The Journal of New Zealand Studies

Overturning the Narrative: Steele and Goldie's Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand, 1899

Jane Davidson-Ladd — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

New Zealand’s best-known historical painting, Louis John Steele and Charles Frederick Goldie’s Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand (1899), has influenced the way Māori history has been (mis)understood. Through a detailed examination of the historical, anthropological and artistic sources that informed the painting, a new understanding emerges. Rather than a generic imagined depiction of Māori arrival, a long-overlooked source for the narrative is found in the voyage of the Arawa waka and its encounter with the “throat of Te Parata.” The analysis gives new insight into the artists’ intent, enabling us to begin to address the uncomfortable place Arrival occupies in New Zealand art history and culture.

A Neglected Design Style: Colonial Era Hybrid Architecture, Furniture and Interior Decoration in Aotearoa New Zealand

Daniel C.P. Smith — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Colonial hybrid design has been a neglected style in Aotearoa New Zealand’s and design history. However, an overview of the corpus, its quantity and plurality, with both Māori and Pākehā makers working into the early twentieth century, indicates that a reappraisal is required. The case study of one Pākehā maker, J.H. Menzies, shows a combination of respect and ignorance of toi Māori (Māori art).[i] Despite the negative connotations of cultural appropriation, a kernel of genuine creative exchange is at the heart of this colonial phenomenon, as exemplified in his work.

[i] I use this term generically to include all forms of art customarily practised by Māori, including (but not limited to) hoahoanga (architecture), toi whakairo (the art of carving) and kōwhaiwahi (painted patterns).

Depiction and Description: Insights into Southern Alps Glaciers Conveyed by John Gully’s Paintings and Julius Haast’s Paper at the Royal Geographical Society

George Hook, Andrew Lorrey — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In June 1862, Julius Haast (1822–1887), the Canterbury Provincial Geologist, wrote to Joseph Hooker, Assistant Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, informing him that “being now naturalized I think it my duty to offer my work to the scientific societies in England.” Haast informed Hooker that as soon as his topographical map was finished, he would send the botanist “an account of the geological features of the Alps, on deposits of the glacial period, accompanied by maps, sections and sketches,” requesting him to present the account to the Geological Society of London.[i] Although this anticipated initial foray into publishing in British scientific journals did not eventuate until 1865,[ii] on 12 November 1863 Haast sent a copy of his large topographical map of the Southern Alps,[iii] accompanied by extensive notes on the physical geography of that region and a set of 12 watercolour paintings (e.g. fig. 1), to the geologist Sir Roderick Murchison,[iv] President of the Royal Geographical Society. Haast hoped that those landscape paintings would “best enable the members, to gain an insight into the wild mountain masses [of the Southern Alps], with their snowfields, glaciers and lakes [emphasis added].”[v]

[i] Sascha Nolden, Esme Mildenhall and Simon Nathan, The Correspondence of Julius Haast and Joseph Dalton Hooker, 1861–1886 (Wellington: Geoscience Society of New Zealand, 2013), 22. Haast became a British citizen in February 1861.

[ii] See Julius Haast, “Notes to a Sketch-Map of the Province of Canterbury, New Zealand, Showing the Glaciation During the Pleistocene and Recent Periods as Far as Explored,” Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 21, nos. 1–2 (1865): 87–96.

[iii] On 11 June 1863, Haast informed Hooker that he was sending Murchison a large map with a set of watercolour drawings by the next mail (Nolden, Mildenhall and Nathan, Correspondence Haast-Hooker, 42–43).

[iv] Ibid., 57.

[v] Julius Haast, “Notes Accompanying a Map of the Province of Canterbury” (Royal Geographical Society Manuscript Archive, 1862), 1.

The British Art Section of the 1906–1907 New Zealand International Exhibition: Its Complexities and Contributions to New Zealand’s Art History

Victoria Adams — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The British Art Section of the 1906–7 New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch remains the largest exhibition of British art in New Zealand history. However, its cultural impact has been little explored in art history scholarship. This article addresses contrasting interpretations of the section by examining its origins, purchases and legacies, reconsidering and recontextualising previous analysis by art historians Linda Tyler and Warren Feeney. The success of the section neither devastated nor revitalised the work of local artists, but instead reinforced the continued importance of purchasing British art for New Zealand and the pivotal role it played in shaping this country’s nascent art collections.

Contributors Bios

Edward Hanfling — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Through Shaded Glass: Women and Photography in Aotearoa New Zealand: 1860–1960

Catherine Hammond — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 1924 the Eastman Kodak Company proclaimed that with one of its cameras in your home you could capture “the most fascinating of all stories . . . the story of us” (p. 239). Through Shaded Glass: Women and Photography in Aotearoa New Zealand: 1860–1960 tells another story of “us”: that of women’s engagement with photography in Aotearoa, from the earliest known images taken here in the nineteenth century, until the point at which the gender divide begins to break down in the twentieth. Lissa Mitchell’s exhaustive research over the past decade has revealed the names and expanded the stories of nearly 200 women, many previously unknown, who worked in photography here between 1860 and 1960.

