Self-taught artist set out to ‘devourworld’
Astarving artist in a grotty Parisian garret – painter Douglas MacDiarmid couldn’t have scripted his life any better. The artist, who lived most of his life in that city of lights, quit a sleepy postwar 1940s New Zealand for Europe to become a full-time painter, quite prepared for the struggle thatwould entail.
He lived the life of a poor painterwho often had to choose between eating and painting, only becoming comfortably well off in his middle age with an international reputation and a prolific output.
Those early days as an expatriate Kiwi artist in Paris were a lesson in endurance and perseverance.
Being aNew Zealander in Paris was a bit like ‘‘being an innocent tossed somewhere between heaven and hell’’, he said in one interview.
It was ‘‘intoxicating’’ nevertheless. ‘‘I had many difficult times there, but Iwas buoyed up by a sense of excitement, just doing what Iwanted to do . . .’’
In New Zealand, everyone knows everyone whereas in Paris you’re lost in an enormous anonymity, he once remarked.
‘‘This has two advantages. You can get on without interruption. But always you’re up against a far greater degree of indifference than in New Zealand.
‘‘. . . If things aren’t going well the weight of indifference is quite inhuman.’’
It was certainly toughmaking a living as an artist in 1950s Paris. MacDiarmid went as far as to say itwas all but hopeless.
‘‘Starving in a garret isn’t a myth, as far as I’m concerned. It’s extremely uncomfortable, and a bore to impair your health . . . but at least it makes you even surer of why you’re doing [this],’’ he recalled years later.
That was putting it lightly. In fact, he lived in an atticwith no power, no running water and no toilet.
He was lucky if hewas able towash once a week. There were times he had to decide whether to spend his last centimes on food or more paint in the hope of selling a painting.
In 1953 his fortunes changed. Hemet a woman, only known as Jacqueline, who became his patron. She set him up in a studio and introduced him to prospective buyers.
The pair became lovers and loved one another deeply but it was a tempestuous relationship. They spent almost a decade together before Jacqueline died of a brain haemorrhage. MacDiarmid had been in New Zealand and only found out about her death after six weeks travelling around the country with his family.
He returned to Paris to discover her family had tossed all his paintings and materials out on the street, leaving him with nothing.
The following decade he described as the grieving years. He was unable to bring himself to paint and insteadwrote poetry and a novel about their time together, earning a crustwriting art reviews.
Bpainter b November 14, 1922 d August 26, 2020
y the 1960s he had picked up his paint brushes again. He had a circle of fringe aristocratic friends who couldn’t afford to buy art but could afford to buy him dinner and as an expat Kiwi short on money but with no shortage of charisma, he was often their guest.
Still extremely poor at the time, he recalled being at one dinner and finding his neck was covered in lice. Not wanting to reveal the squalor he had been living in, he squeezed the lice in his fists and scattered them under the table, hoping no-one would notice.
But this impoverished periodwas coming to an end. By the late 1960s his paintings had begun to sell.
He garnered several patrons who would often buy 10 paintings at a time.
MacDiarmid was painting in watercolours, pastels, oils, acrylics. He painted prolifically and exhibited constantly, almost always selling out his shows.
It helped that hemade his art affordable. He believed everyone should be able to buy art.
He never logged the number of paintings he sold – well into the thousands – nor the titles. Numbers meant nothing to him. ‘‘Trying to count our creative lives in figures is funny enough tomake God giggle, if he’s still there,’’ he once said.
In his mid-40s, MacDiarmid fell in love. One day, in the autumn of 1968, he was walking along the Seinewhen he passed a man who caught his eye. His namewas Patrick – hewent only by his first name. They sat down by the river together and talked.
The spark between the pair lasted more than half a century, though itwas 25 years before they lived together – MacDiarmid never came out to his parents.
They eventually bought an apartment in Montmartre, passing the winters on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, where Patrick was born and where the couple built a holiday house.
They had a civil union ceremony in 1999 when civil partnershipswere legalised in France.
Born in Taihape, MacDiarmid was the unruly younger son of Dr Gordon MacDiarmid and his wife, Mary. At the heart of his ‘‘naughtiness’’, writes Anna Cahill, his niece and author of his 2018 biography, he was a confused child, struggling with an overwhelming feeling of being irresistibly drawn to sexuality and sensuality – of being attracted to bothmen andwomen.
He and his brother Ronald grew up in a household full of books, poetry and music. MacDiarmidwanted to be an artist, a writer and a concert pianist. But in the end his artistic ambitions leaned towards paint.
He was self-taught. ‘‘I’ve never been an art student. I’ve been a student with no time limit,’’ he once proclaimed.
Educated at Timaru Boys’High School, hewent on to Canterbury University where he graduatedwith an arts degree inmusic, English literature, languages and philosophy.
While at university he fell in with a dynamic collection of writers, artists and musicians, including Rita Angus, Evelyn Page and Douglas Lilburn.
They became known as The Group, an informal collective of avant-garde musicians and artists in Christchurch during the late 1940s.
MacDiarmid formed an intense relationshipwith them all but with Lilburn in particular.
By 1944, the pair were in a passionate but anguished relationship – Lilburn became the first great love of MacDiarmid’s life.
He remembered: ‘‘In the course of time, Lilburn must have produced in me every known emotion.’’
The pair corresponded until the composer’s death in 2001.
After doing his home force military service, MacDiarmid moved overseas to ‘‘devour the world’’, living first in London in 1946 where he painted and taught English to foreign students.
After a short-lived return to New Zealand, he settled in Paris where he lived for the remainder of his life.
Landscapes dominated his firstworks, but they gaveway in the 1960s to humans. Portraits figured large.
His portrait subjects included Rita Angus. (He contributed a number of paintings to help fund the restoration of the cottage in Thorndon, Wellington, in which she lived and worked towards the end of her life.)
MacDiarmid refused to be labelled or classified, except to admit he was an ‘‘expressionist’’ painter – ‘‘one who expresses the visual rhythm of things’’.
His interest in literature, ancient history, classical music and the human condition, as well as the beauty and sensuality of the body, all imbued his work.
He exhibited in London, Athens, Casablanca and New York. He also held many shows in New Zealand over the past half century, the first in 1945. He held frequent shows in France from 1953 to 2014, by which time he was well into his 90s.
His works are held in collections all over the world. The largest public collection is in the University of Otago’s Hocken Library Collections in Dunedin.
His work has been preserved and dissected in various publications, including Cahill’s 2018 biography Colours of a Life – the Life and Times of Douglas MacDiarmid; the illustrated art book MacDiarmid, by French art historian Dr Nelly Finet; and a documentary film, A Stranger Everywhere, about his art and life views, which premiered at the annual Australia New Zealand Film Festival at St Tropez.
In 2011, he invited fellow expatriate New Zealand sculptor Marian Fountain to join him inmounting an exhibition at the New Zealand embassy in Paris to raise funds for the Christchurch Earthquake Appeal.
Cahill described her uncle as aman of many contradictions, ‘‘as much a chameleon in his life as in hiswork: highly disciplined yet wayward; generous and compassionate but self-centred; articulate, erudite and classically grounded butmischievously, irreverently funny’’.
He is survived by his partner Patrick and three generations of thewider MacDiarmid family. – By BessManson
Sources: Stuff, The Dominion, ArtNew Zealand, Anna Cahill, The Listener
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