Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists

By Leonard Bell

For fifty years, Marti Friedlander (1928–2016) was one of New Zealand's most important photographers, her work singled out for praise and recognition here and around the world. Friedlander's powerful pictures chronicled the country's social and cultural life from the 1960s into the twenty-first century. From painters to potters, film makers to novelists, and actors to musicians, Marti Friedlander was always deeply engaged with New Zealand's creative talent. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Wellington, brings together those extraordinary people and photographs: Rita Angus and Ralph Hotere, C. K. Stead and Maurice Gee, Neil Finn and Kapka Kassabova, Ans Westra and Kiri Te Kanawa, and many many more. Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists chronicles the changing face of the arts in New Zealand while also addressing a central theme in Marti Friedlander's photography. Featuring more than 250 photographs, many never previously published, the book is an illuminating chronicle of the cultural life of Aotearoa New Zealand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Aug 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781776710645

Leonard Bell

Leonard Bell is associate professor of art history at the University of Auckland. His writings on cross-cultural interactions and representations and the work of travelling, migrant and refugee artists and photographers have been published in New Zealand, Britain, the United States, Australia, Germany and the Czech Republic. He is author of Marti Friedlander (Auckland University Press, 2009), Colonial Constructs: European Images of Maori 1840–1914 (AUP, 1992) and In Transit: Questions of Home and Belonging in New Zealand Art (2007). He is co-editor of Jewish Lives in New Zealand (2012).

Book preview

Published as part of the

Gerrard & Marti Friedlander

Creative Lives Series

First published 2020

Auckland University Press

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142

New Zealand

www.press.auckland.ac.nz

© text Leonard Bell, 2020

© images Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust, 2020

ISBN 9781776710645

Publication is kindly assisted by the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust and by Creative New Zealand

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Design by Keely O’Shannessy

Image preparation by Spectra Graphics

Front cover: Ralph Hotere, Dunedin, 1978.

Back cover: Gretchen Albrecht in her studio, late 1970s.

Photographs pages 1–11: John Drawbridge, painter, c. 1979; Vincent Ward, filmmaker, 1981; Jenny Bornholdt, poet, c. 2008; Gretchen Albrecht, painter, 1967; Tony Fomison, painter, 1978; Tim and Neil Finn, musicians, 2003.

Photographs pages 318–20: Toss Woollaston, painter, late 1960s; Robert McLeod, painter, c. 1979.

CONTENTS

CONTEXTS

PORTRAITS

EPILOGUE

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE ARTISTS

John Drawbridge

Vincent Ward

Jenny Bornholdt

Tim and Neil Finn

Current Offence group

Max McLellan

Len Castle

Doris Lusk

Toss Woollaston

Kevin Ireland

Susan Firth

Maurice Gee

Keith (‘Spud’) Patterson

Phil Slight

Anthony Stones

Frank Finan

C. K. Stead

Maurice Duggan

Suzanne Goldberg

James K. Baxter

Pauline Thompson

Mary Hardwick-Smith

Helen Mason

Juliet Peter and Roy Cowan

Patricia Perrin

Peter Stichbury

Wilf Wright

Jeff Macklin

Rei Hamon

Dick Scott

Barry Cleavin

Rudolf (Rudi) Gopas

Ted Kindleysides

Paul Olds

Kees Hos

David Brokenshire

Jeff Scholes

Warren Tippett

Jan Nigro

Robin White

Ted Smyth

Stanley Palmer

Kate Coolahan

Barry Lett

Don Peebles

Des and Juliet Rainey

Gil Hanly

Pat Hanly

Greer Twiss

Paul Beadle

Melvin Day

Keith Sinclair

Rita Angus

Judith Binney

Michael King

Odo Strewe

Louise Henderson

Barbara Ewing

Raymond Ching

Annette Isbey

Lois McIvor

Ralph Hotere

Jeffrey Harris

Joanna Paul

Patricia France

Limbs

Michael Illingworth

Ross Ritchie

Eric McCormick

Michael Morrissey

Gordon Walters

Tony Fomison

Philip Clairmont

Olivia Spencer Bower

Don Driver

Grahame Sydney

Michael Smither

William (Bill) Sutton

Gretchen Albrecht

Robert Nettleton Field

Marcia Russell

Marilyn Duckworth

Ian Scott

John B. Turner

Shirley Gruar

Philip Trusttum

Lois White

Darien Takle

Fleur Adcock

Charles Tole

Evelyn

Alan Pearson

Milan Mrkusich

Kiri Te Kanawa

Fiona Kidman

Merata Mita

Alan Brunton

Francis Pound

Rosalie Gascoigne

Ann Robinson

Ans Westra

Edith Amituanai

Jacqueline Fahey

Gaylene Preston

Margaret Mahy

Merimeri Penfold

Georg Kohlap

Gavin Bishop

Kapka Kassabova

Barry Brickell

Nigel Brown

Richard Killeen

Mervyn Williams

Robert McLeod

The Current Offence group, from left John McCowan, Philip Thwaites, Alexander Guyan and Michael Noonan, 1965.

