Name: WORD Christchurch Festival: Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land?
Location: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

WORD Christchurch Festival: Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land?

Talk

Past event

Philip Carter Family Auditorium

Free

Peter Simpson, in conversation with Grant Banbury, will speak about the second part of his two-volume McCahon work, written to mark the centenary of this extraordinary artist’s birth and chronicling the evolution of his practice.

Published by Auckland University Press, Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land? Vol.2, 1960–1987 was released in June 2020 and includes many never before published illustrations. A WORD Christchurch Festival event.

Related reading: Colin McCahon, WORD Festival

Exhibition

Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania

30 May 2020 – 3 July 2022

Experience the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean.

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

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