Colin McCahon

Biography

In 1939 the twenty-year-old Colin McCahon exhibited for the first time with the Otago Art Society in Dunedin, and one of his paintings was refused. The organisers found “Harbour Cone from Peggy’s Hill” too abstract: the volcanic cones of the Otago Peninsula had been reduced in it to bare, almost monochrome forms that looked like a topographic diagram. Under the society’s rules every member was entitled to show at least one work, but the rule did not help.

The painting was hung only after other young artists took down their own works in solidarity.

He was born on 1 August 1919 in Timaru, the second of three children, and spent his childhood in Dunedin. Works by his maternal grandfather, the photographer and painter William Ferrier, hung in the family home. He later remembered Otago Boys’ High School as the worst horror of his youth. At fourteen, having already decided to become an artist, he went to Russell Clark’s Saturday classes, and the landscapes of Toss Woollaston, full of New Zealand light and air, settled the matter. From 1937 to 1939 he studied at the Dunedin School of Art under Robert Nettleton Field, alongside Doris Lusk and Anne Hamblett, his future wife. He earned his living in a touring variety show, painted stage scenery and picked fruit.

In the war, though he regarded himself as a pacifist, he decided that fascism had to be defeated and tried to enlist, but the doctors turned him down. In 1942 he married Anne Hamblett. Among the wedding presents was the geologist Charles Cotton’s “The Geomorphology of New Zealand”, and this scientific book left a clear mark on his painting: Cotton’s diagrams stripped houses and trees out of the landscape and left its bare geological basis, while McCahon looked in that cleared land for a spiritual one. The young couple managed to live together only intermittently; he travelled around the South Island for seasonal work, and the places appeared in his pictures, most often the Nelson region. He exhibited with The Group in Christchurch from 1940, became a member in 1947 and remained one until it was wound up in 1977.

His first mature works appeared just after the war: “The Angel of the Annunciation”, “Takaka: Night and Day”, “The Promised Land”. In 1946, in Nelson, he began “I Paul to you at Ngatimoti”, and the Gospel events in this series take place among New Zealand hills. McCahon never belonged to a church, though he acknowledged that questions of faith were central to his work. At the same time words appeared on his canvases. The public was indignant; he explained that a direct word gives the viewer a way into the picture and that religious painting has a long tradition of it. To my mind, there is more humility than defiance in that explanation: the painter accepts in advance that without a prompt he will not be understood.

In 1948 the family moved to Christchurch, where he worked as a gardener and met the poet John Caselberg; the two later made several works joining text and image. The poet and editor Charles Brasch helped him travel to Melbourne in 1951 to study the paintings in the National Gallery of Victoria.

In May 1953 the McCahons bought a house in Titirangi, on the edge of Auckland, among kauri trees; it is now a small museum of the family. At the Auckland City Art Gallery he started as a cleaner, then looked after the paintings, and in April 1956 became deputy director, helping to prepare the first exhibitions of New Zealand art history.

From April to July 1958 he and his wife travelled to the United States on gallery business. Until then he had known Newman, Malevich, Pollock, Rothko, Mondrian and de Kooning only from reproductions. What struck him most was the physical size of Pollock’s canvases: he called them pictures for people to walk past. He visited Allan Kaprow’s studio, and the idea of a work that the viewer walks through rather than past stayed with him. On his return he gave up frames and stretchers, began painting on loosely hanging canvas, increased the scale and moved from single paintings to series. The “Northland Panels” of the same year consist of eight parts. “The Wake” consists of sixteen, with lines from Caselberg’s poems. In a lecture in 1963 he described the hanging of “The Wake” with Kaprow’s word “environment”.

In August 1964 McCahon left the gallery to teach at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland and stayed six years; Richard Killeen, Robin White and Ian Scott are named among those he influenced. From the mid-sixties he painted almost entirely in black and white and brought numbers and texts into his pictures. “The Lark’s Song” is built on a poem by Matire Kereama, whose book “The Tail of the Fish” deepened his interest in Maori culture.

In January 1971 he gave up teaching to paint full-time. Words increasingly pushed out the image, though he did not abandon landscape: the “Necessary Protection” series with the Muriwai coast, views of the Kaipara, “Victory Over Death 2”, which the New Zealand Government presented to the Australian National Gallery. Of the painting “Jump” he wrote that same year that he was not painting protest pictures. He was painting what was still there and what he could see before the sky turned black with soot and the sea became a rubbish tip.

In 1975 and 1977 the Manawatu and Govett-Brewster galleries mounted exhibitions of his religious works and of “Necessary Protection”; he was still mocked, but his supporters were growing in number. In 1984 the exhibition “I Will Need Words” was shown at the Biennale of Sydney, while he himself was already seriously ill and could barely take in his growing reputation abroad.

Colin McCahon died on 27 May 1987 in Auckland, at the city hospital. A year later the Auckland gallery opened the retrospective “Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys”, and on 6 June 1988 his ashes were scattered over the Muriwai headland.