Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land?: Vol.2 1960-1987

By Peter Simpson

The second of an extraordinary two-volume work chronicling forty-five years of painting by our most important artist, Colin McCahon. Colin McCahon (1919–1987) was New Zealand's greatest twentieth-century artist. Through landscapes, biblical paintings, abstraction, and 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 Dr Peter Simpson chronicles the evolution of the artist's work over McCahon'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. These books will be the definitive work on New Zealand's leading artist for many years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jun 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781776710560

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.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

PURE & IMPURE

In Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction, Volume One of this study, the focus was on the complex process of McCahon’s development from his first art-school exercises in 1937, through the various phases of the evolution of his art in Dunedin, Nelson, Wellington, Christchurch and Titirangi, to the achievement of full maturity in the prolific year after his return from four months in the USA in 1958. The period culminated in his great exhibition, Recent Paintings November 1958–August 1959, at Gallery 91 in Christchurch in October 1959. The focus in Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land? Volume Two, 1960–1987 shifts to the later years of McCahon’s career, a period similar in terms of productive years – over two decades – to that covered by the first volume. The break between the two volumes, while partly a matter of publishing convenience, is nonetheless real in terms both of McCahon’s life and art.

Here I give thanks to Mondrian, 1961, oil (alkyd) on hardboard, 1215 x 915 mm

On a personal level, in 1960 the McCahons relocated with their four children from Titirangi to inner-city Auckland. Anne and Colin spent the rest of their lives in Auckland city, living first in Newton (Partridge Street), then from late 1976 in nearby Grey Lynn (Crummer Road). McCahon also built a second studio (and later a small house) at Muriwai in 1969, on the west coast north-west of the city. He retained his job as ‘keeper’ and deputy director at Auckland City Art Gallery until 1964 when he gave it up for a teaching position at Elam School of Fine Arts in the University of Auckland. After seven years at Elam, he retired in 1971 at the age of fifty-one to paint full-time.

The change in McCahon’s place of residence was accompanied by change in his painting. There was a lengthy hiatus (he called it a ‘dry spell’)¹ between the last works painted at Titirangi and the first significant works painted in Newton. Just a handful of works were painted in 1960 before he got under way again with a distinctly new style in 1961 – designated the Gate series. Such a gap was not unusual for McCahon whenever he moved house – a similar thing happened in Titirangi in 1953; a period of visual familiarisation and adaptation (not to mention the inevitable disruptions of domestic relocation) seemed unavoidable.

At first glance, when new work did emerge in 1961 it seemed to be something quite different. The varied colours and complex images and texts of The Wake, Northland panels and the Elias series gave way to the stark geometry and austere colour range (mostly black, white, yellow ochre and some red) of the Gate series. But there were elements of continuity, too. Some works from 1958–59 had also manifested a severe geometry and limited colour range of black, white and grey, as in Black and white French Bay, Cross and Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is. The Gates didn’t come out of nothing; they were anticipated as far back as Painting (1958), a work described by McCahon in 1972 as ‘really the opening of the first Gate series’.²

McCahon’s ongoing engagement with what he had seen and experienced in the United States also shifted after 1960. Whereas in 1958–59 his most active models and examples seemed to have been abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Franz Kline and Allan Kaprow, in the early 1960s he seemed to pay more attention to the examples of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko – artists less dependent on gestural freedom and spontaneous mark-making than on lucid geometry and colour contrasts – and even more to older European modernists who also foregrounded straight lines and hard edges such as Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich.³ In this respect the signature work of the early 1960s is Here I give thanks to Mondrian (1961), a complex gesture of homage to be explored in detail later.

McCahon himself thought of his 1960s work as being distinctly ‘new’. When Toss Woollaston wrote to him sympathising for the denigration thrown at his Hay’s prize-winning Painting (1958) – discussed in Chapter One – McCahon replied: ‘New paintings are much more difficult. The citizens of Chch are lucky they can’t see these ones.’⁴ He also emphasised the novelty of his new style to John Caselberg: ‘Having developed my new painting I must make some good use of it.’⁵ But this was only the (new) beginning, many further and often unexpected changes would follow; the intricate story of the evolution of his art over the next two decades is set out in detail in the chapters which follow.

