The koru man
His name is linked to the rise of Ma¯ori consciousness, but there’s more to Gordon Walters.
Exhibitions like this are ‘‘oncers’’. To spend the energy uniting this many works by one artist over an extensive time is a giant feat. For visitors it’s a rare chance to get a complete overview, a full appraisal of an artist’s work. And Gordon Walters is a good one to pick, because there is so sparse an understanding of his work in its totality.
Some of what has created our inadequacy is that generalisation that is part of the commercial aspect of art. Art can often be marketed much like soap, punctuated by a graphic recognisable image that sums up an artist’s work at a glance. Hence when someone sees one of those powerful black and white rhythmic repeating korup - atterned paintings, a combination of abstract and elegant design, the immediate response is: Gordon Walters.
But what this exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery demonstrates is how Walters is so much more than this and indeed where these iconic works came from.
The exhibition’s title is ‘‘Gordon Walters: New Vision’’ and in the introductory room is a series of our typical Walters, a room of koru patterning – koru within koru, koru surrounding koru, alternating, layered in a packed assembly and some with generous empty sections. My favourite is Painting No 1, 1965, the first work sold to a public gallery where the lines suggest a calm sea where two chaotic waves of koru are producing eddies.
Most of the works in this opening room are from the exhibition at New Vision Gallery in 1966, acknowledged in the show’s title, when Walters had already produced a decade of abstraction.
The early Walters works show an interest in modernism, experiments in influences by Klee, expanded wider by investigations in Rock Art, Marquesan art that then was widened to include Ma¯ ori and Pacific, and primitive drawings. One of the defining aspects of these experiments was the influence and interest shared with Theo Schoon, who he met in 1941. Together they fed each other’s creativity, exploring a collective visual aesthetic.
A use of flat colour was determined early where Walters could arrange shapes – rectangles where some reflected upon themselves, long alternating dark and light stripes, grids, spirals , semitransparent rectangles tilted so they overlap, and dog-toothed notching patterns.
Some of the looser abstractions came about after a trio was added into this gathering, with input from Rolf Hattaway (1907-1970), who Schoon met in 1949 when he worked as an aide at an Auckland hospital. Hattaway had an early interest in art.
In the early 1930s, he suffered a head injury and entered the hospital diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Schoon would bring in art materials and then collect Hattaway’s drawing to bring home to study with Walters, many of the motifs used in Walters’ paintings. It was the unconventional form of the drawings that interested them, a raw expression of vision and emotion, interestingly adapted in Walters’ much more defined and tidy techniques.
There are cabinets in the exhibition that give insight into the working process, with rough gouache drawings where his designs were quickly recorded or cut-outs for moving around a page and figuring composition. These studies make up a great deal of Walters’ oeuvre and, if you chase the dates, in a game of doubling back, you realise that they don’t pre-date the koru works but co-exist.
Even with the koru works, there is far more variation than many might recall. I was unaware as to how much colour was involved (and Walters’ good use of it) – reds, greens, soft yellows and blues, the tones closer, so less strobe-like with subtler variation.
Gordon Walters died in 1995. His name and work were often associated with a rise in the consciousness of Ma¯ ori but if you fill in the story, told so well with this exhibition, more he was an abstractionist set in a New Zealand context where these iconic koru are an obvious fit.