LEONARD BELL
Marvelous artists are made of elements which can't be identified … Their work is strange and will never become familiar.
Philip Guston.1
This first retrospective of Pauline Thompson's art since her death in 2012 features 49 oil paintings and watercolours, varying in size from tiny to several metres wide, plus a large stained-glass piece. Curated by Peter Shaw, the show gathers together works from 1979 into the 2000s, much of it from her family's collection, in order to counter what Shaw views as a ‘terrible neglect of a major artist'.2 With the pictures mostly organised according to their themes and subjects—for example, Pitcairn and Norfolk islands, Polynesian legends, events relating to the life of Sister Aubert in New Zealand and Auckland subjects—the exhibition enables a reviewing of Thompson's art, which, since the mid-1960s, has been at times well known, and at others, not so well.
Her shows were regularly reviewed, usually positively, in newspapers and periodicals (Metro and Quote Unquote, for instance),3 and there have been two articles (1983 and 1991) in Art New Zealand. She has been included, even if briefly, in the standard histories going back to Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith's 1969 An Introduction to New Zealand Painting and Anne Kirker's 1986 New Zealand Women Artists. Most recently, Emma-Jean Kelly wrote an excellent article, ‘Mainmast Speaks: The Paintings of Pauline Thompson’, in Backstory: Journal of Art, Media and Design 8 (2020) and a just-published entry on her for Te Ara Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.
