Harvey Benge

Harvey Benge is a local camera artist with an international reputation for making photo-books in New Zealand. He recently gifted to the Gallery’s E.H. McCormick Research Library his entire photo-book production to date.

You can access an alphabetical list of Harvey’s books here and a chronological list here.

Harvey has generously offered to further gift his photo-books as he publishes them. The Gallery is currently the only museum where his complete photo book oeuvre is publicly available.

Harvey Benge's first book was Four Parts Religion Six Parts Sin (1993). That publication ranged over Auckland's urban spaces overlaid as it is with advertising, murals and graffiti. That book sign-posted how Harvey is interested in images that work as urban narratives.

On Sunday 21 June, as part of the 2015 Auckland Festival of Photography, the Gallery hosted a conversation between Harvey and me that focused on his photo books. We recorded Harvey's talk where he made fascinating comments about his four decade long involvement with camera media. Listen or download the talk

Please note that this conversation contains some language that may offend. 

One of the books I admire for its immediate mystery is Aide-memoire (2000). The cover reproduces a snapshot image of a boat that Harvey found during his frequent travels. In speaking about such snapshot and vernacular images, Harvey noted that he has never been interested in any affirmation of nationalist imagery.

Harvey Benge’s blog is read extensively. It probably receives more hits than any other locally produced blog dedicated to issues within photography. The blog is not really about Harvey's own artwork but serves a portal for introducing the art of others and for networking issues central to photography.

One of his most recent books is Any Lonely Person Write to Ponsonby. The book's title is carved into the succulent on the cover. The photograph was made many years ago and was rediscovered by the artist when he reviewed his early images.

A display of Harvey Benge's photo-books is currently on display in the E.H. McCormick Research Library's display cabinet on the Gallery's mezzanine level.

Recent acquisition – Una Garlick

In 1921 Una Garlick became the first woman member of the Auckland Camera Club; later renamed the Auckland Photographic Society. She was awarded their annual medal in 1926, following on from her many successes at the Club’s monthly competitions.

Garlick exhibited internationally to acclaim between 1925 and 1931 and this success resulted in her becoming an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society. Such recognition meant that she ranked with Gerald Jones as one of New Zealand’s most famous camera artists of the period.

Garlick liked experimenting with photographic printing media; soon venturing beyond conventional gelatin silver printing papers toned with sepia to the use of a bromoil technique, the extremely challenging vehicle of platinum printing and onto sheet fed gravure. Her ability with these difficult printing techniques makes her images frequently appear very velvety yet also matt and metallic. She moved away from interleaving negatives with sheer tissue towards a deeper and sharper focus.

Una Garlick’s stylistic shift towards the unambiguous image parallels what had already occurred during the 1920s in America (with Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz) and Germany (with Albert Renger Patzsch and August Sander).  I sense that the lessons of American Precisionism and German Neue Sachlichkeit gave her a fresher perspective than almost all of her Auckland Camera Club cohorts. 

There is no question that Una Garlick was familiar with copies of The Studio, Das Deutsche Lichtbild and Camera Work. Maurice Lennard recalled for me some decades ago that she had consulted his copies of Das Deutsche Lichtbild and Camera Work on a number of occasions. Meetings of the Camera Club always involved discussions about what was happening off shore photographically.

An anonymous donor has recently generously gifted a fine late landscape by Una Garlick to the Gallery’s collection. The raking afternoon light is seen from the summit of Remuera (Mount Hobson). With its semi-sharp and deep focus has a full register of tones from dark brown to white, this image is a bravura example of Garlick’s habit of incorporating cloud portraits into her landscapes. In many ways, Garlick transitioned from her early pictorialism to a sharper photographic focus that is much more in tune with what was occurring in California during the 1920s and 1930s.

Image credit:

Una Garlick  (1883–1951)

Auckland c1935

sheet fed gravure

74 x 100mm

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of an anonymous donor, 2014

Para Matchitt's vision of the haka!

When I was a child my mother took me to an exhibition of Paratene Matchitt's artwork in Hamilton and I have followed his career ever since. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki recently acquired at auction an early painting by Para titled Au Au Aue Hāa! It is one of the first contemporary painted representations of haka.

