Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction, Vol. I 1919–1959

By Peter Simpson

The first of an extraordinary two-volume work chronicling forty-five years of painting by New Zealand's most important artist, Colin McCahon.Colin McCahon (19191987) was New Zealand's greatest twentieth-century artist. Through landscapes, biblical paintings and abstraction, the introduction of words and Maori motifs, McCahon's work came to define a distinctly New Zealand modernist idiom. Collected and exhibited extensively in Australasia and Europe, McCahon's work has not been assessed as a whole for thirty-five years.In this richly illustrated two-volume work, written in an accessible style and published to coincide with the centenary of Colin McCahon's birth, leading McCahon scholar, writer and curator Peter Simpson chronicles the evolution of McCahon's work over the artist's entire forty-five-year career.Simpson has enjoyed unprecedented access to McCahon's extensive correspondence with friends, family, dealers, patrons and others. This material enables us to begin to understand McCahon's work as the artist himself conceived it. Each volume includes over three hundred illustrations in colour, with a generous selection of reproductions of McCahon's work (many never previously published), plus photographs, catalogue covers, facsimiles and other illustrative material.This will be the definitive work on New Zealand's leading artist for many years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Oct 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781776710515

Peter Simpson

Peter Simpson has spent a lifetime studying the history of his native England after graduating from the University of Kent with a B.A. in the subject. His experiences in global business and travel have allowed him to explain the science, technology and business developments of the Middle Ages while his interest in art and architecture brings a sensitive interpretation to the aesthetics of the time. He is a member of the Medieval Academy of America. In writing this series of books on England in the High Middle Ages he has set out to bring this formative period of the British State to scholars, students and the general history reader. Peter and his wife Donna own and manage a specialized Market Research and Consulting firm and live in Lewiston, New York and Estero, Florida with a collection of cats.

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PREFACE

Let us possess one world, 1955, enamel, oil on hardboard, 760 x 560 mm

I first saw Colin McCahon paintings in Christchurch more than fifty years ago, in Group Shows and annual Contemporary New Zealand Painting exhibitions toured by Auckland City Art Gallery. I saw such unforgettable works as The Fourteen Stations of the Cross (1966) and the four paintings called Still life with altar (1967). I was immediately struck by the emotional power and intriguing originality of McCahon’s work. The paintings grabbed me then and they grab me still. Their interest for me has, if anything, grown stronger over the years. It is hard to put into words exactly the appeal of such works then or now. It has something to do with the bold simplicity and beauty of their imagery – the restriction to a few colours and forms, and the subtle relationships between various parts of a sequence or group – and something to do with the challenge presented by the paintings’ ‘meaning’; the relationship for instance between their titles and their pictorial forms. T. S. Eliot once wrote (in a 1929 essay on Dante) that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’,¹ and the same is surely true of the paintings and drawings of McCahon; communication may be immediate (or not as the case may be) but understanding may take time to achieve. In this two-volume study I express what McCahon’s art has communicated to me and such understanding of it as I have gained from years of looking, thinking and research.

Unless you lived in Auckland in the 1960s and could attend his annual shows at Ikon or Barry Lett Galleries it was hard to see McCahon paintings in those days, and there were literally no books on New Zealand art in which to see his work; the quarterly Landfall, edited by Charles Brasch, and other short-lived journals such as Ascent, occasionally reproduced works by him. The holdings of McCahon’s work in public galleries were still minimal except for Auckland City Art Gallery; for instance, Christchurch’s McDougall Gallery had only one work, Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is (1958–59), before the 1970s. I recall falling on a series of pamphlets called New Zealand Art, edited by Peter Tomory and published by Reed in 1968, which reproduced such outstanding works as Spring, Ruby Bay, Six days in Nelson and Canterbury and Here I give thanks to Mondrian.

Tangi – necessary protection, 1972, synthetic polymer paint on paper mounted on board, 730 x 1098 mm

While studying and teaching in Canada between 1968 and 1976, I had new publications sent to me from New Zealand such as Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith’s An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1839–1967 (Collins, 1969), which devoted a chapter to McCahon and reproduced eight of his works; Gil Docking’s Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Painting (Reed, 1971) included such masterpieces as The Virgin and Child compared (1948) and On building bridges (triptych) (1952). But the publication I most valued in those years – not being able to see the exhibition which it accompanied – was the catalogue for Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition (Auckland City Art Gallery, 1972) with copious illustrations and the artist’s memorable autobiographical commentary on almost every work.

