Name: There is Only One Direction: James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon
Location: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

There is Only One Direction: James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon

Colin McCahon There is only one direction 1952 Oil on hardboard. N. Barrett Bequest Collection, purchased with the support of Christchurch City Council's Challenge Grant to the Christchurch Art Gallery Trust 2011

Panel Discussion

Past event

Philip Carter Family Auditorium

Learn how the friendship between two of New Zealand’s cultural titans, James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon, influenced their work.

Speakers include poet, author and painter Gregory O’Brien, Professor Paul Millar of the University of Canterbury and 2012 Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship awardee Peter Simpson, who curated the 1996 exhibition Candles in a Dark Room: James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon for Auckland Art Gallery.

Related reading: Colin McCahon, License to Chill, James K. Baxter, Poetry, Free event

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)

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

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.

Continued