McCahon’s artistic output was prolific through the 1960s and 1970s, especially after he gave up teaching, with at least one and often several solo exhibitions each year together with appearances in numerous group shows, as recorded in the Exhibition Record (see pp. 368–73). He benefited from and participated in the growing sophistication of the art market, attaching himself to the leading dealers in Auckland and Wellington: Don Wood, Barry Lett, Peter Webb and Peter McLeavey. However, his rate of production slowed markedly after 1980 as alcoholism and dementia took damaging hold and brought his active career to a premature end, several years before his death in 1987.

Readers of There is Only One Direction will know that in this survey much emphasis is given to McCahon’s remarks about his own paintings in published statements and private letters. Usually, brief quotations are preferred, but in introducing the latter part of McCahon’s career I wish to quote more extensively from two letters as rich examples of the range of topics sometimes covered in his correspondence.

The two largest works in the Gate series, Gate: Waioneke and Waioneke (both 1961), while primarily abstract in their idiom, also refer through their titles to a maritime location near South Head on Kaipara Harbour, 26 kilometres north-west of Helensville. Years later, McCahon recalled his experience of visiting this remote landscape in a 1974 letter to Ron O’Reilly which is quoted at some length because of its illumination not just of these paintings but of his practice in general. McCahon visited the location with artist friends Theo Schoon (1915–1985) and Don Neilson (1924–2013) and his sons William and Matthew, and recalled the ‘shattering’ impact on him of the landscape there:

WAIONEKE: the painting. Theo [Schoon], [Don] Neilson (he had the car), William[,] Matthew, myself. We had a permit from Forest Services & walked towards the sea past little lakes & white sand hills. I did look at things. My mind was shattered, my eyes understood the land. If you like, gates opened … I’d not been shattered like this since Harbour Cone & the Nelson landscape & the good morning Kauris.⁶

McCahon connects his memorable response to Waioneke to earlier occasions in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s when such encounters had led to significant paintings of Otago Peninsula, Nelson and Titirangi. But there is more to the origin of paintings than visual perception of landscapes alone. The letter continues with accounts of other encounters with people (Caselberg, Baxter), places (Northland, North Otago), painters (Tessai, Turner, Wilson, El Greco), and (last but far from least) with ‘God’, which had also fed into his work:

Gates are all a part of conversations with John Caselberg and Jim Baxter who held my hand & guided me for years. See, none of this happens without a revelation, it’s not to do with see but with think. The Northland drawings were painted well after a desperate car ride to Kaitaia & the North Otago things from a page in the Agricultural Journal & my memory of a love for a place. It’s really I see a landscape – or I see & then I see my subject which is God & always has been & will be. I jumped for Tessai just to tell him how much I liked him & how much he told me. Painting to me is largely conversation & I hope I paint in this way. The little Turner & the Wilson at the Art Gallery talk back to me & know that I love them. I spent a week looking at an El Greco in Washington – 3 hours a day & I found out about his thinking …⁷

