Name: Curnow on McCahon
Location: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

Curnow on McCahon

Talk

Past event

Philip Carter Family Auditorium

Free

Wystan Curnow is writing a book about Colin McCahon and will share his reasons for writing and some of the discoveries he has made so far, as well as exploring what McCahon’s work means to him and to contemporary audiences.

Curnow first knew McCahon as a family friend, and later as a mentor when he started out as an art critic. He has curated, or helped curate four exhibitions of his work between 1984 and 2017 and has written numerous essays and reviews.

Related reading: Colin McCahon, landscapes (representations)

Collection

Henry Davy S. Porch, Eye Church, Suffolk

Commentary

Colin McCahon: Five Years in Christchurch, 1948–53

Prior to moving to Christchurch in March 1948, Colin McCahon and his family spent a little over a year living in Muritai Street, Tahunanui, on the outskirts of Nelson city. It was his most productive period as a painter to date – a phase dominated by figurative paintings with some landscapes. The products of this prolific period were brought together in his first major one-person show, at Wellington Public Library in February 1948, organised by his Dunedin friend, Ron O’Reilly. An exhibition of forty-two works made between 1939 to 1948, more than half produced in 1947, it consisted of roughly equal numbers of landscapes (including Otago Peninsula and Maitai Valley), biblical paintings (King of the Jews, Crucifixion according to St Mark ), and non-biblical figurative works (A candle in a dark room, The Family). Although it was reviewed favourably in The Listener by J.C. Beaglehole, the subsequent letters column ran hot with controversy, and it brought McCahon to national attention.

Continued

Commentary

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.

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Article

Tomorrow, Book, Caxton Press, Landfall

In the decades before and after the Second World War, Christchurch experienced a remarkable artistic efflorescence that encompassed the visual arts, literature, music, theatre and the publishing of books and journals. And the phenomenon was noticed beyond these islands. For instance, in his 1955 autobiography, English publisher and editor of Penguin New Writing and London Magazine, John Lehmann, wrote (with a measure of exaggeration, perhaps) that of all the world’s cities only Christchurch at that time acted ‘as a focus of creative literature of more than local significance’.

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