Cut it out

Passionate about printmaking since the acquisition of his first (Ralph Hotere) print as an art history student “many years ago”, Christchurch Art Gallery curator Peter Vangioni talks about new exhibition Ink on Paper, a selection of print works made during one of the most dynamic periods in Aotearoa’s art history.

Make no bones about it, Ink on Paper: Aotearoa New Zealand Printmakers of the Modern Era is an exhibition I have long wanted to curate. I acquired my first print direct from Ralph Hotere when I was an art history student here in Christchurch many years ago. Hotere was the artist that piqued my interest in printmaking, but it is the Aotearoa New Zealand printmakers of the 1910s through to the 1950s that I love the most.

Ink on Paper focuses on a generation of artists that were at the forefront of the medium when, following the printmaking revival in Britain, printmaking in Aotearoa was increasingly becoming accepted as an art form rather than simply a method of reproduction.

Ink on Paper includes examples of linocut, woodcut, wood‑engraving, lithography, etching (and even a humble potato print) by well‑known artists such as Adele Younghusband, Rita Angus, Rhona Haszard, Doris Lusk and Colin McCahon alongside others that have fallen into obscurity like Marion Tylee, Harry Vye Miller, Gertrude Ball, Nancy Bolton and Frank Weitzel.

Collectively however, as Marion Maguire says, “their artistic impulse shines through” and they laid the groundwork that subsequent generations of printmakers built upon.

I love the roughness of many of the works in this exhibition and the linocuts in particular – a new medium for the new modern era of the 1920s and 1930s. The linocut encouraged simplification of form, and detail and imagery are often reduced to basic elements – solid masses of black and white rather than tonal gradations.

The prints in Ink on Paper are, on the whole, small in size, subtle and intimate but ambitious. It is this that appeals so greatly to me – you have to get up close to experience the art.

I found the development of this exhibition highly rewarding, from taking stock of the Gallery’s collection of prints from this era, to ascertaining where the gaps were and figuring out how to fill them.

Through purchase and gift we have added some stunning, and often rare, examples of printmaking by Rhona Haszard, Harry Vye Miller, Adele Younghusband, Gertrude Ball, Mabel Annesley, Leo Bensemann, Ivy Fife and Chrystabel Aitken to name a few.

Some prints, such as Haszard’s ‘Sidi Bishr, Egypt’ and Francis Shurrock’s ‘Poppies’, both coincidently linocuts made around 1929, were in a sorry state and required extensive conservation treatment by the Gallery’s works on paper conservator Eliza Penrose.

I’d describe ‘Sidi Bishr’ as being on life support when it first came into the Gallery but Eliza was up to the challenge and has done a remarkable job in saving this print. It is the only copy of this stunning work known to exist and was originally in the collection of Harry Vye Miller.

Haszard studied in Christchurch at the Canterbury College School of Art and, after leaving for Europe in 1926 with her husband and fellow artist Leslie Greener, eventually settled in Alexandria, Egypt.

While in London in 1929 the pair visited the First Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts organised by Claude Flight at the Redfern Gallery and were inspired to begin making linocuts.

Back in Alexandria, they worked with the medium in earnest from October 1929 to March 1930, when the results were included in the exhibition Modern Woodcuts. It is a confusing title but the prints exhibited were all linocuts – the artists saw little distinction between these two similar types of relief prints.

A short while later the pair contributed prints to the Second Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts at the Redfern Gallery alongside some of Britain’s most highly regarded printmakers, Claude Flight, Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power.

Francis Shurrock’s ‘Poppies’ was also not in good shape when it was acquired as part of a larger grouping of the artist’s prints, photographs, sketchbooks, designs and sculptures.