Gate: Waioneke, 1961, enamel on hardboard, 1798 x 1220 mm

To unpack some of the many details in this passage: the poets Baxter and Caselberg had been close friends and collaborators since the 1940s; the multiple Northland drawings date from 1959, while the journey referred to was possibly to pick up daughter Victoria who had been staying in Kaitāia (with Freda and Don Simmonds) while Colin and Anne were in the USA; North Otago landscapes were a large series of memory paintings produced in Auckland in 1967; Tomioka Tessai (1837–1924) was the pseudonym of a Japanese painter whose work McCahon discovered in San Francisco in 1958 and to whom he painted a homage (E19) in the Jump series of 1974; Hadrian’s Villa (c. 1775) by Richard Wilson (1714–1782) and Yachts at Cowes (undated, probably 1820s) by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) were favourites in the Auckland City Art Gallery collection; El Greco’s Laocoön (c. 1610–14) was a great painting McCahon studied intensively in Washington’s National Gallery in 1958. Paintings, for McCahon (he conveyed to O’Reilly), came not just from ‘seeing’ but from ‘conversation’ with places, people, paintings, publications and a plethora of other inputs, not the least of which was: ‘my subject which is God & always has been & will be’. In other words, paintings come from diverse ‘revelation’ and are ‘not to do with see but think’ (emphasis added). In a sense, his paintings only began to take off and become airborne when he moved away from recording direct perception and allowed memory, thinking, belief and imagination to come more fully into play. He made a similar point in a letter to Anna Caselberg, also a painter of landscapes: ‘You see I don’t paint places[,] I paint thinking about God. But I hope he knows it & likes it. You, my dear, do this too & sometimes I feel place overcomes his beauty.’⁸

A second example from McCahon’s correspondence, this time with the painter Patricia France in 1977, is equally illuminating. The Gate series of the early 1960s is, on the face of it, among the ‘purest’ of McCahon’s abstractions with seemingly little or no reference to the world beyond the picture, though in his own accounts of them, McCahon did make reference to things outside the paintings, such as the landscape of Waioneke and the view of trees and roofs outside his bedroom window in Partridge Street. He talked on one occasion about this seeming contradiction in terms of ‘pure’ or ‘impure’, in a report of a discussion with the critic Wystan Curnow in 1977:

Wystan Curnow was round yesterday & we talked about Pure & Impure painting – me being impure[,] as I use endless allusions to poems & the bible & so on – he was arguing the real abstractionist lot[,] and when you get to it Mondrian wasn’t a pure painter nor Malevich etc.– Mondrian was on about good & evil – very much – I can only think of ‘impure’ painting – but – till you get into abstract phylosophy [sic] as ph[i]losophy & not painting – isn’t all ‘impure’. It’s grabbed me. I hang on & weed the garden & try to sort it out. It’s all impure and must be so[;] what soul has ever reached purity – [Spanish mystical poet] St John of the Cross – even. I think I will die impure (good word that one) and will value always the work of other benited [sic] beings like Martha⁹ & the decimated saints: (Baxter, Caselberg, Brasch, Mason, Hyde) … There it all is – pure & impure.¹⁰

Agnus Dei, Donna Nobis Pacem, 1966, oil on canvas on board, 1665 x 905 mm

The debate between pure and impure painting came from America and was connected to the influential ideas of the critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), whom McCahon later met and admired, and the movement known as post-painterly abstraction which included artists such as Morris Louis (1912–1962), Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011). Greenberg argued that the best ‘American style’ painting from Pollock onwards differentiated painting as painting through its progressive isolation of art from anything extraneous or non-painterly, such as narrative, representation, symbolism, biography and so forth. For example, Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) advocated for an art that was: ‘pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting – an object that is self-conscious, ideal, transcendent, aware of nothing but art itself’.¹¹ But for McCahon, such ‘purity’ in art was never desirable; he always sought something more than art for art’s sake; as he once put it, ‘not more masking tape but more involvement in the human situation’,¹² like the poets he admired, such as those ‘benighted saints’ named in the letter; and if that meant being ‘impure’, so be it: ‘It’s all impure, and must be so.’¹³

Throughout this volume, both in his painting and in the continuous commentary on it that his correspondence provides, McCahon can be seen evolving from the relatively ‘pure’ form of abstraction seen in the Gate series towards his own unique and variable mix of abstraction, landscape, text, number, symbolism and signification, a method that involved, on the one hand, ever greater directness and simplicity, and on the other, multiple layers or levels of connotation and meaning.

