For better or worse
Relegated to life as a wife and mother, Anne McCahon had artistic talent to burn – and now, more than 70 years after she did her last painting, she finally has her own show.
Relegated to life as a wife and mother, Anne McCahon had artistic talent to burn – and now, more than 70 years after she did her last painting, she is finally getting her own show.
There is a cabbage tree, flax bush and a small karaka on the berm, nasturtiums on the fence. The dog will bark but a friendly word will be all he needs,” wrote Victoria Carr, in an email, by way of instructions on how to find her house. She lives in Grey Lynn, in a scruffily friendly old house. There are indeed nasturtiums on the fence. The dog, a pomeranian called Max, who is as friendly as her house, didn’t bark.
Inside, there are piles of stuff everywhere: family photos and papers and endearingly wonky ceramics and lots of art. One of her own paintings is pinned up in the kitchen; a watercolour of Max as a “chrysanthemum fairy”. It is sweet and rather good. Some of the art is by her father; she also has some of her mother’s work, but most of it is currently at the exhibition that Carr has helped curate: A Table of One’s Own: The Creative Life of Anne McCahon, at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery until February 12.
Anne McCahon died in 1993. Her daughter thinks she painted her last work in the early 1940s. To state the obvious, the exhibition has been a long time coming. “I think,” says Carr, “she would be very pleased. I think she’d be absolutely astonished.”
So, let’s not talk about Colin. Colin McCahon is, of course, her father. She says: “I didn’t want the focus to be on Colin at all … to let Mum do her thing.”
She says this at the end of our interview in which, of course, we have talked about Colin. This was not for want of both of us trying quite hard not to talk about Colin, but the couple’s lives were and remain so intertwined. “Yes, they were a couple and there’s no getting away from that. They were committed to each, for better or worse.”
There is no getting away from the fact that her father was the famous artist, so the exhibition is bittersweet because her mother – had she been born in different times and, perhaps, been married to another man – might also have been a famous artist.
Mostly, people don’t realise, says Carr, that Anne Hamblett, as she was before she became “Mrs Colin”, was “actually an acclaimed artist. She was spoken of highly, was thought to be good, thought to be the best among pupils at art school and yet she didn’t
Anne Hamblett was “thought to be the best among pupils at art school and yet she didn’t continue doing art”.
continue doing art.”
She stopped painting in 1943 following the birth of the first of her four children, William, 10 months after she and Colin married, and “that seems to be the last date we have for any of her work”.
She was good. You can see that. There is, as Carr says, real “joy” in her painting of poppies in a vase. She later made vases and pots, those endearingly wonky ones. Carr leaps up to show me. She tugs a bunch of garden flowers out of a pot not made by her mother and shoves them into one made by her mother to show how the flowers make the pot. “With its sort of slippy marks around, it sort of come to life and it’s gorgeous.”
It is. It also provides a nice metaphor for an exhibition of a creative life that has belatedly but gorgeously come to life.
After Anne’s death, her children – Matthew and Catherine have since died – found work by their mother that they never knew existed. Carr did ask her mother why she’d stopped painting. “She’d say: ‘There’s only room for one artist in a family.’” She may have resented this. “I don’t know. She would never say if she did.”
Once, in an interview, she did say that McCahon wouldn’t let her go on painting: “‘Because it was his right.’ And as soon as she said that, I knew what it referred to. It referred to marriage vows. She’s married Colin. She’s promised to obey and all those other things you promised in those days. I would say that possibly it was no longer her job. And I give William credit for his statement that Colin married the competition. He cleared the field for himself, you see.”
And, she says, he married his best critic. “He got a critic he could trust.
This is the thing that I think – Mum must have made a conscious decision to marry Colin, because she had come to have a belief in his ability and his future in his expression through art. And I think she said to me that she had nothing to say.”
Families are complicated. Carr loved her father and got on well with him. She had a more difficult relationship with her mother, who she says was aloof. “I felt I sort of appeared to be a person who perhaps would have been better not being there.” She felt her mother didn’t like her very much. “Yes, that’s right.” Does she think this is true? “Well, the thing is … no, I don’t. As an adult, I realise that now. I think it was part of her feeling … Oh, it’s hard to say … Because she wasn’t doing what she would have loved to be doing, and I think that was part of it. I realise the times when I had my best conversations with my mother were whenever she was making stuff, all sorts of stuff. So she might be cooking or she might be sewing. Oh yes, she had all those skills. She had a very good vicarage upbringing and training in those areas.”