CONTEXTS

A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex; more obvious and more profound.

—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE¹

‘Lock Your Doors: Satirists Are Here!’ is the caption beneath a photograph of four men occupying most of an abruptly cropped picture space. Lodged on a veranda, legs dangling, they stare back intently. Bunched together, slightly askew, one atilt, they don’t look quite right, perhaps ‘a few screws loose’. Formally dressed, faces a touch pallid, their mouths downturned, their mood appears to veer towards the manic. In a photograph below on the same newspaper page, they sit with their backs to us, facing inwards, unknowable. Who or what are they? Would anyone recognise them in 2020? Perhaps just one, Michael Noonan, who became a legendary scriptwriter for TVNZ.² They were all subcultural stars when Marti Friedlander took the photograph in 1965, one of about forty taken on the same day in Henderson, West Auckland. In other photographs they stand one behind another, all angularities, robotic, astride railway tracks, blank-faced. What was the space they occupied?³

The four were then well-known performers: Philip Thwaites, Noonan, ‘Moon’ (John) McCowan and Alexander Guyan (1933–1991). English-born Guyan, a poet, short-story writer (published in Landfall) and playwright (Conversations with a Golliwog, 1962), went back to Britain in the early 1970s, where his long-worked-on novel, Exciting, Isn’t It, was published in 1988.⁴ Thwaites was an actor and from the later 1960s manager of the University Book Shop (UBS), before shifting to London in 1974, where he mainly worked in book and recorded music retailing. Noonan, author of the award-winning The Rattle (1963), later a broadcaster and writer as well as an actor, also worked for a while at the UBS, while McCowan was an engineering student and a serious amateur actor performing in plays new to New Zealand by Eugène Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett. He stuck with engineering, though, and was to establish a successful construction company in Western Australia.

Alexander Guyan, 1965.

The Current Offence group, (from left) Noonan, Lindsey Bogle, Guyan, McCowan, 1965.

In 1965 the quartet performed the satirical review Current Offence: Armageddon How Are You? and several other wildly successful shows. Friedlander’s portraits of the group were used as promotional images for their appearances at the Wynyard Tavern, in Symonds Street, Auckland. They appeared on flyers and were reproduced in the New Zealand Herald, Auckland Star and New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. The photographs were not straight reportage. Friedlander closely directed their poses, gestures and looks as well as the overall stagings. These portraits are more imaginative constructions which depict how Marti Friedlander saw them, as much as how they were. A strange, new ‘seam of life’ emerges from the photographs.⁵

The Current Offence satirists (in several shows joined by Lindsey Bogle, 1944–2017) offered a kind of theatrical performance that was new to New Zealand: satirical revue in an intimate setting, a hundred-seat café, with refreshments on hand (the latter inspired by Wellington’s Downstage theatre, at which the group performed in August 1965). Skits with titles like ‘Boozing in Kiwiland’, ‘Outward Bounder’, ‘Rugby in Eden’, ‘On His Holiness’ Secret Service’ and ‘Bob Hopeless Show’ signal their caricatural thrust. The shows of celebrity TV cook Graham Kerr and the presentation of Anthony Stones’s bust sculpture of writer Frank Sargeson to the Auckland Public Library were subject to barbed, absurdist parodies. In ‘Under Holy Oake’, the then prime minister, Keith Holyoake, was filtered through a deliberate, abbreviated travesty of Dylan Thomas’s radio drama and stage play Under Milk Wood (1954). The scripts were ‘pungent’.⁶ Irreverence and bawdiness ruled. For one reviewer the group were ‘pressing ahead with their campaign to deflate the pompous, uncover the phoney and generally demolish the Kiwi Way of Life’.⁷

Their scripts and performances (as a very ‘green’ late teenager I attended several) bring to mind earlier 1960s British satirical cabaret, such as Beyond the Fringe (1960–66) and That Was the Week That Was (1961–62), plus a touch of the famed Cambridge Circus. The latter show, which included comedic luminaries-to-come John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Bill Oddie, toured New Zealand to sell-out audiences in 1964. Contemporaneous satirical magazines like the English Private Eye (from 1961), as well as OZ magazine (produced in Sydney from April 1963), come to mind too. OZ, edited by Richard Neville and rough around the edges, mercilessly lampooned the ‘holy cows’ of Australian society and culture – for instance, Robert (‘Ming, don’t go’) Menzies, the long-reigning, not-so-Liberal prime minister (1939–41, 1949–66) and his cronies, as well as satirising international figures and mishandled affairs, like the expanding Vietnam War.