Chapter One: Newton I, 1960–64 covers the McCahons’ relocation to the inner city and the ‘new painting’ which emerged in both Gate series (1961–62) and other smaller related series: Sketch, Tablet, the Bellini Madonnas and Was this the promised land. The somewhat negative reception of The Second Gate Series (1962) led to a reassessment of abstraction and renewed exploration of landscape painting in Northland (1962), Landscape theme and variations (1963) and Waterfalls (1964).

In 1964 McCahon resigned from Auckland City Art Gallery to take up a teaching position at Elam School of Fine Arts. Chapter Two: Newton II, 1965–69 also covers various numerals and text paintings of the period, such as Numerals and Caltex (both 1965), which, among other things, adapted koru shapes from Māori design, an interest which continuously evolved. A commission to design glass for a chapel in Remuera in 1965 strongly influenced McCahon’s subsequent painting, especially through Catholic symbolism, as in The Fourteen Stations of the Cross (1966), Still life with altar (1967) and Visible Mysteries (1968). The gift of The New English Bible and books by Peter Hooper and Matire Kereama led to a host of text-based works in 1969 in both English and Māori. During this period, Barry Lett in Auckland and Peter McLeavey in Wellington became McCahon’s major dealers.

Chapter Three: Muriwai I, 1970–72 covers the beginnings of McCahon’s time as a full-time artist after his retirement from Elam. In 1970, huge biblical text paintings such as Victory over death 2 and A question of faith were made possible by a large new studio at Muriwai. The cliff, offshore island and beach landscape at Muriwai were incorporated into many series under the umbrella of Necessary protection (including Cross, The days and nights in the wilderness, Light falling through a dark landscape and Moby Dick is sighted off Muriwai Beach). Parihaka triptych (1972) initiated important paintings on historical Māori figures. His first solo retrospective, Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition (1972), toured the country.

Chapter Four: Muriwai II, 1973–74 covers a series of paintings and drawings connected with the death of James K. Baxter and shown in Auckland and Wellington in 1973. McCahon was much preoccupied with the Māori spirit journey to Cape Rēinga as incorporated in such works as Walk with me and The Song of the Shining Cuckoo (both 1974). Major series called Jump and Comet, (1974) also utilised the Muriwai landscape.

Chapter Five: Muriwai III, 1975–76 is dominated by series adapted from the Stations of the Cross, including Teaching aids, Noughts and crosses, Rocks in the sky, On the road and Angels and bed. Urewera mural and Urewera triptych (1975) celebrated the heroes to Tūhoe, Te Kooti and Rua Kēnana. Clouds (1975) and Scared (1976) were other new series. McCahon ‘Religious’ Works 1946–1952 toured the country in 1975.

Chapter Six: Grey Lynn I, 1977–79 deals with the construction of a new studio in Crummer Road, Grey Lynn, and the phasing out of the Muriwai studio; increasing ill health meant McCahon could no longer drive himself to Muriwai. The completion of Angels and bed and a new series of small works, Truth from the King Country, dominated this period. McCahon’s ‘Necessary Protection’, a survey show, toured the country in 1977–78.

Chapter Seven: Grey Lynn II, 1979–83 is concerned with McCahon’s last active years as a painter, dominated by works with texts from St Paul’s A Letter to Hebrews and the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes. Other important late works were A Song for Rua, Prophet (1979), Imprisonment and Reprieve (1978–79), The flight from Egypt (1980) and Storm Warning (1980–81). Illness meant that McCahon painted less and less after 1980; his last works were completed in 1982–83.

The Epilogue is in two parts. The first part, 1984 to 1987, deals with the final years of McCahon’s life, including his catastrophic trip to Sydney in 1984 for the opening of I Will Need Words at the Sydney Biennale and his death in 1987. The second, 1988 to 2019, summarises the main events concerning McCahon’s painting since his death, from the retrospective Gates and Journeys (1988–89) to events held in connection with the centennial of his birth in 2019.

