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Renaissance Man

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Andrew Paul Wood
Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann, Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, 2011), 232 pp., $75.00

If you could physically sense an author’s passion and thoroughness, Peter Simpson’s books would glow like fresh bread. His timely and lavishly illustrated Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann positively radiates, and yet again shows Auckland University Press to be New Zealand’s pre-eminent art book publisher.
            Artist and illustrator Bensemann was the descendent of North German immigrants from Bruchhausen-Vilsen south of Bremen, settling at Moutere, and was born in Takaka in 1912. His family moved to Nelson in the early 1920s, and that dramatic karst landscape was to become a reoccurring feature in his rich oeuvre. The German influence was also strong, manifesting in a rich vein of Romanticism in his work, embracing Holbein and Dürer, and various Medieval, folk, and expressionist sources, to complement the vivid orientalism of his drawings and landscapes.

            Outside of Canterbury Bensemann has not been well known beyond the influential Ilam mafia and the occasional reproduction in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, though his portraits were reproduced annually in the New Zealand Arts Year Books from 1946 until 1949, and during his lifetime one article in Landfall in 1953, and a memorial in Art New Zealand shortly after his death in 1986. Since then, there have been two publications by Bensemann’s daughter Caroline Otto and at least two significant exhibitions curated by Simpson.

            Bensemann shared a studio with his prickly close friend Rita Angus during one of the most fruitful phases of her career, and from 1938, along with Colin McCahon, Angus, Doris Lusk, Olivia Spencer Bower and Toss Woollaston was a part of that influential group of Mainland artists known as The Group, an element of the sparkling circle of under-graduates, writers, artists, poets, composers and actors that formed the ‘Bloomsbury South’ (as Simpson calls it) which made Christchurch the cultural capital of New Zealand up until World War II and the shift in cultural weight to Auckland money and Wellington bureaucrats. This is a period of huge significance to the national story, often overlooked as too provincial, and here elaborated and redressed.
            Bensemann’s work has often been unfavourably compared with that of Angus, and this probably has some basis in terms of his paintings, but where Bensemann truly expressed his genius was in the field of book illustration. His contribution to typography through his role in the Caxton Press negates any argument. In the 1960s with Barbara Brooke (co-founder with Judith Gifford of the Brooke-Gifford Gallery in Christchurch in 1975) he edited Ascent, and he assisted Charles Brasch with the production of Landfall from its initiation in 1947 until 1978, but it was at Caxton he made his greatest impact.

            Simpson tells in straightforward prose how during 1934 Bensemann met the poet Denis Glover, who with John Drew had founded Caxton, and Glover was enthused enough to commission a publication of Bensemann’s drawings.  Caxton’s triumph lay in its combination of high quality printing and the best New Zealand writing of the time. Caxton published poems by Denis Glover, James K. Baxter, Allen Curnow and A.R.D. Fairburn, musical scores by Douglas Lilburn, and prose texts by Rewi Alley, Ngaio Marsh, Frank Sargeson, R.A.K. Mason, D’Arcy Cresswell and Janet Frame. Bensemann proved a consummate typographer, working closely with Glover in all aspects of production. As an illustrator he brought a strongly whimsical fantasy element equal to anything then seen elsewhere, but, as Simpson notes, quite at odds with the emerging Canterbury regionalist modernism developing around him which would become the basis of New Zealand’s artistic nationalism.
            His first major contribution was a frontispiece for Another Argo, a 1935 anthology of poetry by Fairburn, Curnow and Glover. The magical and now very rare Fantastica, a folio of thirteen Bensemann drawings, appeared in 1937. This was followed by Bensemann’s illustrations for Nastagio and The Obdurate Lady: A Tale From The Decameron and The Brothers Grimm: The Adventures Of Chanticleer and Partlet in 1941. The slightly less rare Second Book of Leo Bensemann’s Work of drawings, wood engravings, calligraphy and typography was first published in 1948 and reprinted in 1952. An award-winning masterpiece, Coleridge’s Rime of The Ancient Mariner, first printed in 1952 and reprinted in 1968, represents a fine example of Bensemann’s designer’s art as gesamtkunstwerk, that is, a work synthesising a number of artforms.
            Bensemann’s illustrations are atmospheric and ambiguous in the recherché manner of fin-de-siècle Symbolist art, employing the kind of intense detail that we associate with Medieval illuminations and Renaissance miniatures. However, it strikes me that perhaps it was not so much Aubrey Beardsley, to whom Bensemann is often compared, but the following generation, whom Beardsley influenced, that had most impact on Bensemann: Harry Clarke, Sidney Sime (Lord Dunsany’s illustrator), Austin Osman Spare, and Alastair (Baron Hans Henning Voigt) – all of whom would have been available to Bensemann through their book illustrations.
            When he was compared to Beardsley, Bensemann noted the ‘difference in spirit in our works’. Peter Simpson observes this: ‘recognising the “difference in spirit” … does not invalidate noting their similarities,’ and suggests Bensemann bridled at the comparison ‘because it was superficially plausible … Bensemann is less febrile and insinuating, more humorous, vigorous and robust – but Beardsley is certainly one of the many colours in the palette of Bensemann’s art knowledge and practice’. Sensitive observations like these highlight Simpson’s importance as a chronicler of New Zealand art. His account is not a biography in the strict sense of novelistic structure peppered with the occasional salacious detail. Despite a wealth of intimate detail, it is a work of art history weaving Bensemann’s life with his art and graphic design, and the cultural events of his time. Simpson also becomes a part of the story himself, having known Bensemann nearer the end of his life, making his observations all the more personal and poignant without losing an appropriate observer’s distance. Clearly, though, Simpson was intrigued and charmed by the man and his art.
            Perhaps it is this personal connection that explains Simpson’s sensitivity to his subject, as in the matter of Bensemann’s relationship to Lawrence Baigent. Bensemann and Baigent were close friends since their school days and remained so for the rest of their lives. Baigent was definitely homosexual, but opinions differ as to whether the intimate friendship extended to physical expression. Certainly Bensemann married and fathered four children. Simpson doesn’t shy from the matter, but neither is he gratuitous, noting that Bensemann seemed to enjoy outsider status, and was part of a circle which was very tolerant of such things. ‘Ambivalent sexuality,’ he says, ‘may have contributed an edge to the outsider role Leo dramatised in his self-portraits of the Cambridge Terrace period.’
            Where the narrative begins to run thin is towards the end of Bensemann’s life. His 1970 and 1979 visits to Germany, for instance, barely amounts to two pages but surely might have provided more texture to Bensemann’s Germanophile interests and sense of self – there’s little enough made of his German origins in dealing with the artist’s ancestry and childhood, curious given the Germanic qualities of his art. Descriptions of exhibitions are padded with excerpts from reviews and plates. The man himself seems to withdraw entirely at the point where one would have expected a more concrete summation of Bensemann’s life’s work and artistic goals. The material on the twilight of The Group, however, is an invaluable addition to New Zealand art history.
            This book comfortably straddles the gap between general reader and academic resource with much useful information and quiet pleasures for both. Simpson ably demonstrates that Bensemann was not simply a provincial and somewhat obscure Canterbury artist, but rather a figure of considerable appeal and broader national importance. Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann is a model for future histories of New Zealand art.

ANDREW PAUL WOOD is a Christchurch-based art writer and freelance curator. He is currently completing a doctorate on aspects of Canterbury painting in the 1990s, and is working towards a book on the artist Theo Schoon.

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