WARS IN N.Z.

Press, Volume C, Issue 29687, 4 December 1961, Page 2

WARS IN N.Z.

Paintings On Show The Auckland Art Gallery has arranged its exhibition. "The Wars in New Zealand*' —which is now on show at the McDougall Art Gallery —primarily to illustrate a period in New Zealand's history which is better known through literary accounts. •Hie pictures have not necessarily been selected for their artistic merit, says the Auckland Gallery’s director <Mr P. A. Tomory) in his foreword to the catalogue. The catalogue also contains a most useful. introduction by the Auckland poet and historian, Keith Sinclair. His summary of the causes, events and effects of the Maori Wars combines with the pictures to bring into closer focus events which are as remote to most South Islanders as the Boxer rebellion or the Indian wars in the United States. Very few of the pictures in the present exhibition will be familiar as nearly all have been lent by libraries or museums. (Most of the best early New Zealand painting is hidden away in libraries and museums. The Early Settlers' Museum in Dunedin, for instance, has some superb paintings decaying among its cable cars and memorabilia of Robert Burns.) Major Charles Heaphy. who won the Victoria Cross in the Waikato, is the bestknown artist of the Maori Wars, but he is generally much overrated. His fame, one suspects, owes as much to the V.C. and his training at the Royal Academy School as to his artistic achievement. Nevertheless. his drawing of the ‘ Naval Attack at Rangiriri” is an interesting piece. The discovery of the exhibition is Major Gustavus Ferdinand von Tempsky (1828-1868), the famous leader of the Forest Rangers, whose paintings have a strange, romantic charm These water colours combine a rich formalisation of detail with an unsophisticated strength of design and brightly-glowing colour, in a way that reflects wideeyed wonder and delight at the luxuriance f the bush. Many of the other works are only of documentary interest, but Colonel Cyprian Bridge's “H.M.S. North Star Destroying Pomare’s Pa." and some of the works of Lance-Sergeant J. Williams have distinct artistic merits. Altogether it is a quite fascinating exhibition which is well worth visiting. The same unfortunately cannot be said for the exhibition of paintings by the late Colin Lovell-Smith at the Durham street art gallery. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this show is the absence of stylistic change over some 30 to 40 years The only thing that changed in Mr LoveU-Smith’s painting in that time was the way he signed his name. His approach to painting was a simple one: he sought only to make an objective record in an academic English impressionist style of what he saw. This he did without pretence or affectation—although the show contains a few embarrassingly trite interpretations of legend —but he seems to have been completely unaware of anything except the subject and the process of recording it. The paint is smoothed into the canvas so that it is inert and lifeless, and problems of colour and composition do not seem to have troubled him. Mr Lovell-Smith was, with others of his generation, one of the first painters to look honestly at the New Zealand landscape, seeing it as it was, instead of looking for echoes of Europe. They painted what they saw, but it has been left to later generations to paint what they felt about the country. -J.N.K.