This volume takes its title Is This the Promised Land? from a pervasive strand in McCahon’s work which re-emerges repeatedly – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly – from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Probably the initiating experience behind the concept of ‘the promised land’ occurred around 1936, as McCahon recalled in ‘Beginnings’ thirty years later. The passage was quoted in Volume One (pp. 38–39) but will bear partial repetition: ‘Driving one day with the family over hills from Brighton or Taieri Mouth to the Taieri Plain, I first became aware of my own particular God, perhaps an Egyptian God, but standing far from the sun of Egypt in the Otago cold. Big hills stood in front of the little hills, which rose up distantly across the plain from the flat land: there was a landscape of splendour, and order and peace. (… I saw an angel in this land. Angels can herald beginnings.) … My work has largely been to communicate this vision and to invent the way to see it.’¹⁴ Although the phrase ‘the promised land’ is not explicitly mentioned here, this coming together of God, landscape, vision and artistic vocation is intimately connected to the trope.

The 1948 painting The Promised Land (Volume One, pp. 125–26, 142), first painted in Nelson in February of that year and reworked in Christchurch six months later, was the first explicit occurrence of the phrase. McCahon later called it ‘a dream painting of my life in Nelson – places I loved, me, my hut and water and light and below Farewell Spit, the end and the beginning of it all’.¹⁵ Not mentioned in this summary are the hovering angel at the top (‘angels can herald beginnings’) and the still life of candle and jug in the middle. Taken together, the disparate elements combine to make of it a kind of annunciation – not a traditional annunciation in which an angel announces to Mary that she will give birth to the Son of God, but an artistic annunciation in which the angel announces to the black-singletted worker-artist his vocation to celebrate the promised land, as promised by God to Abraham in the book of Genesis. The painting – and McCahon’s concept of ‘the promised land’ – fuses religious and aesthetic implications; in particular the lit candle symbolises both the artistic imagination (as in A candle in a dark room) and the phenomenon of Jesus Christ as, for Christians, the typological fulfilment of Abraham’s promise.

The flight from Egypt, 1980, synthetic polymer paint on six sheets of paper, each 731 x 1104 mm; panel six: arrival: is THIS the PROMISED LAND

McCahon sustained this vision of ‘the promised land’ throughout his creative life. In 1961–62, for instance, as part of the wider project of the Gate series, McCahon created a small series entitled Was this the promised land (without a question mark), in each of which the titular phrase is inscribed on a hillside (pp. 54–55). In 1963, McCahon retreated further from the relatively pure abstraction of the Gates towards a renewal of landscape in the two eight-part series Landscape theme and variations (pp. 60–61). Significantly, in discussing these with O’Reilly, McCahon referred to them, too, in terms of the ‘promised land’: ‘The paintings for Don Wood are another series … all on landscape themes & all approx. the same size … One group [Series A] hills & variations (as the Promised Land) the other [Series B] plain and sky motifs’.¹⁶ These series recall that originating vision of Otago hills and plains evoking ‘splendour, and order and peace’.

Occasionally in his correspondence in the 1970s McCahon referred casually to ‘the promised land’ as if it was an ever-present item of his mental furniture. In 1978, for example, he described to McLeavey a weekend spent at Muriwai: ‘That was a lucky weekend – the walk on the promised land of Table Top Farm … and the walk up the beach.’¹⁷ A year later he revealed his familiarity with the Old Testament origins of the concept in reporting to McLeavey the death a Jewish friend: ‘Dr Walter Solomon Auburn has died. He has been a great friend to me – and I think me to him too … Auburn has helped me know who I am – and who I am not. He should have lived to gain the promised land.’¹⁸

Significantly, McCahon’s last multi-panel sequence, the six-part The flight from Egypt (1980, p. 336), was deeply engaged with the journey toward ‘the promised land’. The titles of the six panels record a clear narrative sequence: 1. WHEN DO WE START. 2. the Desert. 3. a big tree offers shade. 4. WHEN DO WE GET THERE. 5. I AM TIRED. 6. arrival: is THIS the PROMISED LAND. That concluding query (again without a question mark) is profoundly ambiguous, calling into question the validity of the journey but without necessarily resolving the matter one way or the other. As such, it is an apposite phrase for the title of this volume, which records the later stages of McCahon’s remarkable existential and painterly journey.