Back in Christchurch in 1976, I soon caught up with what McCahon had been doing in the interim through the survey show McCahon’s ‘Necessary Protection’, which was touring the country at the time; it introduced me to such important late works and series of the 1970s as The days and nights in the wilderness, Necessary protection, Parihaka triptych, The Song of the Shining Cuckoo, Clouds, Noughts and crosses and Rocks in the sky. The Canterbury Society of Arts Centennial Exhibition in 1980 enabled me to see such important late works as The Five Wounds of Christ (1977–78), The flight from Egypt and Paul to Hebrews (both 1980). A major highlight in the years that followed was Gates and Journeys, the posthumous survey show curated by Auckland City Art Gallery in 1988 and shown in Christchurch in 1989. With this exhibition, even in its reduced form for travelling, I finally had the opportunity to see the whole magnificent spread of McCahon’s career from Harbour Cone from Peggy’s Hill (1939) to I applied my mind (1982).

In about 1990 I began making the transition from being an enthusiast for McCahon to becoming a serious student of his work. A great stimulus to this process was time I spent (with Creative New Zealand support) at the Hocken Library in Dunedin which in those days (in a different building from now) gave researchers free and unrestricted access to the stacks and therefore to the superb collection of nearly 200 McCahons built around bequests from his parents, John and Ethel (especially rich in early works), from Charles Brasch (especially for early biblical paintings and Titirangi-period landscapes), from Rodney Kennedy (rich in drawings for landscapes and theatre designs) and others including McCahon himself; he had gifted to the Hocken Dear Wee June (1948), The Wake (1958), Northland triptych (1959), John in Canterbury (1959) and The Song of the Shining Cuckoo (1974). The Hocken collection is especially strong in works from the first half of McCahon’s career (up to 1959).

Out of my close-up, prolonged and first-hand exposure to this body of work, I developed a number of research projects which took me more than a decade to complete. As a specialist in New Zealand poetry (my primary field as an academic at Canterbury and Auckland universities), I was especially interested at that stage in McCahon’s use of words and poetry, and, in particular, his relationships to the poets James K. Baxter, Charles Brasch and John Caselberg. Among the eventual outcomes of this research were the exhibition Candles in a Dark Room: James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon (Auckland City Art Gallery, 1995–96), the nationally touring exhibition Answering Hark: Caselberg/McCahon, Poet/Painter (Hocken Library, 1999–2001) – a book of the same name followed in 2001² – and (much later) the 2009 Hocken Lecture Patron and Painter: Charles Brasch and Colin McCahon (Hocken Collections, 2010). At the University of Auckland for several years after 2000, I taught a graduate course (the first on McCahon in the country, I believe, and certainly the first in an English Department) called ‘McCahon and the Poets’ which included Peter Hooper and Gerard Manley Hopkins as well as the three poets named above. In 2001, I edited Colin McCahon, Rita: Seven Poems (Holloway Press) – a sequence of poems about Rita Angus, the only poems by McCahon yet published.

I became a foundation member and secretary of the Colin McCahon House Trust, a body formed in 1998 to oversee the renovation and eventual opening to the public of the small house in Otitori Bay Road, French Bay, in which the McCahon family lived from 1953 to early 1960. Simultaneously, money was raised for building on a vacant section next door a residence and studio for use by artists granted short-term residencies, the trust being persuaded in consultation with his family that, given McCahon’s own long-term commitment to teaching, a programme aimed at developing artists was the best way to honour his memory. This double project was eventually finished in 2006. To mark its completion, I was asked to curate an exhibition, Colin McCahon: The Titirangi Years 1953–1959, shown at Lopdell House in 2006 to record-breaking numbers (or so it was claimed); the following year, 2007, I published a book of the same name with Auckland University Press.