Hamish Keith confirmed that he had worked with both Peter Tomory and Colin McCahon on the New Zealand Painting 1962 exhibition, in which this painting was included as catalogue number 52. It was likely that Hamish was responsible for alerting Peter and Colin to Para's talent.

I phoned Para and he recalled in a flash that this painting was shown publicly for the first time at this Gallery – a few months after he had completed it on Sunday 9 September 1962.

When I first saw the painting I did not know its correct title and the painting has no inscriptions on the back of the original frame. I accessed the artist's file in the E.H. McCormick Research Library and recalled that I had assembled useful information about Para's early work. I re-read Rangihiroa Panoho's MA thesis on the artist that is held in the Library.

In  Para's file there is a black and white photograph of this painting, that I sourced from the New Zealand Herald long ago when I did not know the work's whereabouts. I had written onto the photo's mount card this commentary from the Herald of 23 September 1964:
   
A painting by the Hamilton artist, Para Matchitt, showing how traditional Maori art forms can be applied by a modern artist to produce powerful symbolic effect – in this case the vigour and ferocity of the haka. The author of the accompanying article considers Para Matchitt’s work suited to present day architectural application.
In the artist's file I found the following undated colour article from the New Zealand Women's Weekly. What a stun to see  Au Au Aue Hāa! reproduced top right and another Para Matchitt painting The Carver III  created in May 1964 and which we acquired in 2007.

Para Matchitt’s Au Au Aue Hā!!! comes from a small group of gouache paintings that interpret visual aspects of haka as it performed as dance yet traditionally depicted in whakairo. Para was one of the first artists to bring indigenous carving and dance traditions into painting.

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa holds the smaller painting Whiti te ra 1962 (675 x 430mm) which dates from 3 months earlier than Au Au Aue Hā!!! The painting's title echoes the passion filled call in the renowned haka Ko Niu Tireni (1925) written by Wiremu Rangi.

Au Au Aue Hā!!! is one of Para Matchitt’s earliest major works. The painting did not result from either a preparatory sketch or preliminary drawing, which is in line with the ways he imagined all his paintings and drawings in his mind and then drew them accordingly.

The figure in the painting is shown performing a haka with upraised hands and arms and with feet set apart. By restricting his palette to muted greys with intense tones of red and black, the painting reveals a powerful graphic presence. The figure’s naval, chest and bicep are indicated by traditional Maori designs that have been transformed in expressive gestures.

In the Women's Weekly portrait of Para seated above, he is holding his sculpture Crucifix 1964 which the Ilene and Laurence Dakin Bequest purchased for the Gallery in 2007.

[I see Auckland has the England versus All Blacks rugby match at Eden Park this weekend. I know that there will be a terrific haka performed by the men in Black just before kick-off]

Image credits:

Paratene Matchitt
born 1933 Aotearoa New Zealand
Ngāti Porou, Whakatōhea, Whānau ā Apanui
Au Au Aue Hā!!! 1962
gouache on paper
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
gift of the Ilene and Laurence Dakin Bequest, 2014

Undated clipping from the New Zealand Women's Weekly

Unknown photographer Para Matchitt circa 1965

Recent acquisition – Theo Schoon

Do you know anyone who saw Theo Schoon dancing at Auckland's Town Hall? I would really like to speak to someone who witnessed his dance performance there. I have never associated Theo with being a performer in public but these images show he was. The public are not present, they have either come and gone, or they are soon to arrive.

I recently purchased these two small photographs of Theo for the Gallery's collection.  The images have been taken specially for the artist - he is performing for the photograph's occasion. They show more of the location than his other dance self-portraits. Those examples are studio-based self-portraits where the lighting was controlled.

These previously unknown portraits show that technical issues of working in a hall not made for photo-sessions influenced the resultant pictures. Theo preferred studio light in interiors - he'd spent much time with Wellington society photographer Spencer Digby (as had Brian Brake). Spence was a lighting expert and his wonderful portraits attest to his skill. Theo had exacting standards so the haphazard lighting may well not have pleased him.

It is not generally known that Theo Schoon was an accomplished practitioner of traditional Javanese dance. He collected the appropriate costumes and appropriate head wear. He possessed numerous recordings of Javanese music. When I visited him in Australia he danced for me while seated cross-legged on his bed. For me it was a personal experience of Asian dance the like of which I was then unfamiliar with.