Teaching aids 2 (July), 1975, synthetic polymer paint on ten sheets of paper, each 1092 x 728 mm

1

NEWTON I, 1960–64

In 1960 McCahon and his family moved from Titirangi to the inner-city suburb of Newton, in those days a predominantly working-class and Polynesian neighbourhood. The award of the first Hay’s Art Prize to McCahon for Painting (1958), a radical abstract, caused a furore in newspapers and much unwelcome negative publicity for the artist. After a year of little painting, he embarked on the Gate series (including Here I give thanks to Mondrian, p. 10), an important new series of geometrical abstractions, exhibited at The Gallery (Symonds Street, Auckland) in 1961; a further extension of the series was the sixteen-panel The Second Gate Series (1962, pp. 51–53), a collaboration with John Caselberg (who supplied the Old Testament texts) which addressed the threat of nuclear annihilation; it was exhibited in Christchurch with other work in 1962. Lack of critical enthusiasm for this abstract/text work led McCahon to reconsider his direction, resulting in a ‘return’ (his word) to landscape painting in a large open Northland series (1962, p. 33, 59) and Landscape theme and variations (1963, pp. 60–61), two eight-panel series, exhibited at The Gallery simultaneously with a joint Woollaston/McCahon retrospective at Auckland City Art Gallery. In 1964, after twelve years at Auckland City Art Gallery, McCahon resigned to join the staff of Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts, where he taught from 1964 to 1971. His first exhibition after joining Elam, Small Landscapes and Waterfalls (Ikon Fine Arts, 1964), proved to be both aesthetically and commercially successful.

Colin McCahon helping to install Jacob Epstein’s bronze Rock Drill (1913–16) at Auckland City Art Gallery, 1961.

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

10 Partridge Street

The McCahons’ move from Titirangi to inner-city Auckland in March 1960 was welcomed by the whole family. Colin told O’Reilly:

Anne and all well & flourishing and all pleased to be in town after so long in the bush. No doubt will miss the beach & bush in the summer but there will still be compensations.

We are right in the middle of a Maori & Islander district – lots of people & activity & a lovely view of Mt Eden (the mountain not the other thing).¹

The ‘other thing’ was Mount Eden Prison. Prior to later ‘gentrification’, Newton and nearby Grey Lynn were working-class and student neighbourhoods with a large Polynesian population which McCahon actively enjoyed. Number 10 Partridge Street was a small villa on the Arch Hill side of Newton Gully close to Newton Central School. The house was compulsorily acquired and demolished in the 1970s for the school’s expansion. The McCahons moved to 106 Crummer Road in Grey Lynn in December 1976.

Writing about Here I give thanks to Mondrian (1961), an early Partridge Street painting, McCahon commented:

The painting reflects the change I felt in moving from Titirangi with its thick native bush and the view of French Bay to that of the urban environment. This picture belongs to a whole lot of paintings that were, believe it or not, based on the landscape I saw through the bedroom window. This also applies to the Gate paintings …²

Before the Gate series arrived, however, McCahon experienced one of those unproductive spells which occurred when he moved to a new place. He told O’Reilly: ‘Have had one of those periods when I couldn’t break through at all.’³ The Online Catalogue lists only a handful of works for 1960.

As always, McCahon was very busy at Auckland City Art Gallery, in his role as keeper and deputy director, mostly organising exhibitions such as the first of a historically important annual series of touring shows, Contemporary New Zealand Painting and Sculpture (1960). McCahon was represented by six works from 1959, including Cross and four Elias paintings. He was excited about the exhibition, telling O’Reilly that it completely outclassed the gallery’s Auckland Festival show: ‘… a huge Australian exhibition which sadly flopped – but rightly – it followed immediately on our Contemporary N.Z. ex. and just didn’t measure up … This was (with the N.Z. show) the first time some real pride and enthusiasm seemed to develop around N.Z. painting.’⁴ This positive mood was sustained through the 1960s, especially in Auckland.