My next McCahon project was a chapter in my book Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933–1953 (AUP, 2016), in which I explored the vibrant arts scene in that city in the decades either side of World War II in literature, publishing, classical music, theatre and the visual arts. In one chapter I revisited the friendship between McCahon and Baxter, who coincided and became friends in Christchurch in 1948, each exploring parallel ways into and out of cultural nationalism. A related project was the exhibition Leo Bensemann and Friends: Portraiture and The Group (New Zealand Portrait Gallery, 2016–17), which focused on the portraits of Leo Bensemann, Rita Angus, Doris Lusk, Olivia Spencer Bower, Evelyn Page, Toss Woollaston and Colin McCahon, implicitly challenging the almost exclusive focus on landscape in discussions about cultural nationalism in painting.

For the past decade or so I have enjoyed the challenge of writing more than fifty short essays on McCahon for auction catalogues for Webb’s, Art+Object, International Art Centre, Mossgreen Webb’s, Bowerbank Ninow and Christie’s (London). In 2018, I wrote essays for the publication associated with the McCahon exhibition Gow Langsford Gallery took to Art Basel Hong Kong.

I have summarised my involvement with McCahon’s work over the years in order to indicate that although the present book took about two years to write, it is also the product of half a lifetime of research and writing about McCahon and his work.

A study of this kind could not have been written without the generous support and assistance of many individuals and institutions.

My first thanks must go to the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust, and its former secretary Catherine Hammond, in particular, for permission to reproduce all works by Colin McCahon included here and for assistance in locating works in private collections. Grateful thanks, too, are extended to the McCahon family, and especially Victoria Carr, for support of the publication and in particular for permission to reproduce numerous passages from Colin McCahon’s unpublished letters to family and friends. Central to this book are the quotations in McCahon’s own words from his letters and other writings. My grateful thanks go to the institutions and individuals who have these taonga in their possession, in particular, Hocken Collections (for letters to and from John Caselberg, Charles Brasch, Patricia France, James K. Baxter, John and Ethel McCahon, Beatrice and Noel Parsloe and others); Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa for letters to and from Toss and Edith Woollaston, and to Rodney Kennedy; Alexander Turnbull Library for photographs and letters to Pat Hawthorne; Matthew and Rachel O’Reilly for letters to and from Ron O’Reilly; and Hilary McLeavey for letters to and from Peter McLeavey. For photographs and ephemera (exhibition invitations, letters, newspaper clippings and the like) I am especially grateful to Hocken Collections and the E. H. McCormick Research Library and their staff.

I had the great good fortune to receive a grant from Creative New Zealand in 2017–18 which covered the twelve months during which most of the book was written. This grant freed me from the necessity of earning money and enabled me to concentrate almost exclusively on the book for a whole year.

I am grateful to the many institutions which have given permission for works to be reproduced and have provided high-resolution images suitable for publication. In some cases, institutions either lowered their fees or made no charges at all in order to support the book’s publication. My grateful thanks go to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, the three largest repositories of McCahon’s works. Also to Waikato Museum of Art and History, Te Manawa (Palmerston North), Rotorua Art Museum, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth), Sarjeant Art Gallery (Whanganui), The Dowse (Lower Hutt), Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, The Suter, Te Aratoi o Whakatū (Nelson), Christchurch Art Gallery, Aigantighe Art Gallery (Timaru), Forrester Gallery (Ōamaru), Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Invercargill Art Gallery, the Wallace Arts Trust, the Fletcher Trust, the Bank of New Zealand, the Ravenscar Foundation, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Parliament, New Zealand Portrait Gallery, The University of Auckland, and (in Australia) the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Centre for Contemporary Art (Sydney), National Gallery of Art (Canberra), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne) and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

The staff of Gow Langsford Gallery, Art+Object, Deutscher and Hackett (Melbourne) and Webb’s have also been most generous in sharing high-resolution images of works which have passed through their hands. Thanks especially to John Gow, Gary Langsford, Anna Jackson, Hannah Valentine, Ben Plumbly, Hamish Coney, Damian Hackett, Bruce Qin and Amanda Morrissey-Brown.

My sincere thanks, too, go to the many private collectors who have agreed to their works being reproduced and who in many cases facilitated the taking of photographs for this purpose. Thanks, too, to Grant Banbury, Stephen Goodenough, Jennifer French, Dame Jenny Gibbs, Sam Hartnett and Matthew O’Reilly for invaluable help with photography.

