The original Canterbury Society of Arts building on the corner of Durham and Armagh streets, a building that I had picked in a previous blog as a winner amongst the destruction, has been demolished this afternoon. I never got the chance to enter the building but if walls could talk they would talk of annual CSA exhibitions where many works in the Christchurch Art Gallery's collection were first exhibited. Then there were all the annual Group shows throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s where some of New Zealand's most significant artists exhibited, think McCahon, Angus, Sutton, Woollaston, Henderson, Mrkusich, Castle, Lusk, et al. But the one show for me that I think would have been a stunner would have been Petrus van der Velden's exhibition of over 70 works, including a handful of his recent Otira paintings, in late 1891. A show not to be missed and indeed many of the newspaper reviews at the time stated the same.