Don Binney: Flight Path

Tom Brooking — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the joys of reviewing is that every so often a book comes along that is elegantly written, persuasively argued and beautifully produced. The result is something special that is both wonderful to look at and a joy to read. Congratulations, then, to editor Sam Elworthy and his team, especially book designer Keely O’Shannessy; I have never reviewed anything quite so visually stunning as Don Binney: Flight Path. Gregory O’Brien’s balanced and insightful text is illustrated on every few pages by high quality reproductions of this talented artist’s paintings. Most readers would expect many images of birds, given Binney’s earlier paintings, but he also painted landscapes in New Zealand and other parts of the globe, including Mexico, Africa, Britain and Australia. Binney was skilled too at painting still lifes, creating spectacular montages and occasionally venturing into challenging surreal images of human forms. Despite Binney’s somewhat flamboyant personality and occasional carping about trends in the broader New Zealand art scene, O’Brien confirms that he was an effective environmentalist with genuine sympathy for, and understanding of, the Māori view of nature and spirituality.

Gordon Walters

Warren Feeney — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Francis Pound’s Gordon Walters could be considered the final component and critical analysis of the life and times of four pioneering New Zealand artists whose reputations and legacies acquired prominence in the 1960s. Where Toss Woollaston (1910–1998) and Rita Angus (1908–1970) are given due and comprehensive consideration by Jill Trevelyan (2004 and 2020 respectively), and Colin McCahon (1919–1987) in Peter Simpson’s two-volume magnum opus (2019–2020), Pound’s book on the life and art of Gordon Walters (1919–1995) completes this equation. In making connections between these artists, there is inevitably a sense of the founding of a national art history. Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith’s once highly influential publication, An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1839–1967 (1969), devoted less attention to Walters’ abstraction than to the more figurative and referential work of his peers. But now Pound’s Gordon Walters comprehensively eliminates the remnants of any possible doubt about Walters’ central importance in New Zealand art history. To paraphrase the writer’s commentary on Walters’ own art and legacy, this is an astonishing publication.

Introduction

Edward Hanfling — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 2013 I edited the final issue (as I was dismayed to discover afterwards) of the Journal of New Zealand Art History (JONZAH). It is a pleasure, then, to write this introduction for a special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Studies (JNZS) devoted to New Zealand art history. The quantity and quality of the articles in this issue go a considerable way to filling the void left by JONZAH in the intervening decade, even if the loss of a dedicated double-blind peer-reviewed journal remains keenly felt.

Spiritualist Art in Early Twentieth-Century Aotearoa New Zealand: Minnie Chapman, Sophia Garland Allan and Berta Sinclair Burns

Joanna Osborne — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Spirit drawing, as a means of channelling and expressing communications with spirit entities, has been marginalised in definitions of art as well as in art history. This essay contributes to ongoing and historical conversations in which new religious movements are considered in conjunction with histories of feminism and art, exploring the work of three medium artists: Minnie Chapman (1856–1949), Sophia Garland Allan (1867–1959) and Berta Sinclair Burns (1893–1972). This essay shows how the three artists share spiritualist sensibilities and practices and a visual language of abstraction, decorative expression and particular “universal” biomorphic forms, inviting speculation at the intersection of material culture and esoteric thought.

Modern Architecture and the Pioneers: Paul Pascoe and the New Zealand House, 1933–1950

Ian Lochhead — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The publication of the Group Manifesto, “On the Necessity of Architecture,” in 1948 is widely regarded as a defining moment in New Zealand architectural history. The Group’s ideal of a modern architecture shaped by the environment of their own country was, however, anticipated in the pre-war writings and subsequent buildings of the Christchurch architect, Paul Pascoe (1908–1976). Although unacknowledged by the younger generation of modernists, Pascoe highlighted unexpected parallels between colonial primitivism and modernist functionalism and helped to shape the intellectual climate in which architectural modernism developed in New Zealand during the post-war period.

