Different strokes
A new edition of a landmark book on NZ art offers a fresh take on the classics, old and new, writes Grant Smithies
IT FELT like being reunited with a long lost friend. I was leafing through a handsome new art book and there, on page 204, was the first painting I ever fell in love with: Abandoned Settlement by Brent Wong.
Painted in 1969, it shows a stretch of hilly coastline near Wellington. A jumble of stone columns, chimneys and plinths poke up from the bony landscape, like some sort of ancient architectural graveyard. If that wasn’t surreal enough, a gigantic carved cornice-piece hovers in the sky; a stone-age Starship Enterprise, defying both logic and gravity.
I had a postcard of this painting pinned to my bedroom wall in Whanganui as a teenager, and it then followed me through several scruffy flats in Wellington, Dublin and Edinburgh. A couple of decades later, travelling in a cab past Western Park in Ponsonby, I saw John Radford’s famous sunken buildings sculpture; it felt like a detail from Wong’s painting, rendered in 3D.
These days Abandoned Settlement hangs in the refurbished Auckland Art Gallery but you’ll also find it – as I did – in 240: Two Hundred and Forty Years of New Zealand Painting, the most recent edition of a landmark art history book first published in 1971.
What a book this is. Every couple of pages, there’s a real heart-stopper of an image. Frances Hodgkins’ 1935 Self Portrait: Still Life is here, a tentatively cubist pile-up of shoes, scarves and flowers; cherished objects the artist felt expressed who she was. Familiarity has never diminished the power of Petrus Van der Velden’s brooding, storm-lashed Otira Gorge (1912), which still leaves me cowering for shelter. Jude Rae’s 2003 Still Life of gas bottles and fire extinguishers reclaims photorealism from dullard technicians, presenting a knowing soft-focus update of Morandi and Vermeer.
And Toss Woollaston’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1939) strikes me as a local expressionist masterpiece, a rough and ready tin-can Cezanne, blasted out in quick brushstrokes just up the road from where I now sit, in Mapua.
Entirely redesigned and beautifully presented, the book has three authors who, between them, elegantly contextualise more than 170 significant New Zealand paintings. The biggest chunk was written by Australian art historian Gil Docking, who covered the 200-year period from European settlement until 1969. A subsequent edition was extended to 1990 by Michael Dunn, and the latest version has been updated by art historian Edward Hanfling, who adds 23 new essays on painters he feels best represent the period between 1990 and 2010.
Alongside such heavy hitters as Bill Hammond, Shane Cotton, Seraphine Pick, Peter Robinson and Julian Dashper, Hanfling offers up a pleasingly eccentric selection of artists, spanning the range from faux-amateurish auteurs (Saskia Leek, Saffronn Te Ratana) to underrated traditionalists (Joanna Margaret Paul, Douglas Badcock) and bold adventurers who push the boundaries of the painting medium itself (Lorraine Webb, Patrick Lundberg, Raewyn Martyn).