Arcadian art surveyed

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33447, 31 January 1974, Page 12

Arcadian art surveyed

"The Quest for Arcadia” is the name given to a Robert McDougall Art Gallery exhibition containing 179 paintings from the age of European discovery of New Zealand to the present. The exhibition was planned to coincide with the Commonwealth Games, and the catalogue note says it is not intended to be a “survey in depth.” The work has been drawn from public collections throughout New Zealand and includes paintings that have been reproduced in a variety of publications on New Zealand painting. This gives much of the exhibition a familiarity and an inevitability that make for few surprises. The work selected makes it possible to look back to William Hodges and his first romantic impressions of a new land, and to observe the intimidating effect that land has had on artists for 200

years. The need to describe New Zealand became the first and most urgent impulse, and whether the painters were visitors in search of exotic subjects—such as were John Webber, Louis Le Breton and Augustus Earle—or whether they were those of largely amateur skills — Charles Heaphy, William Fox, John Buchanan, John Kinder, Gustavus Ferdinand Von Tempsky and Gordon Robley—the motive was largely one of recording places and events. This was done with often effective simplicity. By the 1880 s the prospect of selling paintings to a reasonably affluent colonial society had given rise to a new, painterly approach, still essentially topographical but technically more proficient, exemplified in the works of John Gully and J. C. Hoyte, whose softly sentimental treatment of picturesque subjects seems almost an attempt to create in paint that dream of Arcadia, a southern paradise of untouched nature.

The arrival of James Naim, Claude Edward Fristrom, Girolamo Nerli, and Petrus Van der Velden in the 1890 s

is credited with raising the level of painting beyond imitative picturemaking. Certainly Van der Velden’s dramatic and powerful composition, “The Otira River,” is one of the few paintings in the exhibition that transcends its place in time. Naim, Fristrom, and Nerli brought with them to New Zealand elements of impressionism, a movement that had already effectively run its course in Europe. While their own work was marked by a vitality that might have been a response to a new situation, impressionism itself was to linger on as a largely insignificant influence in the art societies of New Zealand for the first half of this century.

This desire to be associated with the important events occurring in the art centres of Europe is really the dominant force guiding the development of painting in New Zealand this century. Whether artists went to Europe themselves, as did Grace Joel, Raymond Mclntyre, Frances Hodgson, John Weeks, Sydney Thompson, and a host of others, or whether they stayed here, to be influenced by reproductions, teachers imported from overseas, and occasional travelling exhibitions, the result is essentially the same, and the influence of developments elsewhere remains strong. The horrors of two world wars and an economic depression have left little appreciable mark on New Zealand painting. Landscape remained the most common theme, at least until the 19605, and nostalgia in the form of portraits of Maori chiefs showed no consideration for many of the staggering social changes that occurred in New Zealand society. If the contemporary section of the exhibition still con-

tains some work of a highly eclectic nature, it at least offers variety, and one senses a confidence that can probably be attributed to greater community support for the arts in recent years. People are being portrayed as people, and not in some thoroughly romantic context; artists seem prepared to reveal more of themselves and their feelings, while others pursue a more pure aesthetic approach. On looking back it is hard to understand why Russell Clark, E. Mervyn Taylor, and many of their contemporaries became absorbed with the British artists, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, in the 19505; and in the 1930 s why Christopher Perkins had the influence he is said to have had on Rita Angus and W. A. Sutton, for far from being a sharp vision his large painting, “Maori Meeting,” appears almost as a cartoon. By the same token it is clear that Rudolf Gopas has had a profound effect on the present generation of younger Canterbury painters, whose work is included in the exhibition. If art exists in time and its form reflects the forces of that time—social, economic, political and religious —then it is more pleasing to anticipate the future than dwell too heavily on our artistic past. Colin McCahon, Toss Woolaston, Don Peebles, David Graham, Ralph Hotere, Patrick Hanly, John Coley, Quentin McFarlane, Philip Trusttum, Tony Fomison, and Phillip Clairmont are but a few of those whose work is laying a solid foundation towards producing a diversity in the visual arts that can only enrich our lives in years to come. —G.T.M.