During the 1940s and 1950s Theo Schoon demonstrated Javanese dance to appreciative audiences in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland. There was affirmative and interested newspaper coverage of  his performances. Theo also gave personal tuition of traditional Javanese dance and he was the first person to do this in New Zealand.

I have met some people who witnessed Theo dancing privately at Auckland. These performances occurred at parties, mostly during the 1950s. Colin McCahon told me that he was charmed and surprised by Theo's skill at dancing. Ross Fraser said Theo's dancing was mesmerising. I saw for myself how he used hand gestures to tell stories.

Mark Adams

For more than three decades Mark Adams has followed a singular direction in his art. History is always present as is the presence of people. This does not mean that one sees images of people posing in his photographs. In fact, he rarely includes humans but their lives are always there in spades. As is Mark's view of colonial New Zealand history.

"History" painting is rare in New Zealand and always has been. Not so with photography which always has history inserted into its own reality, even if it is consciously avoided. What Mark does is capture history as a visual tracery of the past. He travels to places that have substantive human history.

Very many places have such a significant history for our culture's reality. There's an old trope used about New Zealand that critiques its newness as a country appearing to have a short past. Such as believing there's no history here. Just look around, we may not recognise our visual archaeology of place but it is forever present.

To an extent, looking at a Mark Adams photograph is to look at oneself looking at the past. What can we recognise and what do we recognise? This proactivity, of expecting us to see more than surfaces is everywhere in Mark's art. Not only does it look at history, it comments on how we look at history.

These two photographs complicate this issue of where time sits even more, they are looking at another artist looking, but in the past. In this case it is the art of the Reverend Dr John Kinder. These two images are included in Kinder's Presence, which is currently on show.

Mark has gone to two sites that Kinder himself made famous through his watercolours of the same location painted over more than a century ago.

In his photograph Outlet of Lake Rotokakahi, Mark turns his back on the view which Kinder made of Rotokakahi. 1866. Outlet of Lake 1866 and looks back from what the painter would have been recording when he visited the Thermal regions in the mid 1860s.

What we see in Mark's shot is the road's path into the view that Kinder was making. In his image Te Wairoa, The Buried Village, he carefully attempts to replicate the place that John Kinder stood at to make his watercolour view The Wairoa near Lake Tarawera with Mission Chapel of Te Mu January 4 1866 circa 1886. At left is the stone pataka for storing food.

In Mark's multi-part panoramas the company of time is even more obvious. In After William Hodges' 'Cascade Cove', 21 May 1995 2005 he commemorates the visit of Lt Pickersgill with three companions to the waterfall at Cascade Cove in Dusky Sound on 23 April 1773.

Made famous by William Hodges's painted view of the same waterfall, this place is one of the few sites that one could now visit and see it essentially the same as it looked to Cook's men. How many other of 'Cook's Sites' are still able to be seen as they were? Oddly, there are very few photographs of this actual location available on-line, one has to visit it to get a true sense of its sublime qualities; the very same awe-inspiring feeling that caught Hodges's imagination.

Yet, when one surveys the four parts of Mark's panorama you see how difficult this photograph was to make with large format photographic equipment. It would be a challenging task at any time, let alone in the middle of the winter of 2005. To move from one image to another requires the camera to be adjusted with planned acuity, which is why the panorama has to be fitted together like image building-blocks.

Mark Adams's approach to time is also evident in his 1978 portrait of Tony Fomison's home in Gunson Street, Ponsonby, Auckland. Tony lived in a late nineteenth century kauri villa, whose kitchen/dining area was decorated as if it remained from the time when this house was new. Tony called it the parlour and it was filled with the naive paintings that he assiduously sought from places like Dominion Road's emporium named Antique Alley. The parlour had many visitors and wasn't like the front room kept for best.

Tony's decorating style mimicked and cherished Victorian notions of walls stacked to the brim with pictures and nick-nacks; which would then be left on the walls for decades. This tableau is the faux-past and is done with more aplomb than anything I have seen in any publicly owned local historic house. Mark sees how Tony pricked time in that Grab-the-day-way (a better translation than Seize) of Carpe Diem.