Hay’s Art Competition, 1960

During 1960 McCahon was at the centre of a newspaper furore when his Painting (1958) was made a joint winner of the first Hay’s Art Competition award in Christchurch. Three judges, John Simpson and Russell Clark from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts and Peter Tomory from Auckland City Art Gallery, could not agree on a winner and awarded the prize equally to Julian Royds for Composition (‘a reddish Gothic interior extravaganza’, according to one review),⁵ Francis L. Jones for Kanieri Gold Dredge (a naïve representational work), and McCahon’s Painting (1958; see Volume One, p. 268) – Tomory’s choice – works as different from each other as the proverbial chalk and cheese. But it was McCahon’s work which caused the controversy. J. N. K. (Nelson Kenny), an able critic, said of it: ‘It is not a picture of anything. It is not meant to be anything but what it is. It is simply a surface covered with paint of different tones and colours – as ultimately is any painting – and it must be looked at with this in mind if its stark austerity is to be appreciated.’⁶ Newspapers around the country, however, published sneering attacks on both painting and painter. McCahon wrote bitterly to Brasch: ‘I have about 100 quite devastating cuttings from all over N.Z. which I am keeping for when I eventually manage to leave N.Z. for good – to remind me in times of homesickness of what to expect should I return. (The Auckland Star reproduced the picture on its side.)’⁷ This ugly brouhaha interfered with his painting: ‘No painting to report[;] am having a long dry spell. For the first time ever I have been really depressed with constant bad reviews.’⁸

Alarmed by McCahon’s talk of wanting to leave the country, Brasch wrote a long, sympathetic reply, imploring him to ignore newspaper criticism: ‘It’s worthless, nearly all of it, as you know. I agree it’s infinitely depressing to read, and hurtful when you’re consistently misunderstood, misrepresented, sneered at. But, Colin, you must realise that in spite of it you have a large following and a reputation second to none.’ He was sceptical about the likelihood of McCahon’s succeeding abroad: ‘Will you really do better in another country (where – England? America?), as one among many, most of them better known and better established?’ Furthermore, ‘are you sure that you’d be able to paint in another country, do you realize how your work grows out of N.Z.?’ He concluded: ‘I should hate this country to lose you … Although I can’t always follow you, you’re still the first N.Z. painter to me’.⁹ McCahon was appreciative of such caring concern: ‘Thank you for your kindly & reassuring letter. I most certainly would be off tomorrow if I could but as you know am so well tied down I must remain here for years to come.’¹⁰

Troubled by the buckets of disparaging criticism being dumped on his friend, Woollaston published an impressive defence of the derided painting in the Press. He began: ‘In view of the unpleasant nature of much of the criticism Colin McCahon’s Painting has received, I feel the need to make some amends to the artist concerned’. After seven detailed paragraphs describing the forms, structure and colour of the painting, he continued:

I would say that, if the picture has a subject, a ‘meaning’ as people like to say, it would be of such a kind as to make necessary the extreme abstinence from representation that we find in it. It is too close to the unutterable for easy verbal communication: its subject is too disconcerting to allow many people to indulge in the easy response of ‘I like it’, which unfortunately is all that most people will allow of themselves for painting.¹¹

McCahon was grateful: ‘But thank you for the words on Painting … No, I object to nothing there. I just wish it wasn’t necessary for these things to happen at all and am certainly glad I’m not in Chch … New paintings are much more difficult. The citizens of Chch are lucky they can’t see these ones.’¹² By then the dry spell was over and he was hard at work on the highly innovative Gate series.

