Auckland Art Gallery Director Kirsten Paisley has said, ‘Colin McCahon’s contribution to art in New Zealand is immense. Not only was he a leading painter, but also an influential teacher, curator and critic. And he is a significant figure in Auckland Art Gallery’s history, serving as a Keeper and later Assistant Director over a period of almost a decade.’
A Place to Paint: Colin McCahon in Auckland featured 25 key paintings drawn from Auckland Art Gallery’s collection, as well as from private holdings, and included works that have rarely been seen. In particular, the exhibition marked the first public display of painted windows from the Convent Chapel of the Sisters of our Lady of the Missions, Remuera. Completed by McCahon in 1965, the 13 glass panels came from a period of figurative paintings based on Bible stories. This exhibition focused primarily, however, on McCahon’s move away from such figurative paintings towards an engagement with his immediate environment. This move occurred in parallel with his physical relocation in 1953, from Christchurch to Titirangi in West Auckland.
The house in Titirangi where he lived with his wife Anne and four children in the 1950s is now the McCahon House Museum Trust and Artist Residency. Nestled in towering native bush, this tiny, ochre-red bach or holiday home was the setting in which some of the country's most important paintings were created. To mark the centenary, four of his works were displayed there for the first time since they were painted.
It was here that he lived when he began working at the Auckland City Art Gallery; firstly as a cleaner (he had moved to Auckland on the promise of a job that didn’t materialise), then as a curator. His years as a curator were also celebrated with an exhibition at the Auckland City Art Gallery. From the Archive: Colin McCahon in Auckland utilised photographs, ephemera and publications from Auckland Art Gallery’s E H McCormick Research Library, to take visitors closer inside McCahon’s days as a curator, and later teacher, as he moved from a career at Auckland City Art Gallery to lecturing at Elam School of Fine Arts, before becoming a full-time painter in the early 1970s. This exhibition was co-curated by the artist’s grandson Finn McCahon-Jones and Gallery archivist Caroline McBride.
Other anniversary exhibitions sought to show other aspects to the breadth of McCahon’s work. The Te Manawa Museum of Art, Science and History in Palmerston North showed works that provided a cross-section of McCahon’s art practice and development over his career. The first of these works was collected in the 1960s, when McCahon was a rising star and not a household name. The last was acquisitioned in 1986, at the end of his career. The Gow Langsford Gallery celebrated the centenary with an exhibition of paintings on loose canvas. Across the Earth: 100 years of Colin McCahon was a collection of significant paintings that exemplified the artist’s distinctive treatment of the New Zealand landscape, and demonstrated the austere spiritualism endemic to his practice. The exhibition focused on loose canvases of McCahon’s Muriwai period exploring the immediacy of raw materials in his paintings.
Te Papa holds one of the largest collections of Colin McCahon’s work in New Zealand and nine of McCahon’s most important works were hung in Te Papa´s Toi Art galleries in August to celebrate the extensive artwork he created from the 1940s to 1970s. Focusing on three major moments in McCahon’s life, these three groups of paintings presented distinct phases in McCahon’s career. From early religious paintings, that experimented with landscape and figurative work, to the abstract paintings of the 1960s and huge word paintings of the 1970s. This group of works showed McCahon experimenting with different scale, materials and subjects.
Curator of Modern Art, Lizzie Bisley, described McCahon as ‘always technically daring, and open to challenging the boundaries of what a painting could be.’ The Rt Hon Dame Patsy Reddy in a speech at Government House said he, ‘helped shape the way that we have thought about art in this country’ wanting ‘his work to have a meaningful place in the contemporary world and to engage people with questions about life, faith, and place.’ Peter Simpson, who has chronicled forty-five years of painting by McCahon in a two-part work published this year, argues that through landscapes, biblical paintings and abstraction, the introduction of words and Māori motifs, McCahon’s work came to define a distinctly New Zealand modernist idiom.
In McCahon Country, another book published for the centenary, Justin Paton charts McCahon’s remarkable development as a painter and thinker, exploring his deepening engagement with Maori culture and environmental issues, and revealing his vision of the land as a source of light, peace and spiritual sustenance. Paton describes him in the book as one of the great religious artists. McCahon was raised in the shadow of Wesleyanism and was strongly informed by puritanism:
“But above all, above and beyond any given creed or faith, he’s an artist who’s obsessed with what we might call the crisis of art as public speech. There’s a wonderful, immortal phrase of his where he said, ‘once, the painter was making signs and symbols to live by. Now, he makes things to hang on walls and exhibitions.’
“It’s a wonderful, wry statement - there’s a certain quality of disappointment in it - because what he’s saying is that once, if you wanted to understand how to live your life, you wanted a code, you wanted an affix, you could go to art, you could go to a sacred space, a space of faith, and that is where you would see the images that might guide you. And he knew that all that had changed in the 20th century.”
For Paton, 'McCahon is not only New Zealand’s most significant or important artist. He is our most soulful artist, our most searching. He asks the most of art and the world it renders. One hundred years since his birth, he still wants to know what we should believe in and where we belong.'
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James K. Baxter - Let Time Be Still.
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