Locating Paul Olds Within New Zealand Modernism

Miriam Olds Spence — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The place in New Zealand art history of Paul Olds (1922–1976) remains relatively obscure. Olds’ oeuvre defies easy categorisation and does not readily align with established notions of New Zealand modernism. He made a considerable impact as a painter and teacher in Wellington, where he settled in 1957 after six years in Europe. However, his reputation dwindled after his premature death. Olds’ paintings juxtapose figurative and non-figurative elements, organic and inorganic forms and employ nuanced texturing and complex colour layering. Observing his oeuvre chronologically reveals his distinctive approach and his subtle and nuanced contribution to New Zealand’s post-war modernist narrative.[i]

[i] The author (Miriam Olds Spence) was born in Wellington in 1963 to Elisabeth and Paul Olds. When I was three years old, my parents separated and my mother and I moved to Germany, where I grew up. My mother was engaged in postgraduate research at the University of Tübingen, and later became a lecturer there. After we moved, I only saw my father twice, briefly. I did not return to Wellington until 1979, three years after my father died. My research stems from a desire to better understand my father’s place in New Zealand’s postwar art history.

Gordon Crook: Banners and Wall Hangings

Peter Stupples — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Gordon Crook was a British textile artist who came to live in Wellington in 1972, aged 51. Through contacts at the Dowse Art Museum and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Crook was commissioned by the architect Miles Warren to make banners for the New Zealand Chancery in Washington D.C. (1979–80), followed by banners and wall hangings for the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington (1981–83). Crook’s work was suigeneric, idiosyncratic in its imagery and development, a world feeding on itself. Outside any national or current artworld style, Crook extended and enriched New Zealand’s public visual art scene.[i]

[i] See my three articles on the work of Gordon Crook: “Gordon Crook: tapestries,” Tuhinga 31 (2020): 70–90; “Gordon Crook: The Pastel Triptychs,” Tuhinga 32 (2021): 120–34; and “Gordon Crook and the Wolf-Man,” Tuhinga 33 (2022): 1–29.

Guy Ngan: His Art, Life and Pacific-Chinese Aesthetics

Yiyan Wang — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article is a study of the art of Guy Ngan 顏國鍇 (1926–2017). A Chinese-New Zealander, Ngan’s work and aesthetic considerations are yet to be adequately understood. I will introduce his background, discuss his major works and elaborate on his approach to art practice. I will also discuss Ngan’s identity, his self-identification and the reception of his art in the context of New Zealand art history. What are the characteristics of Ngan’s work? How has Ngan’s Chinese cultural background informed his art practice? And what constitutes his “Pacific-Chinese aesthetics”? I will argue for a positive case of a Pacific-Chinese aesthetics in New Zealand as proposed and practised by Ngan. The article concludes with a discussion of recent changes in the reception of his oeuvre.

Cabbages, Crumble and Sky Talk: Environmental and Planetary Issues in Art – Aotearoa New Zealand

Bridie Lonie — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The article describes changed approaches to environmental art in the face of our changing environment. Susan Ballard’s Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (2022) and Janine Randerson’s Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art (2018) propose that changed environmental conditions require, and are generating, new subject matter and new ways of making art. Their ideas are discussed in relation to an early example of public art, Barry Thomas’s Vacant Lot of Cabbages (1978), and works chosen from the oeuvre of Marilynn Webb (1937–2021), who saw her art as acts of spiritual and political protection of the land. The writing of Bridget Reweti in the recent exhibition catalogue Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills (2024) casts new light on Webb’s engagement with Māori understandings of the land.

Young Guns Reloaded: Evaluating Contemporary Māori Art of the 1990s

Edward Hanfling — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The “Young Guns” were an emerging generation of contemporary Māori artists in the 1990s. Their work was irreverent, and provoked uncertainty and controversy regarding its relationship to the genealogy of customary and contemporary Māori artists. This paper reviews notable works by Shane Cotton, Michael Parekowhai, Lisa Reihana and Peter Robinson, and their evolving critical reception, from complex readings through an internationalist, post-conceptual lens to accommodation within a vitalist Māori framework. The focus is on patterns of re-evaluation within Māori culture, whereby humour, belligerence, profanity and mundane materiality are mixed with the metaphysical, and “rubbish” becomes valuable art or taonga.

Let’s NOT Celebrate Cook: Robyn Kahukiwa’s Confrontational 2020 Exhibition

Karen A. Blennerhassett — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the provocative exhibition Let’s NOT Celebrate Cook, a selection of paintings by Māori artist Robyn Kahukiwa (Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Konohi, Whānau-a-Ruataupare) at Mahara Gallery, Waikanae, near Wellington, in 2020.[i] Employing a decolonial lens, it explores the extent to which Kahukiwa’s artistic intervention disrupts the hegemony of Western historical discourse and reclaims an Indigenous narrative. It considers how, in foregrounding an Indigenous perspective, her artworks encourage candid discussion regarding the legacy and impacts of British colonisation in present-day Aotearoa New Zealand.

[i] Following an eighteen-month closure for extensive redevelopment, Mahara Gallery reopened in October 2023 under the new name of Toi MAHARA.