Name: Pilgrim's Progress: Colin McCahon's Journey towards the Promised Land
Location: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

Pilgrim's Progress: Colin McCahon's Journey towards the Promised Land

Colin McCahon Canterbury Plains c.1950–52. Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwehtu, gifted by the family of Mary and Arthur Prior, 2017. Courtesy of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust

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Art lover, philosopher, scientist and radical psychotherapist John Woolf looks at the depth of McCahon’s religious convictions and doubts, and finds parallels with John Bunyan’s 1678 classic The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Bunyan’s ‘every-man’ is a vivid illustration of McCahon’s mortal struggle with faith through art.

Related reading: Colin McCahon, landscapes (representations)

Collection

Colin McCahon Canterbury Plains

During his time living in Ōtautahi Christchurch in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Colin McCahon completed several paintings of the hills and plains of the Waitaha Canterbury region. The geometric patterns of the paddocks and shelter belts in this work hint at McCahon’s growing interest in abstraction, which would become a major focus in his work. This painting is thought to have been inspired by Te Whakatakanga-o-te-ngārehu-o-te-ahi-a-Tamatea, the city’s Port Hills, not far from where the McCahon family lived in the suburb of Waltham.

He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)

film

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.

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.

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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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