Colin McCahon - WikiHQ

Colin John McCahon (; 1August 191927May 1987) was a New Zealand artist whose work over 45 years consisted of various styles, including landscape, figuration, abstraction, and the overlay of painted text. Along with Toss Woollaston and Rita Angus, McCahon is credited with introducing modernism to New Zealand in the mid-20th century. He is regarded as New Zealand's most important modern artist, particularly in his landscape work.

Early life and education

McCahon was born in Timaru on 1 August 1919 the second of three children of Ethel Beatrice Ferrier and her husband John Kernohan McCahon. He attended the Maori Hill Primary School and Otago Boys' High School, The society's conventions of good taste were challenged by McCahon's modernist style, which reduced the volcanic cones of the Otago Peninsula to a topographic series of bare, almost monochromatic forms. The protests of other young artists, who withdrew their works in sympathy, forced the society to relent and display the work.

In September 1940 and November 1943, he was guest exhibitor with The Group show in Christchurch. He became a member of The Group in 1947 and contributed work regularly until its demise in 1977. During 1944, McCahon collaborated with his wife producing watercolours collectively called Pictures for Children. In 1940, he had a small exhibit in Wellington and produced his first commissioned work, Otago Peninsula. This illustration is now held at the Archives New Zealand.

Later, leaving his family at home, he travelled around the South Island for seasonal work, which subsequently led to his artwork reflecting the places where he travelled, particularly the Nelson region.

Married life

McCahon married fellow artist Anne Hamblett (1915–1993) in 1942 at St. Matthew's Church, Dunedin.

Career

McCahon began the first of his early religious paintings, I Paul to you at Ngatimoti, in 1946 in Nelson. These works depicted events from Christ's life in a New Zealand setting. McCahon was never a member of a church, but acknowledged that religious questions were central to his work. McCahon collaborated with Caselberg on various works that fused words and images.

The support of the poet and editor, Charles Brasch, enabled McCahon to visit Melbourne from July to August 1951 to study paintings in the National Gallery of Victoria. Paintings such as The Wake and the Northland Panels reflect McCahon's immediate response to this visit, Gate III, which was made for Auckland Art Gallery's Ten Big Paintings exhibition and later sold to Victoria University, and the Necessary Protection series along with numerous landscapes of the Kaipara area.

A second retrospective of his work was presented at Auckland City Art Gallery in 1972, which later toured New Zealand.

In 1984, the exhibition "I Will Need Words" was presented as part of the Biennale of Sydney; McCahon was barely able to appreciate his growing international reputation due to his ill health. He died in Auckland City Hospital on 27 May 1987. Instead of using frames, he worked with unstretched and unframed canvas, and other changes included a considerable increase in scale; the creation of series of works in contrast to individual paintings; and "a new gestural freedom in his brushwork."

Of his painting Jump, McCahon wrote in 1971:<blockquote>I am not painting protest pictures. I am painting about what is still there and what I can see before the sky turns black with soot and the sea becomes a slowly heaving rubbish tip. I am painting what we have got now and will never get again. This is one shape or form, has been the subject of my painting for a very long time.</blockquote>

He felt that:<blockquote> Most of my work has been aimed at relating man to man to this world, to an acceptance of the very beautiful and terrible mysteries that we are part of. I aim at very direct statement and ask for a simple and direct response. Any other way the message gets lost.

He met Mary Cockburn-Mercer in 1953 on a trip to Melbourne; she rekindled his interest in cubism. McCahon had visited the studio of Kaprow and he also saw Kaprow's work exhibited in New York at the Hansa Gallery.

After this trip, McCahon's use of scale and space shifted, most notably in The Northland Panels, his work consisted of eight panels, monocoat on canvas. Another work completed in 1958, after McCahon's return from America, was The Wake, which was exhibited at The Gallery in Symonds Street, Auckland. The Wake consisted of 16 panels and incorporated words from poems by John Caselberg. McCahon used Allan Kaprow's term 'environment' when he described the work in a lecture in 1963 as having been hung to "create a complete environment."

Landscape

A constant theme throughout McCahon's art is his exploration of the religious. His landscapes, in particular, are imbued with a sense of the spiritual. Even more overtly, McCahon often sets Biblical scenes in the contemporary New Zealand landscape. His Otago Peninsula (1949), currently in the collection of the Dunedin Public Library, was the realisation of a schoolboy vision inspired by Otago.

