NUDE MAORI STATUETTES

Taranaki Daily News, 8 August 1930, Page 3

NUDE MAORI STATUETTES

“NOT SYMBOLIC OF RACE.” NATIVE WOMEN PROTEST. Vexation has been' expressed by a number of prominent Maori women that an Aucklander should plan to sell ■to tourists small figures of a nude female that have been claimed to-“symbolise Maori womanhood.” Native women, says the Sun, are not prone to pose in the nude and artists have rarely secured Maori models for this class'of work. “ ‘Art for art’s sake’ may have some justification among the Europeans, but art for Thbney’s sake, when it comes to lowering the esteem of Maori womanhood, is a. totally different thing,” indignantly asserted one Maori. “The statuary in oiir museums, portraying nude Grecian women, does not convey to us the finest characteiistics of Grecian women, as niotheis of the Grecian race, and it. is hardly to be expected that statuettes of a nude Maori girl can do other, than convey to the world.at large an impression that the native women of New Zealand sit about ‘in the altogether.’ It is wholly wrong. If it is necessary to supply figurettes for tourists, some effort should be made to reproduce Maori ideas of prettiness, with figures arrayed in traditional Maori garments—something that will reflect Maori life.” Another Maori woman argued: “How would the pakeha woman of New Zealand like a Maori woman to sell figurettes of a nude white girl to tourists, as being a symbol of European womanhood? We might be able to model such a figure and send to Germany to get the requisite rose and milk complexion, and persuade the Italian plaster works in Christchurch to turn us out imitations of the original at a reasonable price! ” SCHOOL GR FACTORY?' Many of the natives, who supplement their incomes by practising home handicrafts, such as carving pipes and walking-sticks, and plaiting and weaving, complain of the operations of the Maori Art School at Rotorua, which they assert is a factory for turning out Maori curios rather than a school. The men at the school are paid wages foi a sort of mass production of often crude imitations of Maori caiviiigs, figures with protruding tongues, painted red, and merely grotesques. Handicrafts among the Maoris ai e purely family industries, each family jealous of its skill, and guarding its own methods of dyeing • materials _ and kindred operations. “The competition of the mass production of curios by the school at Rotorua has taken the market from the private families," a prominent Maori complains, and adds that this was not the aim and object of the school.