I thank all of the copyright holders for granting permission to reproduce works in this book. We have made every effort to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission, but we apologise in advance for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Among many individuals who have helped this publication in a variety of ways I would like to thank Sharon Dell, Anna Blackman, Robyn Notman, Ali Clarke, Anna Petersen, Lucy Hammond, Andrew Parsloe, Alan Roddick, Rachel Scott, Tim Jones, Peter Vangioni, David Simpson, Amy Marr, Patrick Evans, Dick Lucas, Nola Barron, Llew Summers, Dylan Summers, Faith Wright, Jancis Meharry, Philip Woollaston, Errol Shaw, Julie Catchpole, Patrick Holland, Mark Stocker, David Reilly, Oliver Stead, Margaret Neilsen, Lee and Rod Cook, Robert Leonard, Wystan Curnow, Jim and Mary Barr, Jill Trevelyan, Greg O’Brien, Gordon Brown, Paul McNamara, William Dart, Don Abbott, Michael Dunn, Peter Shaw, Len Bell, Ron Brownson, Alexa Johnston, Kim O’Loughlin, Geoffrey Heath, Julia Waite, Bridget and Gary Brent, Sue Gardiner, Rob Gardiner, Sir James Wallace, Adrian Burr, Quentin McFarlane, John Coley, Finn McCahon-Jones, Caroline McBride, Briar Williams, Sophie Coupland, Tony Lane, Michael Shepherd, Rachel Watson, Julian Miles, Sir Michael Friedlander, Charles Ninow, Gil Hanly, Ian McDonald, Dunstan Ward, John Edgar, Jonathan Besser, Martin Edmond, Ian Wedde and others.

McCahon with The Virgin and Child compared, 1948, photograph taken by Theo Schoon.

E. H. McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Colin McCahon Artist File

My publisher Auckland University Press and its director Sam Elworthy have strongly supported me throughout the production of this book from beginning to end. Especial thanks to Susannah Whaley for invaluable assistance with acquisition of images, and to Katrina Duncan, Katharina Bauer, Sophia Broom, Andrew Long, Mike Wagg, Matt Turner, Elizabeth Newton-Jackson, Spencer Levine, Peter Deutschle, Karen McKenzie and Diane Lowther.

My final thanks are to my wife Helen for loving support during the more than fifty years in which Colin McCahon has been a recurrent presence in our lives.

Auckland

April 2019

INTRODUCTION

ONE DIRECTION/MANY MANSIONS

There is only one direction, 1952, oil on hardboard, 692 x 550 mm

This is the first of a comprehensive two-volume study of the art of Colin McCahon. Volume One, Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction, covers the years from the artist’s birth on 1 August 1919 – one hundred years ago this year – to the end of 1959 when he was forty and shortly to move with his family from the bush suburb of Titirangi, where they had lived since 1953, to the central Auckland suburbs of Newton and (later) Grey Lynn. By 1959 McCahon had been actively painting for more than two decades and was becoming recognised as one of the country’s leading artists. That year, 1959, was one of his most prolific and accomplished, encompassing a flood of new work completed after his return in August 1958 from a career-changing four-month visit to the United States. Volume Two, Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land?, to be published in 2020, covers the years from 1960 to his death, aged sixty-seven, in 1987. In terms of McCahon’s painting career, Volume Two deals with a similar number of years to Volume One – more than two decades – years in which he consolidated his reputation as New Zealand’s most important artist. Because of illness he did not paint in the last few years of his life.

The title of Volume One, Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction, comes from a 1952 painting of Mary and Jesus (opposite). One of the very last of his figurative biblical paintings, it was gifted by McCahon to his friends James K. and Jacqueline Baxter to mark the McCahons becoming godparents of the Baxters’ daughter, Hilary. In the painting, the title phrase ‘there is only one direction’ has obvious religious connotations. Mary’s downward gaze and the ‘straight look’ of the young Jesus probably refer to their mutual foreknowledge of his fate: death by crucifixion. The cross is literally painted on Jesus’ face, in the shape of a T (Tau) cross formed by his eyebrows and nose. But McCahon used the notion of ‘one direction’ frequently in his correspondence and other writings, with aesthetic as well as religious connotations. ‘For each painter finally there is only one direction and this should be apparent in the painter’s work’, he stated in 1971.¹ McCahon expressed variations on this core idea throughout his career. In 1947 he told Charles Brasch: ‘Your mention of the lack of sound & sustained public criticism to me a very important point, an edge to fight against and a way to keep more on the one direction & away from the barren side tracks.’² And more than three decades later he told an adult student in 1979: ‘My subject hasn’t changed from when I started painting. A painter knows his (or her) subject from way back. The subject can change – bottles today, landscape tomorrow – but the way is always the same. It doesn’t change.’³