The controversy about Painting (1958) expanded when William Baverstock, the ultra-reactionary director of the McDougall Art Gallery (already notorious for his role – as Canterbury Society of Arts (CSA) secretary – in the Pleasure Garden affair in 1948), successfully advised the City Council not to accept the donation by Hay’s Ltd of any of the winners, especially McCahon’s, on the grounds that it was ‘not art but the negation of art’, a decision loudly condemned by the art community in Christchurch, including W. A. Sutton, Doris Lusk, Leo Bensemann, John Coley and E. N. (Ted) Bracey, who all wrote letters to the Press. Bensemann pointedly contrasted the Auckland City Art Gallery’s role as a ‘vital force in the art affairs of this country’ with the McDougall’s moribund status.¹³

The Gate series

By March 1961 McCahon had finally moved on, telling Caselberg about ‘the stream of present painting which is happening again at last’.¹⁴ Caselberg – who had recently married seventeen-year-old Anna Woollaston in Auckland – was awarded the Burns Fellowship at Otago University for 1961; he planned to write a large sequence of verse plays about early New Zealand history and race conflict; for years he involved McCahon – as an experienced theatre person – in lengthy communications about them.

Meanwhile, McCahon arranged to exhibit his new work at The Gallery in Symonds Street, established in 1960 by Frank Lowe and Don Wood, both architecture students who attended McCahon’s painting classes at Auckland City Art Gallery. He told Caselberg: ‘I have been doing further work on the whole lot in the present group – hanging an exhibition here August 28, with Frank [Lowe] & Don [Wood], about 16 paintings and, for sale, the drawings for the Northland Panels.’¹⁵ And in September: ‘Have just closed an exhibition … here – had them done on T.V. too – Bob Chapman expounding.’¹⁶ Chapman, who taught political science at the University of Auckland, opened the show and had spoken about the works on the brand-new medium of television.

Exhibition invitation, An Exhibition of Recent Paintings by Colin McCahon, The Gallery, Auckland, 1961.

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

Exhibition catalogue, Painting from the Pacific, Auckland City Art Gallery, 1961.

E. H. McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

But the first of the new series to be exhibited was Gate: Waioneke (p. 13), a large painting with a self-fabricated curved top, McCahon’s contribution to Painting from the Pacific, an Auckland City Art Gallery exhibition which included paintings from Japan, America, Australia and New Zealand. The exhibition reflected his conviction, formed in America and supported by Tomory, that there were interesting connections between the art produced around the Pacific Rim. Not everyone agreed with the premise; Brasch was sceptical, as was Wystan Curnow, who wrote about the exhibition for Landfall. Poet and critic C. K. Stead called it ‘a piece of McCahonery’.¹⁷ Brasch commented in his journal: ‘This mystique of Colin’s that virtue lies in what is of the Pacific & that we must turn away from the baleful influence of Europe forms an interesting parallel to Allen Curnow’s New Zealand mystique.’¹⁸ The New Zealand contingent included several students from McCahon’s ‘attic’ classes which he started at the gallery after his return from America: Jean Horsley (1913–1997), Alwyn Lasenby (born 1929) and Freda Simmonds. Wystan Curnow said of Gate: Waioneke: ‘McCahon once again gives proof of his ability to create symbols that possess a compulsive empathy in a work which, interestingly enough, is compositionally akin to those of [the Americans] Bischoff and Diebenkorn.’¹⁹ Diebenkorn’s Berkeley #23 (1955), which McCahon may have seen in San Francisco, was included in the show.

Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #23, 1955, oil on canvas, 1575 x 1391 mm, photograph taken by Katherine Du Tiel.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of the Women’s Board © The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

McCahon’s An Exhibition of Recent Paintings at The Gallery consisted of eighteen works from the Gate series, including four from a sub-series called Sketch. Also included were 28 Northland drawings, the residue from the Gallery 91 exhibition. The oil paintings ranged in price from 15 guineas for the Sketches to 200 guineas for Here I give thanks to Mondrian. At his Little Congress talk in 1963, McCahon said (in Wystan Curnow’s summary): ‘These were followed by Black & White squares. Strong Mondrian