Tony really liked to tastefully flout taste as an art political act. In doing so he got way closer to truths about things. Mark's image could have been a carefully-won shot of a local identity's private interior, but he preferred to create a portrait of his friend Tony through an archaeological record of his mate's parlour at night.

Is it a portrait of Gothic local? Too right and now only existent in this image gifted by the artist and the partners of Ernst & Young. Style and time are always best kept in the tightest of tension. To paraphrase Mario Praz.

Image credits:

Outlet of Lake Rotokakahi
silver gelatin print, toned
courtesy of Mark Adams

Te Wairoa, The Buried Village 
silver gelatin print, toned
courtesy of Mark Adams

After William Hodges' 'Cascade Cove', 21 May 1995
gelatin silver prints, toned
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki,
purchased 2005
courtesy of Mark Adams
gift of the Deane Endowment Trust, 2005

Note: I am grateful to Sir Roderick Deane and Gillian, Lady Deane for their close support in the acquisition of this Mark Adams panoramic photograph. I considered it to be an essential addition to the Gallery collection and the Deane Endowment Trust generously purchased the artwork and presented it to the Gallery.

Parlour at Gunson Street, Ponsonby 1977 1995
gelatin silver prints, toned
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki,
gift of Mark Adams and the Partners of Ernst & Young, 1995

Ava Seymour

I recently recommended that the Gallery acquire Ava Seymour's suite of photo-collages Health, Happiness and Housing. I consider these images central in any history of photography in New Zealand. The 15 photo-collages' unforgettable title signals the work's ambition, which is a unique sequence of completed by Ava soon after her return to New Zealand from living in Berlin.

The entire suite is currently on show in Natasha Conland's contemporary group exhibition Freedom Farmers. They have been glazed and framed and are exhibited as the original collages for the first time. Even though the entire artwork has a laudable notoriety it is still essentially under-known to the public.

Health, Happiness and Housing is a perceptive and astringent portrait of New Zealand. This country had lived through a period when Robert Muldoon devised his 'think big' projects while the population had comprehensive unemployment. The change wrung by fiascoes created because of the 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour led to a demonstrative population; one prepared to make loud statements about society neither cowered nor frightened by state authority. This is the time when War time baby boomers' children were young adults and expressing how they felt about life.

Dada Moon Dance

After the first exhibition of Health, Happiness and Housing at Auckland and Christchurch during 1997 and 1998, the suite of montages gained a cult reputation as provocative photographic statements about New Zealand in the 1990s. If you try to find local parallels it's likely you'll find them in the performing arts, especially in punk's proto-grunge noise. Auckland punk's intensity was equally raw and declamatory. Think of the Suburban Reptiles songs and their aggressively effective performance style. Urban anger meets louche ennui while provoking the ever necessary disruption, anger and annoyance. Performance that likes not being liked at all, a lot.

G.I. Girls

These collages resulted from a road-trip that Ava undertook during late 1996 documenting state house communities in locations from Invercargill to Auckland. Surprisingly, her research was the first large-scale visual project initiated by any New Zealand artist depicting the template-like architecture of post-War State Housing and the consequent population of blue-collar workers and immigrant communities. It is political art. 

Devised initially as a social experiment in postwar housing, State Housing began profiling negative issues within community housing which had been unpredicted and unexpected. Seeing Health, Happiness and Housing was to see the unwanted. The series acutely reinforces the social reality of wealth versus poverty.

White Wedding, Invercargill

Valley of the Fruitcakes

While conceived as a critique of mass state housing with its archly humorous vision, the collages show how a Government-funded housing project actually addressed a genuine social need while not seeing its future implications. These communities are rendered as modular in plan while fostering human psycho-dramas that some fiction writers have also imagined as happening here.

Ava Seymour noted that New Zealand’s state housing project fostered "whole communities such as Otara and Porirua that became notorious and stigmatized for both their tenants and the appearance of their dwellings’ while further ‘depicting the dilapidation of such areas and the deterioration of our social dream."

Using her automatic fixed-focus Olympus camera, Ava recorded State housing communities at times when there appears to be a uniformly overcast sky. There may have been a blue sky on the day she visited, but Ava carefully manipulates the atmosphere to appear monochromatic and stifling.