Was this the promised land, 1962, enamel on hardboard, 600 x 595 mm

Without a strong sense of direction, an artist’s work faltered, McCahon believed. Whether rightly or wrongly, he perceived this as a weakness in his otherwise admired contemporary Milan Mrkusich (1925–2018): ‘Milan just doesn’t know what he is painting about, what his direction is. All that lovely careful paint directed where & to whom[?]’⁴ A further example, in which both religious and aesthetic dimensions are again implied, is ‘Poetry is for peasants’, poem XIII in Peter Hooper’s ‘Notes in the Margin’ (1969).⁵ McCahon liked the poem so much that he painted it four times:

Poetry

isn’t in my words

it’s in the direction

I’m pointing

if you can’t understand that

and if you’re appalled

at the journey

stick to the

guided tours

they issue return tickets

As for poetry, so for painting. But vital as the principle of ‘one direction’ is to understanding McCahon, it is not the whole story. There is also a counter principle involved: that of many directions/continuous change. As he told the student in 1979: ‘The subject can change – bottles today, landscape tomorrow …’. A scriptural analogy for this idea might be John 14:2: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ McCahon himself used this very passage when writing to Patricia France in 1977; commenting on a painting of hers called My Aunt and I which she had given to the McCahons – a characteristic reminiscent double portrait, he wrote:

Yours is a strange & beautiful little painting … It’s so quiet & gentle & still & loving. (Sheep may safely graze – I also thought – In my house there are many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you.) It’s the inside thing I love in painting. Who was the real Bellini or Mondrian – and it’s all there – who is Pat France & you tell me[?]⁶

McCahon here is using the ‘many mansions’ allusion to contrast France’s very idiosyncratic painting (or Bellini’s or Mondrian’s) with his own. But I use the phrase ‘many mansions’ to suggest the multiple options and continuous changes within McCahon’s own practice, painting by painting, year by year, through four decades and more: his employment at different times of figure painting, landscape, still life, biblical narrative, portraiture, abstraction of various kinds, word, text and number paintings, and continuous variations within these modes, not to mention his use of a wide and ever-changing range of materials, pigments and supports.

This survey of McCahon’s art explores the double principle of one direction/many mansions as central to his practice. The material throughout the two volumes is organised chronologically, with chapters headed Southern Beginnings; Dunedin, Nelson, Wellington; Tāhunanui; Christchurch I and II; Titirangi I and II; and in Volume Two: Newton I and II; Muriwai I, II and III; Grey Lynn I and II. I trace the evolution of McCahon’s work through time from the beginning of his career to the end, and, indeed, in the three decades since his death. Oftentimes it was not a simple chronological progression; there were simultaneous parallel activities, twists and turns, doublings back, repetitions, reprises and continuous cross-referencing. His work needs to be read synchronically as well as diachronically. For example (one among many), the biblical notion of the ‘Promised Land’ is first used as a title in 1948; it later became the subject of a small series, Was this the promised land, in 1962; and it re-emerged as a title in the sixth panel of The flight from Egypt (1980). Paintings with different titles, such as Landscape theme and variations (series A) and (series B) (1963), also allude implicitly to the same concept. In choosing a chronological arrangement, I try to remain aware of the inevitable limitations of such an approach.

Admirers of McCahon vary considerably as regards which parts of his work they most favour. For some, the preference is a matter of genre – some, for instance, markedly prefer his landscapes or his figurative biblical paintings above all else; others favour his abstractions or his word and number paintings most. Often preferences are asserted in terms not of genre but of period. A common distinction is between those who favour his early work and those who prefer his later work; the most frequent point of division between ‘early’ and ‘late’ is 1958; that is, between work done before or after his trip to America of that year, a distinction I consider mostly valid.