While the emergence of satirical cabaret was belated in New Zealand, Current Offence was a significant cultural phenomenon (in both anthropological and arts senses), even if the troupers’ moments in the limelight were brief. The group had an ardent following in the mid-1960s, playing to ‘packed houses’;⁸ the Anglo-Dutch folk singer and virtuoso guitarist Francis Kuipers (1941–2017), who provided musical interludes, no doubt helped.⁹ Current Offence was a seminal happening that also served to germinate further similar activities and events in the later 1960s and into the 1970s – for instance, John Clarke (1948–2017) in Wellington (Victoria University revues, late 1960s, emerging as Fred Dagg in 1973) and the Red Mole wandering players. One of their principal founders and writers, Alan Brunton (1946–2002), was also photographed by Friedlander.

The Wynyard Tavern’s location facilitated the Current Offence satirists’ success. The Wynyard Tavern was an integral component of the cultural geography of the day; it was close to Auckland Art Gallery, the Elam School of Fine Arts, the University of Auckland (with around 5000 students in 1963) and, in the days of six o’clock closing, the Kiwi pub (on the site where the AUT marae now stands). The Kiwi’s clientele was symptomatic of the changing times. Presided over by the manager, Sloane, a former boxer, it was a heady, sometimes weird mix of artists, writers, theatre people and their followers, antipodean bohemians and that cohort of wilfully scruffy students, plus their hangers-on, keen to offend the ‘bourgeoisie’, from which most of them in fact came. The patrons also included the odd criminal and several not-inconspicuous plain-clothes policemen.

The Wynyard Tavern, which was not a pub, offered more than just coffee and food. It was also a meeting place, where various subcultural clusters gathered and grew, and a venue for the occasional concert and exhibition: Friedlander’s first one-person show, photographs of children, in 1966, for instance, as well as those of other photographers like Simon Buis and Max Oettli (1970).

Marti Friedlander was a participant observer in the broader sociocultural world of which the Current Offence group was an important part: a surge of creative dissidence and social discontent manifest in a hunger for the new and different in a mainstream climate characterised by disciplinarian, puritanical views and widespread censorship of books, movies and people. Mandy Rice-Davies, of the 1963 ‘Profumo affair’, for example, was banned entry to New Zealand in 1965, a threat to the country’s moral fabric, it would seem. Friedlander’s portraits helped bring into public visibility artists and creators in new, oppositional subcultures. Her photographs, when published, made those people known, and shaped how they are remembered now. In some instances, as with the Current Offence performers, the artists went their various ways and the photographs too dropped out of public sight. This book aims to bring the photographs and the people back into visibility.

Cover of programme for a folk-singing concert at the Wynyard Tavern. Photograph Marti Friedlander, c. 1969.

Cover design by Gray Dixon.© Gray Dixon, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington Eph-C-MUSIC-Garland-1970s-01

Des and Juliet Rainey, c. 1969.

A portrait is a picture of a person or people, in most instances posed for the photographer.¹⁰ Some critics claim that portraits’ subjects are primarily ‘actors’ playing roles, maybe inventing personas for the sake of the portrait – as in the Current Offence portrayals. But that is not necessarily so. Portrait events are often much more multifaceted.