Contrasting this shadow-less daylight is a local ‘population’ collected, sourced and derived from medical textbooks and magazines. This utilisation of such off-shore imagery is innovative for our art context. It makes foreign images relocate and immigrate to here. The people are both local and immigrant making this portrait more powerful than simply clipping from New Zealand printed sources. It also reduces recognisable sentiment and derides nationalism.

Betty and Nancy Gordon

These imported images contrast with the sort of humane social portraiture created a decade earlier by photographer Robin Morrison who concentrated on discovering and then affirming local identities, sited in their private domestic environs.

In contrast, Seymour’s humanity normalizes what we might previously have categorised as being images of freaks. We become the freaks by proxy and this provocation holds a mirror to us.

Corsophine Queen

Welfare Mom

Such an apparently shocking and uber-Gothic response to New Zealand’s people is paralleled in the paintings of artists such as Jeffrey Harris, where animated faces frequently stand as evidence of distorted relationships. Other parallels of familial dystopia can be found in Barry Cleavin's searing prints, Jacqueline Fahey's autobiographic paintings and Andy Leleisiu'ao's early paintings of relationships gone asunder. Some would call it living in a psycho drama.

Gas Mask Wedding

Tea Time

Day Care Walkabouts

Health, Happiness and Housing was not intended to be a sequence of inter-related collages that saw New Zealanders as living in ‘a half-gallon quarter acre Pavlova Paradise’. Ava Seymour's New Zealanders are rendered as socially controlled people underpinned by state subsidies and through the ghettoisation of a damaged working class, reflecting the underbelly of suburban dreams.

By being equally a critique and an affirmation, the sequence remains as challenging as it was a generation ago. In another generation it will still be regarded as tough and truthful. By shouldering images of real places with irreal inhabitants, Ava makes a social portrait which is fun, fearful and a lesson I am still being taught.

Minnie Dean

House at Cannons Creek

State Highway 1

Bandy Candy

Enema Nurse

Image credits: 

Ava Seymour
Health, Happiness and Housing 1997
1. Dada Moon Dance
2. G.I. Girls
3. White Wedding, Invercargill
4. Valley of the Fruitcakes
5. Betty and Nancy Gordon
6. Corsophine Queen
7. Welfare Mom
8. Gas Mask Wedding
9. Tea Time
10. Day Care Walkabouts
11. Minnie Dean
12. House at Cannons Creek
13. State Highway 1
14. Bandy Candy
15. Enema Nurse
Photocollage
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
purchased 2013

The tale behind our new acquisition

Albrecht Dürer, The Virgin and Child with a Monkey, c1498, engraving, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2013

In my previous post I introduced our recent acquisition, a splendid early impression of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving The Virgin and Child with a Monkey, c1498 (state: Meder a). I now want to explore the remarkable provenance (history) of this object.

After leaving Dürer’s studio, this impression of The Virgin and Child with a Monkey circulated among collectors and the art market for upwards of 300 years before being acquired by the London-based collector the Reverand Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode (1730-99). Cracherode combined private wealth with a discerning eye and established a collection of several parts, notable among which was a large number of fine prints. Our print carries Cracherode’s mark on the verso (back) at lower left:

Only the finest or most significant of Cracherode’s prints were marked with his initials and the print scholar Antony Griffiths has suggested that he reserved his mark ‘as a sign of special approval or attachment.’ As we know that Cracherode only had a small number of northern prints from the period (compared to his extensive holdings of 16th-century Italian prints, for example), we can be confident that our print was highly prized by the famous collector.

Having served as a Trustee of the British Museum since 1784, Cracherode left his several collections to the Museum on his death. But in 1806 it was discovered that over the course of a year or more, the caricaturist and amateur art dealer Robert Dighton (c1752–1814) had stolen a large number of Cracherode’s prints from the Museum. The scandal was soon picked up by the newspapers and the Trustees struck a deal with Dighton to recover as many as possible of the prints in return for not bringing a prosecution against him.

Recent research by An van Camp (Curator of Dutch and Flemish Drawings and Prints at the British Museum) has revealed the lengths Dighton went to in order to obscure the provenance of his stolen prints. The stamps and inscriptions of previous owners were scratched out and bleached as well as being obscured with false marks invented by Dighton. By obliterating the legitimate provenance of these prints (recognisable through the various marks of previous collectors) and falsifying new histories for his ill-gotten wares, Dighton hoped to sell them without raising suspicion.

