Maori painter and German adventurer make interesting gallery-mates

Press, 10 July 1979, Page 13

Maori painter and German adventurer make interesting gallery-mates

Two exhibitions that will be on display simultaneously in the Robert McDougall Art Gallery next week make an interesting juxtaposition from both artistic and historic viewpoints.

One is by Ralph Hotere, a Maori and one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary painters; it features work done during his visit to Europe last year, and includes some anti-war paintings made after he visited the Sangro River War Cemetery, on Italy’s Adriatic Coast, where his brother is buried. The other exhibition features the paintings and personal artefacts of a German adventurer who came to New Zealand in the 1860 s to fight — and die — in the Maori Wars.

Ralph Hotere’s exhibition has already opened, and will continue until July 29. Apart from the Sangro paintings — an extension of a series of nine powerful works painted after his first visit there 16 years earlier — it comprises works on paper and paintings, in three series. One series, “The Pope is Dead,” was painted in reaction to the death of Pope John Paul I in 1978. The seductively severe stencilled lettering familiar in his earlier work takes on a new raucous, almost pained, feeling derived from huge newspaper headlines.

The other series. “Windows in Spain” and “Avignon,” allude to architecture, the play of light and the muted colours of cool narrow streets or glaring, white - washed walls. The gallery says these paintings represent a major advance in Ralph Hotere’s work, and put a definite emphasis on the “paintingness,” the mottled surfaces being beautiful. While the exhibition continues, two films showing Ralph Hotere working, will be screened at regular intervals. Ralph Hotere lives in Dunedin, and has exhibited widely in New Zealand ■and overseas. In 1978 he took the prize at the Christchurch Arts Festival International of Drawings with his drawing, “Ko Wai Koe (Who are you?).” Speaking of his paintings, he says: “I have provided for the spectator a starting point, which, upon contemplation, may become a nucleus revealing scores of new possibilities.”

The other exhibition features Gustavus Ferdinand von Tempsky, and will run from next Monday until August 7. “With his flashing eyes and flowing black curls, brandishing his guitar, paint-brush, and sword, he was a welcome visitor anywhere — a scholar and a fighting man. But through it all, artistic gentleman or ruthless warrior, he was a vagabond.” This was a

description of von Tempsky. Born in 1828 in East Prussia, and educated in a Prussian military academy, von Tempsky found his way to New Zealand in 1862, after trying his hand at establishing a Prussian colony on the Mosquito Coast of Central America, unsuccessfully prospecting in the Californian goldfields, milling timber and engaging in diverse activities in Australia. His arrival in New Zea-

1 land coincided with the conflict between the Maoris t and European settlers, and 1 he was quickly offered a / position in the forest / rangers company, with which he achieved distinc- » tion for his reconnaissance 1 with Thomas McDonnell 5 of a Maori position at 1 Paparata. f He rose quickly to the rank of major, transferred z to service in the Wanganui--1 Taranaki district, and took part in attacks in Kakararnea, Opotiki, and Weraroa. But jealousy

over promotion and conflict between the colonial and imperial troops resulted in his being struck off pay in 1866. He returned to Auckland to paint and write of his experiences. When he- returned to the military in 1868 von Tempsky’s fortune turned, and after disastrous campaigns against Turutura and his Hauhau warriors he died in retreat at Te Ngata o te Manu. The paintings of von Tempsky are those of a sophisticated primitive. His

genre was the Maori wars, and although he did tend to reconstruct the events and interpret them according to itis own lights, the paintings remain as a splendid graphic record of the difficult campaign of Waikato and Taranaki. The exhibition includes paintings done on the Mosquito Coast, in California, Mitla, and during the Coromandel-Waikato. Taranaki, and Wanganui campaigns. It will be on display from July 15 to August 7.