Eminent historians such as Carl Schorske (Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism, 1998) and Peter Burke (Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, 2001) argued that historians should give greater recognition to the value of visual images. Many of them still privileged the written word as the only acceptable form of historical evidence. In his Art and Agency (1998), Alfred Gell noted that most ‘of the information which we make use of is derived from visual sources’, and that visual perception and images play integral roles ‘in cognition or people’s thought processes’.¹¹ Fundamental aspects of life and relationships are imaginable primarily, sometimes only, as visual images, something to which the power of portraits testifies. Portraiture, including photographic portraiture, as a means of better understanding societal dynamics and relationships, whether historic or contemporary, receives much more attention now. Portraiture brings together photographers, their subjects and viewers in revealing ways. A portrait’s implications extend far beyond the representation of the particular subject in itself. It has complex relations to social actualities. And while a portrait can ‘lie’ (a truism in the digital era), nevertheless the good photo-portrait gets to the ‘heart of the matter’, either showing or suggesting not only qualities of a person, but also aspects of the social climate which the subject inhabits. The imperative to engage (or not) visually with faces is found in all societies. Neuroscientist, visual arts advocate and Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel observes, ‘Our visual senses are tremendously specialised for faces…. The face is the most important visual image we ever encounter. We recognise other people, we recognise ourselves, by faces.’¹² From photography’s beginnings in the 1840s portraiture was its principal activity. Now, thanks to the internet and billions of ‘selfies’ and snaps of others, it is the largest category of images accessible. These Portraits of the Artists show not only ‘telling’ faces, but also hands, bodies and spaces: physical, sociocultural and psychological.

First and fifth edition covers of Michael King and Marti Friedlander, Moko: Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century. The painting on the 1972 cover is C. F. Goldie’s All ’e Same t’e Pakeha (1905).

Friedlander’s photograph on the 2008 cover features Herepo Rongo (Waikato, 1970).

MARTI FRIEDLANDER (1928–2016) IS ONE OF THE MOST HIGHLY REGARDED New Zealand photographers.¹³ Her work and career, spanning sixty years, were central to the country’s social and cultural life from the mid-1960s, during several periods of radical social change and upheaval. Their centrality continues. Besides those of children, her portraits of elderly Māori women with moko (traditional facial tattoo), vintners, artists, writers, potters, musicians and actors stand out. Many of the latter were initially and extensively seen in periodicals, exhibition brochures, books and newspapers during the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁴

Friedlander’s life story has been oft-told in books, articles, films and media interviews, yet some salient biographical facts provide a necessary foundation for what you are about to see. Her complicated early years bear upon her later career as an empathetic and insightful portraitist. Born in Mile End in the poor East End of London in 1928, she and her older sister, Anne, were abandoned when Marti was three. Their parents, Sophie and Philip Gordon, thought to have been Russian-Jewish immigrants to England, were unable to cope and disappeared from their daughters’ lives. Separated from Anne, Marti was placed in a London County Council facility, the Ben Jonson Home, a grim, Dickensian institution, in Bethnal Green, near Mile End. Fortunately she was rescued, and the sisters reunited in 1933 at the Norwood Orphan Aid Asylum, a Jewish orphanage in Streatham, south-west London.

Friedlander lived there until war broke out in 1939. After two years as an evacuee in Worthing, she studied photography at Bloomsbury Technical School for Girls in Letchworth Garden City near London in 1942–43. Friedlander arrived at photography by accident. She won a trade scholarship to train as a dressmaker and designer but, the course already full, she sidestepped into the ‘trade’ (commercial) photography course, since it had the only remaining vacancies at the school. On another scholarship, she spent a later year as an aspiring artist at the excellent Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in south London. She soon realised that she was not cut out to be a painter, and, responding to an advertisement in the British Journal of Photography, luckily found a job as technical assistant (printing, touching up negatives and prints) and ‘dogsbody’ in the shared Kensington studio of two accomplished professional photographers: New Zealand-born Douglas Glass, now best known as the portraitist for the Sunday Times from 1949 to 1961,¹⁵ and Gordon Crocker, who, while primarily a fashion photographer, made striking portraits of models.¹⁶ Work with them was crucial for Marti’s development. She stayed with Crocker until her marriage to Berlin-born New Zealander Gerrard Friedlander in early 1957, and their departure for an extended honeymoon trip to Europe and Israel en route to New Zealand.

Gordon Crocker, British photographer, c. 1954.

Gordon Crocker,Woman, 1938;

Gordon Crocker, unidentified fashion photograph.

Cover of Alexander Liberman, The Artist in His Studio, 1960;

cover of Felix H. Man, 8 European Artists, 1954.

