James K. Baxter To Colin McCahon 1952. From Book XVI, James Keir Baxter literary papers, MS-0704/016. Image courtesy of Hocken Collections – Uare Taoka o Hākena and reproduced with kind permission of the James K. Baxter Trust.

To Colin McCahon

James K. Baxter’s 1952 poem ‘To Colin McCahon’ is an important marker in the long and sometimes tempestuous artistic relationship the two men shared. On an immediate level, the poem is a response to McCahon’s painting There is only one direction (1952), which he presented to Jim and Jacquie Baxter to mark the birth of their daughter Hilary after they had named McCahon her godfather.

But the painting is also part of a sporadic ‘conversation in art’ between McCahon and Baxter over the next two decades about the importance and purpose of art, and the role of the artist in society. This conversation, which kicked off in various Christchurch pubs when both lived there in 1948, first took to print when Baxter used a column in Canta, the university student magazine, to defend McCahon’s work from criticism by those who didn’t appreciate his cultural influences and, often religious, symbolism.

In many ways There is only one direction is McCahon’s affirmation of Baxter’s reading, as well as the catalyst for the poem ‘To Colin McCahon’. Baxter begins the poem by noting the concern with human suffering that McCahon shared with the French artist Rouault, but recognises the unique translation of that suffering to a New Zealand frame in McCahon’s work, before discovering in the promise symbolised by the Virgin and child the possibility of salvation through ‘the bruised herb’, forgiveness. Baxter and McCahon’s conversation in art stuttered to its nadir just weeks before Baxter died in 1972, when in the poem ‘Ode to Auckland’ he castigated the Auckland Art School for admiring ‘the worst of McCahon’.

Thankfully for New Zealand art, Baxter didn’t have the last word, which went instead to McCahon’s magnificent series of works exploring and trying to understand Baxter’s literal and metaphorical journeys through the sacred spaces and cultural consciousness of Aotearoa.

Related reading: Colin McCahon

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Baxter and McCahon: a conversation

Two of the greats of the New Zealand art world – artist Colin McCahon and poet James K. Baxter – were friends. And fell out. As poet Gregory O’Brien says, 'They were such big spirits, I guess they couldn’t last that long in a room together.' O’Brien, Dr Paul Millar, author, professor of English and head of the School of Humanities at the University of Canterbury, and Dr Peter Simpson, writer, critic, academic and curator, are all experts on the work and personalities of these two men. On 6 March 2016 they got together before an audience at the Gallery for a fascinating discussion about Baxter and McCahon.

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Colin McCahon - There is only one direction

Dr Peter Simpson reads James K. Baxter's poem To Colin McCahon, written in response to this painting.

Exhibition

From the Sun Deck: McCahon's Titirangi

17 September 2016 – 6 February 2017

Colin McCahon’s shift to Titirangi in 1953 was a watershed moment in the artist’s career, providing the inspiration for him to develop his interest in cubism and abstraction.

Collection

Colin McCahon There is only one direction

This pared back, strikingly modern Madonna and child was painted in the Christchurch suburb of Phillipstown where Colin McCahon, perhaps New Zealand’s most acclaimed twentieth-century artist, lived with his family between 1948 and 1953. In contrast to the typically grander, often lavish treatment of this traditional subject within art history, McCahon’s composition is personal and startlingly bare, reduced to two naked figures framed within a rough oval that emphasises their close and enduring connection. Without haloes, thrones or attending angels, their identity is alluded to only through their grave sense of purpose and the work’s uncompromising title.

McCahon gave There is only one direction to the renowned writer James K. Baxter and his wife Jacqueline, marking the friendship between the two families and McCahon’s position as godfather to their young daughter Hilary. The painting sat above Baxter’s writing desk for many years.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)