Charles Brasch, for example, an important early friend, critic and collector, decidedly preferred McCahon’s pre-1958 work over the post-1958 work, a preference evident in the pattern of his collecting. Between 1947 and 1958 Brasch acquired eighteen works by McCahon by gift or purchase, but from 1959 he added only four, most of which were gifts. In 1961 he wrote in his journal: ‘R[odney Kennedy] like me is dismayed at the present acclaim for his recent quite wild bad work.’⁷ He disliked McCahon’s abstraction and more especially anything with ‘ugly’ words written on it.⁸ By contrast to Brasch, many other, especially younger, commentators manifest a preference for McCahon’s post-American work, a difference sometimes presented as a change from a ‘regional’ or ‘national’ approach towards a more ‘international’ style.

Where did McCahon himself stand on this issue? Like many artists he tended to favour his newest work and to discount what he had done in the past. Typical was a remark made to Ron O’Reilly in 1948: ‘I hardly wish to be associated with last year’s work any more. And this year’s is just beginning. The old from the standpoint of the present is poor.’⁹ He expressed frustration, also, at Brasch’s clear preference for earlier over more recent work, telling his parents: ‘I am disappointed as he always prefers the old and not the new. Next time it will be the same. What I do now will be chosen over the new.’¹⁰ In one rather startling comment to O’Reilly in 1974 McCahon seemed to dismiss everything he had painted up to the age of about fifty as ‘student’ work, though at the same time recognising that newer work was dependent on the older:

I tend to date my painting career much later than others do. Realise I’ve been 2 painters (at least), one the student painter and possibly from 1968–69, a painter. This is probably not a popular one. It is a thing I know about myself. But if I hadn’t painted Gates I could never have painted the cruel Jumps. And if I’d not painted [the] sequence on the Maori prophets I could have not painted the Rosegardens.¹¹

He was constantly striving for improvement; even after painting the monumental biblical text paintings of 1970 (Practical religion and Victory over death) he wrote to O’Reilly: ‘The paintings aren’t half as good [as] I would have liked but I’m not altogether unhappy & will do better next time.’¹²

Not all commentators on McCahon’s career express a clear preference for earlier over later work, or vice versa. For example, O’Reilly’s great personal collection, built up over forty years, included, in contrast to Brasch’s, work from every phase of McCahon’s career. When his collection was shown at Peter McLeavey’s in Wellington in August 1969, the works ranged in date from 1938 to 1967, evenly divided between pre-1958 and post-1958; O’Reilly continued to add new works to his collection throughout the 1970s. In this survey, I have taken a leaf out of O’Reilly’s book, so to speak, and adopted what I hope is an even-handed approach to the different phases of McCahon’s career; each period is considered in its own terms; earlier work is not automatically favoured over later work, or vice versa. I consider McCahon to have made great paintings at every period from Harbour Cone from Peggy’s Hill (1939, pp. 72–73) to I considered all the acts of oppression (c. 1981–83, Volume Two), and attempt to offer a balanced perspective on his career as a whole. Readers are, of course, free to discover their own preferences among the work discussed and reproduced.

Throughout much of his life McCahon was an indefatigable letter writer, a practice that with the advent of personal computers has virtually disappeared. He kept up a regular correspondence with many people, including his parents, his sister Beatrice, his wife Anne (when they were temporarily apart), his close friends: Doris Lusk, Rodney Kennedy, Toss and Edith Woollaston, Ron O’Reilly, Charles Brasch, John (and later Anna) Caselberg, Patricia France, Peter McLeavey and many others. Letters to all those named are liberally quoted in the following chapters. McCahon often wrote letters in spurts. In 1939 he wrote to his parents: ‘I have at least six more letters to write and the day is really too hot for settling down to letter writing.’¹³ He told Patricia France in 1977: ‘I started writing letters at 6.30 this morning & have written all day.’¹⁴

One reason for this practice of writing several letters at one time was that he found it hard to combine letter writing with painting. As he explained to Caselberg in 1954: ‘There is a lot I should or could write but I can’t write & paint – I find the actual physical business of making letters painful after painting – it’s such a restricted movement.’¹⁵ The total of his letters must be numbered in thousands not hundreds.

After his mother died in 1973, McCahon told France how much he missed this form of communication with her: ‘My thing now is my letters, I wrote often to Mother. I wrote mad letters all about cats & children[;] whom do I talk to now[?] Cats & children are good material for letters. I feel a loss this way…’. ¹⁶ His letters cover a great many topics other than ‘cats & children’, and while they will be a great resource for his eventual biographer, it is particularly his comments about painting in general and his own painting in particular that are of most interest in the present context. There is scarcely an important painting or series which is not the subject of intelligent and often eloquently insightful comment to one or more of his correspondents.

