An Auckland Icon

If ever there were an art-historical equivalent of scoring a classic try on one’s All Black debut, it would be the so-called Smirnoff Sculpture. Its creator, Marté Szirmay, was aged just 22 when she won the commission in March 1969. Then virtually unknown—she had recently earned her Elam School of Fine Arts diploma and had just commenced teacher training—it marked the dream beginning of her career as one of this country’s foremost abstract sculptors. ‘Be very afraid!’ the lugubrious Don Binney warned her, having seen his own star wax and wane. But he need not have worried; fired by her consistently intelligent vision and a formidable work ethic, Szirmay’s career has thrived over six decades. Indeed, with well over 600 sculptures and medals large and small now to her credit, inexplicably—indeed unfairly—she has been overlooked as an Arts Foundation ‘icon’ and from the honours list. Although the Smirnoff Sculpture is a landmark that has been passed by millions of pedestrians and vehicles on Newmarket’s busy Broadway over the past half-century, as the Austrian writer Robert Musil famously pronounced, ‘there is nothing in the world so invisible as a monument’.¹ This is the first case study to focus on Szirmay’s sculpture.

The commission originated through the benevolence and subtle advertising of distillers and vintners Gilbey’s New Zealand Ltd, which launched the one-off Smirnoff Award, named for their famous vodka. A $3250 premium