A Te Papa profile of McCahon has described his landscapes as "often stark and empty (rather than picturesque), raising questions about the human histories of these seemingly unpopulated landscapes."

Word paintings

McCahon's large-format "word paintings" combine his religious and abstraction tendencies. His early religious paintings created a very literal connection between the events and locations of the Bible and his native soil. He started incorporating words into his paintings in the 1940s, a move often criticised by the public, but which he felt was necessary to directly communicate with the viewers of his art.

Selected works

Christ Taken from the Cross 1947 view
Six Days in Canterbury and Nelson 1950 view
North Canterbury Landscape 1951 view
Northland Panels 1958 view
Painting 1958 view
Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is 1959 view
Waioneke 1961 view
Visible Mysteries No 1 1968 view
The Lark’s Song 1969 view
Victory Over Death 2 1970 view
The days and nights in the wilderness, showing the constant flow of light passing into a dark landscape 1971 view
Parihaka Triptych 1972 view
Teaching aids 2 (July) 1975 view
Am I Scared 1976 view
A Painting for Uncle Frank 1980 view
I applied my Mind 1982 view

Legacy

Family house museum

The McCahon family house near French Bay, Titirangi, Auckland, now serves as a small museum about Colin McCahon and his family. The house is surrounded by kauri trees.

McCahon House Trust, artists' residency

A more contemporary house and studio on the same section of land serves as the base for the McCahon House artists' residency. The contemporary house has hosted three artists for three months every year since 2006.

Richard Lewer was artist in residence in 2008. In 2021 residencies were awarded to: Emily Karaka, Moniek Schrijer, and Cora-Allan Wickliffe. In 2022 Tanu Gogo was in-residence. Other artists who have completed a residency include Judy Millar, Andrew McLeod, James Robinson, Gavin Hipkins, Rohan Wealleans, Luise Fong, Eve Armstrong, Lisa Reihana, Ava Seymour, Andy Leleisi’uao, Jim Speers, Liyen Chong, Tim Wagg, and Wayne Youle.

Stolen works

thumbnail|Urewera Mural by McCahon, completed May 1976. It was famously stolen in 1997.

In June 1997, the Urewera Mural, a triptych, was stolen from the reception of the Department of Conservation Āniwaniwa Visitor Centre at Lake Waikaremoana. It was eventually determined that the painting had been stolen by Tuhoe activist Te Kaha and an associate Laurie Davis. After missing for 15 months, it was returned in August 1998 after negotiations involving arts patron Jenny Gibbs, Te Kaha, and Tuhoe member Tame Iti. It required more than $5,000 worth of repairs once it had been returned. It was finally returned to the visitors' centre in September 1999. The thieves are believed to have broken into a secure room at the library by prying open a locked window. Art experts and police said at the time that selling the paintings in New Zealand or overseas would be difficult, as anyone who knew about the artists would be very suspicious. By October 2007, all the stolen items, valued at over $200,000, were returned. Negotiations between police and a man who knew the thieves concluded the case. Following this incident, security was increased at the library.

Controversies

From 1998 - 2001 the 'Parade' exhibition at Te Papa Tongarewa, which sought to mix high and more popular culture, courted controversy when it placed McCahon's Northland Panels beside another New Zealand Icon - Fisher and Paykel's Kelvinator fridge. Board members, politicians and academics waged a battle resulting in the eventual scrapping of the Parade as the curatorial proposition behind it (led by Ian Wedde) was seen as curatorial overreach.

In popular culture

Tobias Cummings and The Long Way Home's "Canoe Song" refers to several of McCahon's works on their debut album, Join the Dots.

Two interviews with McCahon recorded by artist Ray Thorburn in 1976 and 1982 are available on YouTube

McCahon was the subject of a 2004 biographical documentary titled Colin McCahon: I Am, produced by Television New Zealand and directed by Paul Swadel.

Memory of the World

Many of Colin and Anne's personal papers were archived by the Hocken Collections. In 2020, these were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao register.

References

External links

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki: Works by Colin McCahon
The Colin McCahon database and Image Library
University of Otago Digital Collections: Works by Colin McCahon
McCahon, Colin John, 1919–1987 McCahon, Anne Eleanor (née Hamblett) 1915–1993 McCahon, Colin and Anne: Papers, 1914–1989, ARC-0772, Hocken Collections, Dunedin, New Zealand
Colin McCahon in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa