Colin McCahon by Peter Simpson

Author:Peter Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2019-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

Landfall, Caselberg, English painting, and Helen Hitchings, 1950–51

Landfall 16 (December 1950), including Brasch’s ‘A Note on the Work of Colin McCahon’; the painting depicted is Crucifixion (1949).

In Landfall 16 (December 1950) Brasch kept a promise to McCahon of reproducing a second batch of his paintings, namely, Mother and Child (1947), The Virgin and Child compared (1948) and two Crucifixions (both 1949). One of the Crucifixions, originally called Crucifixion with Rainstorm, and The Virgin and Child compared came from Brasch’s own collection. The other Crucifixion (p. 132), also dated 1949, was almost certainly the work shown at Helen Hitchings’ in 1949 as Crucifixion (oil on canvas, 21” x 13” – the same dimensions as in Landfall), and was probably damaged and destroyed. McCahon was somewhat disappointed by the selection of ‘old’ work. He told his parents: ‘Had Charles here a week ago last Wed to select things for Landfall. Again I am disappointed as he always prefers the old and not the new. Next time it will be the same. What I do now will be chosen over the new. Not that it really matters.’25

In addition to the reproductions Brasch wrote a modestly titled ‘A Note on the Work of Colin McCahon’, the most substantial and important critical essay that had appeared on McCahon’s work to that time. He began by summarising McCahon’s differences from other New Zealand painters in terms of a distinction between ‘representational’ and ‘symbolic’ painting:

He is scarcely concerned with the ordinary appearance of objects, that is to say with representational painting, the only kind which has been familiar to us and which we have been prepared to recognize. His concern is primarily with their meaning – their meaning to him. For instance, the mountain ranges and the lamps which appear so often in his work are not there solely for their own sake, as interesting subjects to paint, but as symbols …26

He then explained the reasons behind McCahon’s placement of his religious scenes within recognisable New Zealand landscapes: ‘His Crucifixions do not say, “Here is Christ crucified”; they say rather, “This is what human life is like, this is what is happening to men, here, today”…. His Annunciations, Crucifixions, Depositions and the rest are placed as unmistakably in New Zealand as Perugino’s are in Umbria – only for different reasons.’27 But, according to Brasch, McCahon was attempting something different from Italian Renaissance painters; he was implicitly commenting on the nature of New Zealand society: ‘Their harshness, their frequent crudity, may seem shocking at first; but if we are honest with ourselves we have to admit that these qualities reflect with painful accuracy a rawness and harshness in New Zealand life which are too easily passed by or glossed over …’.28 Here Brasch was to some extent reading into McCahon’s work his own nationalistic preoccupations, as shared by his contemporaries Curnow and Sargeson, writers for whom exposing the rawness and shallowness of New Zealand culture was a recurrent preoccupation. Basil Dowling’s poem ‘On Certain Paintings by Colin McCahon’,

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