Brendan McGorry and the Belle Époque
MICHAEL WILSON
The death of painting . . . . As a beginning art student, I was fond of taunting anyone who still insisted on wielding a brush and pigment with the possibility—nay, the inevitability—of their chosen medium’s imminent and deserved demise. At the time—the cusp of the 1990s—standing at an easel felt to me like the last thing any forward-thinking artist should be doing, though of course I had little to propose in the way of viable alternatives (at least any I yet knew how to carry out). In short, I was young and in love with extreme ideas, so the potential end of an entire way of working tickled me no end. It’s always with some residual amusement, then, that I notice this particular notion now crop up again from time to time. And it was with some surprise that I clocked the phrase in the titles of recent work by Auckland artist Brendan McGorry. A painter.
McGorry’s canvas (2016) is a reworking of John Everett Millais’ pre-Raphaelite classic (1851), an instantly recognisable image of decorative, romanticised morbidity. But the