Her mother’s father was an archdeacon and, says Carr, she is almost certain that her mother remained a devout Anglican her entire life. The archdeacon was against the marriage. “Her father tried to stop her from marrying my father, so there you go. I think he had a pretty good idea that she was going to find herself working extremely hard and that her gift might be wasted.”
The children went to Sunday school. This seems strange. I thought they were bohemians. “We weren’t bohemian! No! That’s one of the funny things. People in the neighbourhood may have thought that things happened, and certainly we did have noisy parties sometimes, but there weren’t any orgies or any of that sort of thing going on. Ha, ha. And Colin didn’t have a bevy of naked ladies there! No, we were just perfectly ordinary people.”
In many ways they were a perfectly ordinary, traditional family. Her parents had a traditional marriage in many respects. They lived for a time in Titirangi in what is now McCahon House, in considerable poverty. Carr thinks her mother was happy there. She worked on her illustrations for the School Journal (this was allowed; it brought in some muchneeded money, for one thing) and from her kitchen window she could see and draw nikau, tui and kereru. She made those bits of pottery.
She did her journal drawing on the kitchen table, hence the name of the exhibition, which is both celebratory and quite sad. She had a table of her own, but no room and certainly not a studio. The table had to be cleared for meals, to make room for her real work, which was feeding and looking after the family.
Carr remembers the Sisyphean nature of her mother’s domestic life: the piles of washing and ironing, the meals to be made, the “primitive conditions”. Looking back, does she feel resentful on her mother’s behalf that her gift was being wasted? “Yes. All of us used to go: ‘Why on earth doesn’t she do it?’ But look at all the things that were impediments to her painting.”
She once asked her mother why she didn’t let the girls help with those neverending chores. Her mother replied: “‘No. I made up my mind that you will have enough of that to do in your life later. Enjoy your childhood.’ So there you
“She’s married Colin. She’s promised to obey and all those other things you promised in those days.”
are. That’s what she wanted.”
And what she accepted. Also, she chose to marry Colin, Carr says. And they loved each other and wanted to be with each other, which is not quite the same thing as being happy. “To a certain extent they were as happy as people could be in those difficult circumstances.”
The well-documented drinking in earnest came later, after the family moved from Titirangi to the city, where alcohol was easier to come by.
There would be a family outing to “Winey Winnies”, a wine shop presided over by said Winnie, “an ample woman, and she was all done up in velvet – deep blue or claret or burgundy”.
Carr often acted as chaperone for her father, to ensure propriety. “One of the things that was very disturbing was all the women who wanted Colin to be with them, and my mother would say: ‘Ha. If they think they can look after him better than I can – ho, ho.’”
On one occasion, when he was three sheets to the wind, he and Carr hopped into the car and she knew they were going to hit something when he said: “The lights are going the wrong way.”
“He was drunk and he drove into someone’s fence.” Goodness. Did the police come? “No, because he charmed the lady absolutely. He pulled his cheque book out … and while he was doing that, I’ll tell you the thing that was really amazing was this hysterical transvestite in hair rollers and pink fluffy dressing gown and pink fluffy slippers. It was her boarder. Hilarious.”
So, worth risking being killed by her drunk father? “Yes. And later on, poor Mum decided she was going to learn to drive, and she did get her licence, but Dad was so abominable. He was really bad, because he didn’t think she should be driving. She was a woman. Driving seems to bring out the worst in men as far as their misogyny goes.”
They were, as she says, very different times, so there is little point in being resentful. I say: “Well, I can’t help sitting here, listening to all of this, feeling pissed off with your father.”
She says: “I know. Well, this is the thing. I loved my father, no doubt about it, and I got on well with him.” He was, she says, charismatic and charming, except when he got on the drink, and then he could be a bit nasty, but usually he just went to sleep. He was, like her mother, “multi-faceted”. And families, yes, they are complicated and possibly even more complicated when one of them was a legendary painter about whom there are many legends.
There is little point resenting the fact McCahon’s work now sells for screeds when, during his lifetime, the family lived in poverty and his works, if they sold at all, went for thrupence ha’penny.
She thinks about people who have made money selling his work: “Well, lucky them.” She has never sold any of his work and never will. They will go to her children. “They’ll never be able to buy one.”
Carr has three sons; her husband,
Ken, was a builder who died of a heart condition 20 years ago. She was pleased to get rid of the McCahon name when she married. “Because of getting self-respect for anything I did myself. And because everyone would say, ‘So, are you going to be an artist like your father?’ No. Hello, there’s a whole other side to my family there, with lots of brains, too, you know.”
Yes, quite. And now, at long last, Anne McCahon, who had brains and talent, has an exhibition of her own.