Educational painting display

Press, 18 April 1986, Page 26

Educational painting display

What goes into a painting? An educational installation at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, until April 27. Reviewed by Julie King. It was an artist, Picasso, who remarked that “everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand the singing of birds? People love the night, a flower, everything that surrounds them without trying to understand them.” How art is understood and just how to elucidate painting are questions which have annoyed some artists and fed many critics.

Few would disagree, however, that regional and national galleries do have an educative role; at the

McDougall gallery is an educational installation, “What goes into a Painting?” which answers its own question in accessible, enjoyable, and provocative terms.

Thirteen works show a range of media used by painters to make painting: oil, acrylic, water-colour, gouache, and tempera. How each painter has used a medium is clearly explained in notes accompanying each work and in this way attention is focused on each painting in the specific sense of examining medium and technique.

The value of such a show is that the viewer is directed to look closely at only a few works from this one aspect. For anyone curious about materials and techniques, the great advantage of the installation over that of the numerous publications devoted to the same inquiry is that there are explanations elucidating real works and not photographs of painting. It is good to see the gallery using its permanent collection in an educative way for everyone and publishing a small booklet.

At the same time, the question which the -show provokes is how do we more fully understand paintings once we have recognised the medium and the technique? For the historian, the relation between the subject of a painting and its treatment can be an elucidating one. For example, the show demonstrates in two paintings — Henriette Browne’s “Bible Lesson,” 1857, and Goldie’s “Ena te

Papatahi,” 1912 - how the oil medium can be used in a meticulous, realistic way to perpetrate a particular social viewpoint, far removed from social reality. In mid-nineteenth century France, at a time of substantial social change and of religious questioning, Henriette Browne specialised in religious genre painting in a realistic technique. In the “Bible Lesson,” one girl is reading aloud to another who is sitting withdrawn behind the table on which are placed a few books and withered flowers. The moralising dimension is suggested by the still life of withered flowers with its suggestion of life’s short bloom. The realism of the scene is heightened by the painter’s technique with the use of oil glazes to reproduce textures of the lace headdresses of the girls. The painting with its moralising subject and its realistic technique appealed to the establishment of Second Empire society and was brought by the Empress Eugenie. Here, subject and technique were complementary, conservative and mutually reinforced a social myth.

An interesting comparison can be made between Browne’s painting and Goldie’s of ft Ena te Papatahi” in the way in which a precise, realistic technique is similarly used. Ena te Papatahi had died in 1910, two years before the portrait but a fact of little matter to Goldie since he was still painting

her in 1930. What Goldie excelled in were the wrinkled folds of ageing skin. What Goldie specialied in was the portrayal of a social myth of the old Maori in both nostalgic and picturesque terms.

It was stimulating to move to the next work in the installation by Olivia Spencer-Bower and question what lies within her technique: a vigorous, searching self-portrait. The installation succeeds in setting up an enjoyable educational experience but do be warned about the hazards of getting to know paintings by concentrating on techniques. After looking closely at all 13 works and being seduced into admiration by how the techniques of painters explore each medium, I fell back on guard on another quotation this time by Edward Weston: “The difference between good and bad art lies in the minds that created, rather than in the skill of hands.”