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Harry Vye Miller Theatre Beautiful 1931. Linocut. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2019
Theatre Beautiful
Collection
One thing I’m really looking forward to when life returns to a new sense of normality in a post-Covid19 world is visiting a movie theatre – a treat I’ve taken for granted until a couple of weeks ago. In Theatre Beautiful, Dunedin artist Harry Vye Miller captures the bustling busy interior of Dunedin’s Regent Theatre which opened in the city’s Octagon in 1928. Miller enjoyed this theatre and is known to have attended the opening night. The building thankfully remains fully intact and is one of the gems of Dunedin’s architectural heritage.
Miller was an art student at Dunedin’s King Edward Technical School during the mid to late 1920s, and it was here that he was taught printmaking by his two English art teachers, William Allen and Robert Field. Field and Allen were popular with their young students due to their modern outlook on art. The linocut was still a relatively new medium in 1931 when Miller completed Theatre Beautiful and was gaining in popularity in England at the time thanks to the efforts of the medium’s champion, Claude Flight. Broad, bold lines suggest the arch of the theatre’s ceiling, while figures seated in the foreground and silhouetted beyond are simplified shapes giving the work a very refreshing modernist mood for this period in New Zealand art.
Related
Collection
![Theatre Beautiful [Regent Theatre]](/media/cache/88/ee/88ee3b1abe7a9b8a42c6c138992dfe1f.jpg)
Harry Vye Miller Theatre Beautiful [Regent Theatre]
While attending the Dunedin School of Art in the 1920s, Harry Vye Miller fell under the spell of his teachers William Allen and Robert Field. He thrived under their progressive attitudes to art, and William in particular encouraged his work as a printmaker. Based in Ōtepoti Dunedin throughout his career, Harry became an artist-educator himself and advocated for the linocut medium throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1942 he wrote an article for Art in New Zealand titled ‘Teaching Lino-cutting’, in which he championed the democratic nature of the medium and its suitability for use by artists and art students alike, as the materials were all within anyone’s reach.
Ink on Paper: Aotearoa New Zealand Printmakers of the Modern Era, 11 February – 28 May 2023