Books
Colours of a Life: The Life and Times of Douglas MacDiarmid
by Anna Cahill
Mary Egan in association with MacDiarmid Arts Trust, Auckland 2018
RICHARD WOLFE
With the recent passing of Milan Mrkusich, Douglas MacDiarmid (born 1922) surely qualifies as both the longest-lived and longest-active New Zealand-born artist. But as Leonard Bell points out in his foreword to this book, MacDiarmid has rated ‘barely a mention’ in this country’s standard art histories written since the 1960s. Bell offers several reasons for this relegation to the ‘extreme margins’ of our art narratives; the fact that MacDiarmid has worked in several different styles simultaneously, and the perception that much of his art did not comfortably fit the standard New Zealand categories. In addition, he left the country in 1946, a decision described by Bell as ‘tantamount to betrayal, traitorous even’.
However, MacDiarmid was not entirely overlooked. with his 1945 portrait of sculptor, writer and refugee from Nazi Germany, Otti Binswanger. In the associated publication curator Gordon H. Brown acknowledged MacDiarmid’s involvement with The Group, in Christchurch, in the period 1943–48, and also with Wellington gallerist Helen Hitchings and his inclusion in her exhibition in London in 1952. Nine years later MacDiarmid received official recognition when invited by the New Zealand government to return to his homeland during the 1990 celebrations as a ‘living cultural treasure’, during which time his portrait was painted by Jacqueline Fahey and he was interviewed for this magazine by Ross Fraser.
