N.Z. REALIST PAINTING

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29390, 17 December 1960, Page 15

N.Z. REALIST PAINTING

Early Painters

In Exhibition

In recent years there have been many exhibitions surveying recent New Zealand painting, but with the exception of two exhibitions devoted to individual painters—Petrus van der Velden and John Kinder—little has been seen of the country’s * early painters. The exhibition of New Zealand realist painting at present on show at the Durham street art gallery serves to fill this gap, for many of the works included are by early painters. On the whole the work of the early painters is considerably more interesting than that of the contemporary realists. When Kinder, Hoyte and van der Velden were working, realism was still a living force in painting and its practice did not mean the exclusion of formal visual values. Alfred Sharpe's “Environs of Auckland,” for instance, combines topographical accuracy with poetic colour which gives it a truly Gothic aspect. Van der Velden’s splendid Otira Gorge oil sketch, Kinder’s and Hoyte’s gently romantic watercolours and an exuberant drawing by Sir Henry Warre are far richer in purely visual values than their modern counterparts by Rita Angus, Leo Bensemann and W. A. Sutton, although the last is represented by works which do not represent his present style. These three all strive to represent an object with the immediacy of a photograph, even to the point of destroying, the paint’s identity until the smooth anonymous surface of a photograph is achieved. The drawback is that the meticulousness of the process invests these paintings with a laboured feeling which is the antithesis of the illustrative conception. One feels that in the case, for instance, of Rita Angus’s tree a good photographer would have done the same job much better.

Mr Sutton’s in the recent Group Show demonstrated how far he has come since 1949 when he painted his “Bruce Creek,” a tour de force of realism. He now takes the visual .essentials of a landscape and recreates them in terms of paint on canvas so that the evocation of nature is accomplished at the level of reality instead of illusion. It is a pity one or two of these recent works could not have been included in the exhibition, for they would have exemplified realism at its most valid and direct, particularly by contrast with Mr Sutton’s earlier works. Another contemporary painter, M. T. Woollaston seems somewhat out of place in this show. There are certainly representational elements in his work, but they have little relevance to the expression, which is much the same whether the subject is a landscape or a person. For Mr Woolla<ton the subject is only a framework on which to build in a symphonic way. There is a landscape quality in his work but it arises from the nature of a lifetime’s experience, as in the case of Colin McCahon, whose work, whatever its subject, is always conditioned by landscape. Indeed, Mr McCahon could have been included more justly in the exhibition, for many of his paintings, although purely rectangular and non-representational in form, are realistic evocations of particular effects of light. The exhibition was arranged by the Auckland City Art Gallery. The fact that most of the early works came from' the gallery’s own collection gives some idea of the extent of itsz unequalled collection of early New Zealand painting. The exhibition is accompanied by a commentary, but it is not possible to fully determine its nature, ds text and paintings have not been hung in the correct order, presumably because many of the frames have lost their numbered stickers earlier in the exhibition’s tour. It is unfortunate, because there is a real need for exhibitions that make explicit the viewpoint from which they have been selected. —J.N.K.

Ran Into Door.—A boy aged 10, was admitted to the Burwood Hospital suffering from arm injuries yesterday after he had run into a glass door about 11 a.m. The boy is Barry Jenkins, of 6 Huia street.