Realms of Subjective Reality

At the Elam School of Art’s end-of-year prize-giving in 1937, Betty Aislabie and Gennaro Nigro were awarded first and second respectively for Still Life Painting, as well as a second equal and a commendation for Painting from Life.¹ Similarly, the following year saw Aislabie awarded first for Painting Head from Life, while Nigro was highly commended for Painting Figure from Life.² Five years on, in December 1943, and now known as Jan and Gerry (Angelo), they were married. But while Jan Nigro would go on to enjoy a painting career spanning a remarkable 75 years, Gerry’s output was less continuous, broken by a period of a quarter of a century or so before he returned to the easel.

The gap in Gerry Nigro’s exhibiting history was largely due to the negative reaction to his early work. At Elam he had little interest in the English artists, such as Augustus John and Stanley Spencer, favoured by Archie Fisher, the school’s director. Fisher also considered Nigro a disruptive influence on other students, both politically and artistically, and expelled him at the end of 1938. His paintings from this period were mostly large and monochromatic, and of 1937. With their social and political themes, Nigro’s , and displayed his interest in the work of the Mexican mural movement, while stylistically they also suggested an awareness of Wyndham Lewis and the vorticists. At the 58th annual exhibition of the Auckland Society of Arts in 1939, reviewer A.C. Hipwell detected a ‘striving for freedom from academic conventions’. But it was Gerry Nigro’s pair of entries, and , which Hipwell suggested might qualify as ‘the two problem pictures of the year’, finding their ‘clash of flat geometric patterning with third dimensional rendering’ to be disturbing and unconvincing. Nigro was quick to respond, accusing the critic of being ‘absolutely prejudiced against anything new’ and underestimating the ‘intelligence of visitors’. In his defence Hipwell now pointed out that a painter who made ‘intellectual excursions into the realm of subjective reality which involves the use of somewhat obscure symbolism’ could hardly be surprised by the comment that the layman might be ‘both startled and puzzled’. But it was Nigro’s , a large painting of two nude male figures shown at the Auckland Society of Art’s summer exhibition in November 1939, which really brought him to public attention. Perhaps the first hint of trouble was the observation that the society’s new selection process meant that it could choose one painting from those submitted by the artist, but if only one work was offered then they were required to accept it. This allowed the artist to exhibit what he/she considered the best work, regardless of what the selection committee might have thought. In the opinion of one reviewer, this was a potential problem, exemplified by Nigro’s . In fact, the committee ‘would have been well advised to refuse it’.