This is New Zealand

The exhibition Rare and Unrivalled Beauty: Landscape Paintings from the Kelliher Trust Art Collection has, at the time of writing, recently opened at the Millennium Public Art Gallery, Blenheim, making a stunning impact in its two gallery spaces. Throughout 2022 and early 2023, it will tour South Island art galleries in Nelson, Arrowtown, Ashburton, Ōamaru and Timaru. Te Papa would surely be a highly appropriate additional stop, making me irreverently speculate whether the exhibition might make a piquant complement to the recently opened Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist. Despite the obvious fact that the Kelliher paintings tell splendid stories of Aotearoa New Zealand, unfortunately this will never happen.

Indeed, previous surveys of the nation’s art there have studiously avoided works of this kind, partly because of their conspicuously poor representation in the permanent national art collection and partly because of a strangely inflexible institutional and intellectual prejudice against them. The controversies aroused by the Kelliher Art Award, supposedly ‘at war with modernism’ between the 1950s and the 1970s,¹ lingered long in the minds of many. The sentiment was returned in kind, as every modern movement needs a conservative bogeyman. Thus, even in 2002, a full 25 years after the final Kelliher exhibition, Peter Shaw still believed that its ‘traditional’ landscapes risked setting many diehard modernists’ teeth on edge in his curated exhibition Representation and Reaction:

. A young Courtney Johnston—now Te Papa’s Chief Executive—did not disappoint, claiming that it showed Now, I believe, no longer: the dust has settled and the landscapes gracing the Millennium’s walls assume a genuine art-historical and historical poignance and mana, giving pleasure and provoking thought in the process.