Our print shows Dighton’s owner’s mark on the recto (front) at lower right:

This stamp is a tell-tale sign of Dighton’s theft. Combined with the trace of Cracherode’s own mark on the verso we can identify our print as one of those stolen from the British Museum by Dighton and not subsequently recovered. (The British Museum no longer pursues the prints that Dighton stole, and the Gallery has acquired good title to this important work.)

Our print no doubt circulated among private collectors in the years after 1806 before appearing in a commercial exhibition in London at P & D Colnaghi & Co Ltd in 1971, marking the 500th anniversary of Dürer’s birth. A private collector purchased the print from that exhibition for £2000.

In July 2012 our print resurfaced during the filming of the popular television programme Antiques Roadshow during its visit to Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom. While the owner realised that her late father had acquired the print at Colnaghi’s in 1971 she was keen to learn more. London-based dealer Philip Mould examined the print and it became one of the highlights of the day’s visit to Stowe. The print features in episode 13 of series 35 of the Antiques Roadshow (Stowe House) which screened in the United Kingdom in January of this year.

In addition to being an important and beautiful work of art, our print has a most extraordinary story to tell. We hope that Aucklanders will enjoy this delightful addition to their collection.

- Mathew Norman, Assistant Curator

Further reading:

• An Van Camp, ‘Robert Dighton and his spurious collectors’ marks on Rembrandt prints in the British Museum, London’, in The Burlington Magazine, 155, 2013, pp88–94.
• Antony Griffiths (ed.), Landmarks in Print Collecting: Connoisseurs and Donors at the British Museum since 1753, The British Museum Press, London, the Parnassus Foundation, Ridgewood, NJ, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, 1996, pp43–51.

New acquisition

Albrecht Dürer, The Virgin and Child with a Monkey, c1498, engraving, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2013

The Gallery recently acquired a superb early impression of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving The Virgin and Child with a Monkey, c.1498. (An early impression is pulled from the copper plate early in its life before the engraved lines deteriorate through repeated printing. This impression is also in the earliest state: Meder a.)

Albrecht Dürer was the leading artistic personality of the Northern Renaissance and his work was highly prized in the succeeding centuries. Dürer dramatically improved the standard of printmaking through the influential work produced at his studio in Nuremberg and his many prints were in wide circulation, making him famous throughout Europe. Importantly, Dürer acted as a conduit for many of the artistic advances of the Italian Renaissance which he encountered in person during his two trips south of the Alps.

The impact of Dürer’s first visit to Italy in 1494-95 is particularly evident in the classicising of the drapery of the Virgin’s costume seen in this composition. The simpler lines of the falling cloth reveal that Dürer had cast off much of the weight of the earlier Gothic tradition. We need only look to an earlier depiction of the same subject by the artist in which the heavy, stylised folds of the cloth are more reminiscent of carved stone or wood than actual fabric.

The close observation of incidental detail is found throughout Dürer’s work, whether it be in his paintings and prints or in the preparatory works, including his drawings and luminous watercolours. A fine example of the latter is the watercolour depicting the Weierhaus (pond or fisherman’s house) seen in the background of this print, and which is now in the British Museum, London.

It is useful to recall that Dürer created the visual effects of the wide range of textures and surfaces found in this print with only the tip of the engraver’s burin. The burin is a metal instrument with a sharp v-shaped tip which the artist uses to engrave the lines of the design into the copper plate. (A very thick ink is then rubbed into these grooves before the surface is wiped clean prior to printing.) In order to differentiate between the surfaces depicted, the artist needed to vary the depth, number and variety of marks he made in the copper. Compare the short and velvet-like fur of the monkey’s nose with the smooth skin of the fleshy Christ-child; while the rough wood of the low and rustic fence is in marked contrast to the softly waved and loosely worn hair of the Virgin.

