Colin McCahon

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Colin McCahon ( August 1, 1919 - May 27, 1987 ) was a New Zealand artist and art curator . Above all through his expressive landscape painting, his abstract paintings and his word paintings, he became one of the most important pioneers and representatives of modern art in New Zealand.

Life

The early years, New Zealand and USA

Colin John McCahon was born in Timaru (New Zealand). As a child he found visits to the Dunedin Art Gallery inspiring, and in 1933 he took part in an art class program organized by Russell Clark. After attending Otago Boys High School, which McCahon found depressing, he became a part-time student at King Edward Technical College. He spent summers as a tobacco picker and plantation worker in the Nelson region, where he rode his bike from Dunedin. The bike trips had a lasting impact on his landscape aesthetics. In 1940 one of his pictures was rejected for an exhibition at the Otago Art Society, but later approved after protests. In 1945 McCahon married Anne Hamblett in Dunedin. One of his wedding gifts was The Geomorphology of New Zealand, which also influenced McCahon's understanding of landforms for life.

Although he was not a member of any church, religious questions related to the Christian religion played an important role in McCahon's work. Since 1946 he has made paintings in which he depicted biblical figures in the familiar, often remote New Zealand landscapes. He took up art history traditions of Europe and North America that tried to update biblical narratives and personalities in non-biblical places and in the present. In the forties McCahon also increasingly, and, at the end of his artistic career, finally exclusively, included text elements in his paintings. These words, painted in multiple or two colors and often in large format, are often biblical quotations.

In 1947 McCahon became a member of the artists' group 'The Group' in Christchurch , whose representatives used or experimented with modern forms of expression in the visual arts; this also included the artist Rita Angus . Angus, whose work has often been compared to McCahon, also made use of an intensely colorful, expressive painting style that placed religious figurations in New Zealand scenarios . Mc Cahon belonged to the artists' association 'The Group' until it was dissolved in 1977.

In 1953 McCahon moved to the North Island ; where he settled in the Auckland district of Titirangi . The landscape of the North Island found its way into his work at this time; His pictures of the charismatic kauri trees, which are often centuries old, should also be emphasized . McCahon applied for a job at the Auckland City Art Gallery , where he initially found employment as a cleaner. He later became a curator there and ultimately deputy director of the art museum. In 1958 McCahon traveled to the USA. This trip abroad, which took him to various art museums and galleries, gave him the opportunity to directly observe European and American painting traditions, which he could only get to know through books in remote New Zealand. McCahon also managed to get a good overview of the contemporary modern art scene in the USA on the trip. McCahon's later work was inspired by this trip and strengthened his self-confidence as a modern artist.

Auckland, Māori Reception

Upon returning to New Zealand, McCahon painted the Northland Panels . Under the impression of his overseas stay, they address the topic of 'travel': as movement in geographical and cultural spaces, but also as a journey through life and as a contemplation of art in analogy to travel. In 1961 the painter began his Gate series, which reflect McCahon's exploration of the Cold War and the danger of atomic overkill in an abstract painting style.

In 1964 McCahon was given a lectureship at the Elam School of Art at the University of Auckland. Since 1965, the colors of his paintings have changed increasingly, giving way to black and white or monochrome painting. Numbers, partly as numerical mysticism , and texts became more and more important in his work. One example is his work Lark's Song (Song of the Lark), which is a large-scale written version of a Māori poem. The poem comes from Matire Kereama, a wise woman of the Aupōuri tribe, who was only able to publish at an advanced age and was noticed by the literary public. Kereama's book The Tail of the Fish became one of McCahon's main written sources for his knowledge of Māori culture and traditional ornamentation.

The late years

In 1970 McCahon resigned from teaching in order to devote himself entirely to painting. In the seventies he continued to work on landscapes, but word painting dominated. The works Victory Over Death 2 , Gate III and the Necessary Protection series are among his better-known works, as are his numerous landscapes of the Kaipara region.

In 1972 the Auckland City Art Gallery showed a large retrospective of McCahon's paintings, which spanned his entire creative period and which in the following period could be seen in most of the major art museums in the country. In 1978 the Australian government received the work V ictory Over Death 2 as a gift from the New Zealand government. McCahon viewed this international recognition of his work with some skepticism, because he and his work had repeatedly been exposed to incomprehension and hostility from New Zealand critics; this also included artist colleagues who were open to modernity, e. B. ARD Fairburn . In 1987 McCahon died after a long alcohol addiction. He had already suffered a stroke in 1980, and in recent years has suffered from Korsakoff's syndrome ; both had a significant effect on his artistic productivity in the last years of his life.

A retrospective of McCahon's work was shown at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2002 , where McCahon was described as "the first New Zealand painter of outstanding international importance". Due to the enormous increase in value of McCahon's works in the wake of his international fame, there were some spectacular thefts of his pictures. Worth mentioning here are the theft of the Urewera Murals from 1976 , a triptych (estimated price 2 million NZ dollars) by Māori activists in 1997, which was returned two years later, as well as the theft of some McCahon poems together with an Oxford Lectern Bible in the 2002 from the library of Auckland University.

Stylistics, reception, worldview

The highly sensitive McCahon had developed his own style of art under difficult material and institutional conditions for decades . His word painting in particular was picked up by a number of New Zealand and international artists such as Nigel Brown, Shane Cotton, Peter Dornauf, Emily Karaka, John Reynolds and Peter Robinson and developed with very different textual and compositional references.

literature

  • Peter Simpson: Colin McCahon: There Is Only One Direction VOL 1 1919-1959 . Auckland University Press, Auckland 2019, ISBN 978-1-86940-895-4 (English).
  • Justin Paton: McCahon country . Penguin New Zealand, 2019, ISBN 978-0-14-377393-1 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Biography of Colin McCahon. Museum of New Zealand - Te Papa Tongarea, accessed August 21, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Bloem, Marja; Browne, Martin (2002). Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith . Amsterdam: Craig Potton Published by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. ISBN187733300X.
  3. ^ Norman Franke: Paradise Lost, Paradise Reframed. In: EyeContactSite. June 6, 2020, accessed on August 21, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME McCahon, Colin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand artist and art curator
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1919
DATE OF DEATH May 27, 1987