Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Dick’s Pics

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Andrew Paul Wood

Me, According to the History of Art by Dick Frizzell (Massey University Press, 2021), 312pp, $65

It goes without saying that Dick Frizzell is a very clever man with an idiosyncratic view of the world. Somehow, he has also survived half a century or so’s worth of New Zealand art-world vicissitudes, so inevitably his thoughts about art are going to be interesting. He is also (and this is not intended as an insult) a narcissist. You would have to have the balls to write your own history of world art, playing at being Kenneth Clark. You also must be a bit of a celebrity for a publisher to let you do it. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Behold: Me, According to the History of Art. Frizzell does to art history what Tom Scott did to Charles Upham. [Read more…]

He Whakarite Ataahua/A Beautiful Arrangement

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Gina Cole

Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand: An anthology edited by Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris and James Norcliffe with art editor David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2020) 250pp, $39.95

In the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre of 15 March 2019 and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration that ‘We are all New Zealanders’, the editors of this anthology called for creative work that responded to life in contemporary New Zealand. The response wonderfully displayed in this collection was wide ranging and diverse. And after all, portraying range and diversity is the job of anthologies. In an article from a 2020 issue of the New Yorker, writer Clare Bucknell states:

Etymologically, ‘anthology’ refers to a collection of flowers, varied species of blooms selected and arranged so that they look like they belong together. Since the term’s origins in the seventeenth century, multiplicity has always been the form’s selling point: the provision of very different voices and concerns that nonetheless have some kind of collective force.1 [Read more…]

The Politics of (In)Visibilities

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Robyn Maree Pickens

Sapphic Fragments: Imogen Taylor with essays by Milly Mitchell-Anyon and Joanne Drayton (Hocken Collections, 2020), 50pp, $35; Llew Summers: Body and soul by John Newton (Canterbury University Press, 2020), 200pp, $65

Sapphic Fragments is an intimate, provocative and critical publication that is in conversation with artist Imogen Taylor’s exhibition at the Hocken Collections gallery in Ōtepoti Dunedin in early 2020, and her eleven-month residency as the 2019 Frances Hodgkins Fellow. The Fellow’s publication is ever increasingly becoming an integral component of the residency ‘outcomes’, and Taylor’s is no exception. Slightly smaller than A4, with a soft card cover and a geometric-patterned, light gsm dust jacket, Sapphic Fragments, as an aesthetic object, sits partway between high-end artist’s workbook and Moleskine stationery. The considered intimacy of the book’s exterior is continued between the pages with the inclusion of iPhone photos taken either by Taylor or partner and architect Sue Hillery. This naming of Sue Hillery as Taylor’s partner is significant for several reasons that encompass Taylor, Hillery and contemporary lesbian/queer visibility while also reaching back into the past of Hodgkins (1869–1947) and her ‘friend’ (lover), Dorothy K. Richmond. Sapphic Fragments can be interpreted as an act of reframing, repositioning and reclaiming elided intimate histories (personal and artistic), while agentially self-positioning Taylor (and Hillery) in an attempt to prevent present or future homophobic omissions. From design to photographs and text, the publication materialises the politics of queer intimacy, collaboration and reclamation. [Read more…]

‘All art comes from the depths of one’s feelings’

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Michael Dunn

Louise Henderson: From life, edited by Felicity Milburn, Lara Strongman and Julia Waite (Auckland City Art Gallery/Christchurch City Art Gallery, 2019), 256pp., $65

At one time, in the mid-1950s, Louise Henderson was a prominent figure among painters based in Auckland. In fact, she was seen as a modernist; she had associated with John Weeks in Auckland and later studied in Paris with Jean Metzinger (1883–1956), a Cubist painter, teacher and writer. Henderson had changed her earlier style, learnt in Christchurch, for a more abstract and Cubist-influenced approach. She exhibited at the Auckland Art Gallery alongside Colin McCahon and Milan Mrkusich, both of whom were some twenty years her junior. She was highly regarded by collectors and critics, such as Charles Brasch and Eric McCormick. But by the 1970s her star had waned, and although she continued to paint and exhibit into the 1980s she was no longer seen as a leading contemporary painter. Auckland Art Gallery staged an important show of her work called Louise Henderson: The Cubist years, curated by Christina Barton in 1992, and in 1993 Henderson was made a Dame. Henderson has, however, still not been accorded her full due as a painter and teacher. Louise Henderson: From life and the accompanying exhibition aim to redress the situation. [Read more…]

Solitary Grandeur

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Martin Edmond

McCahon Country by Justin Paton (Penguin Random House NZ, in association with Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), 304 pp., $75

This year is the centenary of the birth of Colin McCahon, and among the publications celebrating that event is Justin Paton’s McCahon Country. It is not the only one. The first of Peter Simpson’s two-volume chronicle of McCahon’s life and work will be published in October 2019, with the second to follow in June next year; and Wystan Curnow’s long-delayed opus is also rumoured to be coming out in 2020. None of these books is, or will be, properly speaking, a biography. Indeed, three decades after his death, we still lack a comprehensive life of the artist. Gordon Brown’s Colin McCahon: Artist, first published in 1984, is more an elucidation of the work than of the man; as is Simpson’s work; as Curnow’s presumably will be. As Justin Paton’s book, with qualifications, also is. [Read more…]