During her London days and a later prolonged stay in 1962–63, portraits by a range of photographers impacted on her via books, newspapers and periodicals and the occasional exhibition. For instance, besides Glass, whom she sometimes accompanied on his portrait assignments, she saw work by Vogue photographers such as Alexander Liberman and André Kertész in New York and Felix H. Man and John Deakin in England, as well as work in the British Observer newspaper by Hungarian-born Michael Peto, Jane Bown (e.g. portraits of Jean Cocteau, Melanie Klein, Samuel Beckett) and Australian David Moore. They, plus Deakin occasionally, were employed for the prestigious newspaper by Czech-born émigré Mechthild Nawiasky, the picture editor from 1949, who revolutionised its use of photographs. Formerly Nawiasky had been assistant to Stefan Lorant, another refugee from Nazism and editor of Picture Post, and later Lilliput. In both periodicals Bill Brandt’s portraits of artists and writers featured in the 1940s.¹⁷ They were inspirational. American Arnold Newman’s were too, as they appeared in Life and Horizon. Friedlander later met Newman in London. Liberman’s The Artist in His Studio, first published in 1960, made a decisive impact. Friedlander retained a battered copy throughout her life. And Henri Cartier-Bresson’s books published in the 1950s – The Europeans and The Decisive Moment – impressed her in the 1960s. Man’s 8 European Artists (1954) did too.

Photographs of artists, writers, craftsmen and women, theatre people, dancers and musicians by prominent photographers constitute a vigorous sub-genre of portraiture. They have done since the early days of photography – with Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) in France and Julia Margaret Cameron in England in the 1860s and 1870s the most notable then. From the early twentieth century onwards leading practitioners, besides the aforementioned, include Alfred Stieglitz, Imogen Cunningham, August Sander, Lotte Jacobi, Ilse Bing, Cartier-Bresson, Lucia Moholy, Cecil Beaton, Robert Doisneau, Jorge Lewinski, Australian Max Dupain and Berlin-born, Bauhaus-trained Grete Stern in Buenos Aires. With the boom in photo-books that got under way from the later 1980s, publications solely devoted to portraits of artists and writers have proliferated, particularly in Germany, France, the USA and Britain.

THE FRIEDLANDERS REACHED NEW ZEALAND IN EARLY 1958 AND SETTLED, or tried to, in Henderson, West Auckland. Nearby Titirangi had a thriving Camera Club, where the collegiality of fellow members such as Olaf Petersen, Simon Buis (an immigrant too), Steve Rumsey and Des Dubbelt (editor of Playdate) encouraged Friedlander’s at least partial acclimatisation to what for her was an alien land. While she had taken her own photographs since the 1940s, including a lot during her travels, these were almost entirely personal, for her private use: images of friends, family and places visited. That remained so in her first years here.

One of Friedlander’s ‘personals’ – of the then barely known writer Maurice (known as ‘Moss’) Gee – in 1959 became her first published portrait. His parents, Lyndahl and Len, were her next-door neighbours in Tirimoana Street in Henderson. Gee was on the way to Australia, during a troubled period of his life. A photograph by ‘M. Friedlander’ featured in a portfolio of portraits of writers by several photographers in the arts periodical Landfall in March 1960.¹⁸ The identity of ‘M. Friedlander’ was not included in the short biographies of ‘New Contributors’. The earlier December 1959 Landfall issue had included two photographs by the same ‘M. Friedlander’, of sculptures by Jim Allen and John Kingston, accompanying an essay on recent sculpture in Auckland by Friedlander’s friend, fellow émigré and ‘Westie’ Gerhard Rosenberg. The pictured sculptures were effectively stand-ins for the artists. It was not until her return to New Zealand in 1963 from England and Israel, though, and having lost a daughter, stillborn, that Friedlander resolved to become a professional photographer. Commissions began to flow.

Marti Friedlander’s photograph of Maurice Gee in Landfall, March 1960.

From the mid-1960s and into the 1970s her portraits appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, such as Playdate (including visiting English pop singer Cliff Richard), the Wine Review, New Zealand Listener, New Zealand Herald (with art critic Beverley Simmons’s articles), Auckland Star, New Zealand Potter (some uncredited), the short-lived visual-arts periodical Ascent (1968–70), Marcia Russell’s proto-feminist Thursday (1968–76), Artis (previously New Vision Newsletter, 1970–72), New Argot (the New Zealand Students’ Arts Council periodical, 1973–75) and Art New Zealand (founded 1976). Those in the New Zealand Listener included artists Ralph Hotere, Toss Woollaston, Pat Hanly and Greer Twiss, writers Maurice Shadbolt, James K. Baxter, Keith Sinclair and C. K. (Karl) Stead and the composer Ronald Tremain, as well as visitors from overseas, such as writers Han Suyin and Hammond Innes, actors Raymond Burr and Edward Woodward, musicians Yehudi Menuhin and Benjamin Britten, and sculptors Helen Escobedo and Michio Ihara.¹⁹

Han Suyin, Chinese-born doctor and writer, 1975;

Helen Escobedo, Mexican