Through his letters and other writings McCahon’s voice is heard often throughout these pages; it is a deliberate focus of my approach. With regard to McCahon’s more public statements, a word of explanation is necessary. There were three main occasions on which McCahon wrote extensively about his own practice: first, his ‘Beginnings’ article, commissioned by Charles Brasch for Landfall in December 1966; second, ‘All the Paintings, Drawings & Prints by Colin McCahon in the Gallery’s Collection’, published in the Auckland City Art Gallery Quarterly, no. 44, 1969; third, the catalogue commentary printed in Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition, Auckland City Art Gallery, 1972.¹⁷ There are many other brief reviews, notes and comments elsewhere (some of which are quoted), but these three are the most comprehensive. All are well known and have been quoted extensively over the years. For that reason, it was tempting to exclude them here as overly familiar to those who have followed McCahon closely. However, this book is intended not only for the already knowledgeable but also for those reading about McCahon for the first time; therefore, they are repeated here, despite their familiarity, as indispensable to a full understanding of his work.

Closely related to McCahon’s letter writing is the importance to his career of family and friends. Broadly speaking, his most regular correspondents are his immediate family and his closest friends. On several occasions he referred to them as his ‘tribe’; for example, when writing to Anna Caselberg in 1974, he mentioned in this context the Woollastons, the Caselbergs, Doris Lusk, Rodney Kennedy, Charles Brasch (who had died in 1973) and Patricia France (Pat):

I too want to see Edith & Toss. It’s been a long time. I have a great feeling about the ‘tribe’ & it is one & we all belong together & need support. I’ll start at you lot + DORIS. You – John – Sara – Rodney – Charles – Anne & me – I find it difficult to make a list for you, I just hope we may be on yours … Pat is now in.¹⁸

In another letter he speaks of his own immediate family as another part of the ‘tribe’: his wife, Anne, his children, William, Catherine, Victoria and Matthew, and their wives, husbands and children. He adds: ‘I adore my family. Nobody would have expected me to do this but I do so.’¹⁹ O’Reilly and McLeavey were other regular correspondents who became part of McCahon’s ‘tribe’.

One reason for McCahon’s close attachment to family and friends was the controversy and animosity that his work often aroused, because of its radical novelty, occasional difficulty, and indifference to conventional good taste. In the face of public attack and belittlement, he relied greatly on the support of family and close friends. This negativity recurred throughout his career. The more celebrated episodes – for example, the rejection of Harbour Cone from Peggy’s Hill by the Otago Art Society in 1939, the outcry over his Wellington Public Library exhibition in 1948, the furore about the Hay’s Art Prize winner, Painting (1958, p. 268), in 1960, the trans-Tasman brouhaha about the gifting of Victory over death 2 (1970) to the Australian government in 1978, to mention just a few – are all discussed in this study. After one such episode in 1978, involving a councillor in Lower Hutt who claimed he could knock up a McCahon-type painting in his lunchtime, McCahon, sounding more sanguine than he probably felt, wrote to McLeavey: ‘But you know – if this sort of thing didn’t happen I would know I was dead. It all started back in the late 1930s times & has been with me since …’.²⁰ In a darker mood he once wrote: ‘A lifetime of bash doesn’t make you happy.’²¹ It is tempting to speculate that the excessive drinking which plagued his later years was not unrelated to this ‘lifetime of bash’.

It would be wrong, however, as sometimes happens, to depict McCahon as a prophet not recognised in his own country. He was certainly not universally admired in his lifetime, or, indeed, since it ended. There were always nay-sayers, and still are. Some institutions – Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Robert McDougall Gallery in Christchurch, the National Art Gallery – were initially hostile to his work and remained so until at least the late 1970s. But McCahon never lacked recognition from his friends, peers and many contemporaries, and his work was praised from the beginning by at least some (if not all) critics and reviewers. Partly in order to dispel the myth of McCahon as ‘despised and rejected by men’, I have often quoted contemporary reviews and essays so as to reconstruct a balanced image of McCahon as