The monkey (perhaps a Wolf’s mona monkey – Cercopithecus Wolfi) adds an exotic note to this composition. It seems that monkeys were kept as pets in the period and this poor creature may be seen chained for just that reason. However, the animal is also loaded with meaning and Erwin Panofsky pointed to the monkey as a symbol of base, immoral behaviour linked to Eve and the doctrine of Original Sin. Freighted with the weight of human failings, the monkey stands in contrast to the purity of the Virgin.

The Gallery did not previously hold an example of Dürer’s compositions of the Virgin and Child, so this acquisition fills a gap in our representation of the artist’s work. (Indeed, there does not appear to be another impression of this print in any of the other public collections in New Zealand.) For obvious reasons, this particular print was enormously popular in Dürer’s own time and later and a number of copies were produced by printmakers who were keen to cash-in on Dürer’s success.

- Mathew Norman, Assistant Curator

Further reading:
Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, two vols, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1945, p67.

Grader, 1959

Before we left for the summer holidays a colleague invited me downstairs to view a recently acquired artwork. In the crypt-like Receiving Room we watched registrar Fiona Moorhead unwrap Sybil Andrews’ Grader, 1959.

I’d spent some time studying an image of the linocut on my PC, and the real thing didn’t disappoint. Rolling its way down the tissue-like paper, which is so transparent you can be looking at the reverse of the print without realising it, is the carefully cut image of a piece of mid-century farm machinery full of force and dynamism. Grader exudes energy and charm in part because of Andrews’ management of bold subject matter in a tight composition, and her use of the somewhat homely and accessible linocut technique.

Sybil Andrews, Grader, 1959
linocut, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2012

Representing the rhythms of contemporary life in tightly composed scenes of the city, sport and work, Andrews was a master of her modern medium – the linoleum block print. Made using industrial flooring material, lino prints were considered a lesser art form than wood cut prints. But Claude Flight, leader of the Grosvenor School, rejected the restraints of the past and ignored entrenched hierarchies, declaring that ‘a lino-cut colour print should not look like an oil or water-colour painting, it is a print from a soft linoleum block and should not be taken for a wood-cut, a wood engraving, or an etching, it should take its individual place on a wall and be recognised as a lino-cut’.

In Grader the white blade slices the ground, cutting a curly ribbon of earth as the large front wheels go one way, and the smaller rear wheels another. In the midst of this swirl of curvilinear forms and angles man and machine appear fused, and it’s difficult to establish who’s  in control.  This was very likely an effect Andrews was eager to create. The faceless, lone worker in Grader contrasts Andrews’ earlier scenes of manual labour in which workers come in teams, appearing more abstract – a reflection of her egalitarian interests which she shared with the fellow Grosvenor School linocutters.

Described as ‘British Futurists’, the Grosvenor School linocutters incorporated elements from other styles, like the Italian Futurists celebratory depictions of speed and movement – what Umberto Boccioni feverishly described as ‘our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed’. There are also links with what the Vorticists described in Blast as ‘the forms of machinery, factories, new and vaster buildings, bridges and works’. Though most of the Grosvenor School’s scenes of the city and inter-war merriment appear less imbued by pervading unease compared with the Vorticist’s visions of a sinister and dehumanising city.

Andrews produced many of the Grosvenor School’s most enduring images of the 1920s and 30s, including Haulers, 1929 and The Gale, 1930 (both held in Auckland Art Gallery). In Speedway, 1934, we see her suggestion of a more threatening and impersonal machine age, one that might fuse human and machine.

At the height of the linocut movement Andrews used the speed of the city as a metaphor for the modern world. But in 1947 she moved to Canada, and settled in Campbell River, a remote logging and fishing town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Although she found herself in an isolated area (more Douglas Fir forests than speedways), Andrews was still able to find local scenes of activity – logging trucks and ploughers at work, ice skaters at play, and these became sources of inspiration for her art. The titles of her works – Logging Team, 1952, Hauling, 1952, Skater, 1953, Ploughing Pasture, 1954 – hint at an on-going interest in movement and manual work.

Auckland Art Gallery holds 12 other works by Sybil Andrews, all of which were gifted to the Gallery by Rex Nan Kivell in 1953, along with more than 200 other British modernist prints. And while the Gallery has some of the best examples of Andrews’ work, until we acquired Grader we had nothing to represent her later career.

- Julia Waite, Assistant Curator / Assistant Project Coordinator