Throughout much of his career Colin McCahon manifested a great liking for the triptych format—that tripartite art form deriving from hinged medieval altar pieces and ubiquitous in Christian art and western art generally, from Giotto and Simone Martini in the fourteenth century to Max Beckmann and Francis Bacon in the twentieth. There are no fewer than eleven works by McCahon with ‘triptych’ in their titles ranging in date from On building bridges (triptych) in 1952 to Urewera triptych in 1975. His other triptychs, those named as such, were, in chronological order: Northland triptych (1959), Elias triptych (1959), Koru triptych (1962), Triptych: pink and blue (1963), three different Waterfall triptychs (all 1964), Easter landscape: triptych (1966) and Parihaka triptych (1972). In addition to these there are another dozen works by McCahon which, although not including the word ‘triptych’ in their titles, nonetheless consist of three distinct parts constituting a single work—triptychs in substance if not in name. These are: Koru 1, 2, 3 (1965), The Second Easter Landscape: The Central Plateau (1968),1 Can you hear me St Francis? (1969), On going out with the tide (1969), Comet: F1, F2, F3 (1974), Comet F8, F9, F10 (1974), Urewera mural (1975), Imprisonment and reprieve (1978–79), A Song for Rua, Prophet (1979), The testimony of scripture No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 (1979), Paul to Hebrews (1980) and The emptiness of all endeavour (1980). Three works from 1978–79 are painted on three separate sheets of Steinbach paper, hung in a vertical format not side by side: namely Imprisonment and reprieve (1978–79), A Song for Rua—Prophet (1979), The testimony of scripture No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 (1979); Paul to Hebrews (1980) is likewise painted on three sheets of Steinbach paper but hung in a horizontal row, not vertically. A unique case is The emptiness of all endeavour (1980), which is painted on three rectangles of unstretched canvas of different sizes and shapes and hung in a cluster, one vertically and two horizontally.
In this essay I investigate McCahon's singular use of the term triptych early in his career well before the first usage of the term as title in 1952's . Around
