JEFFREY HARRIS FIVE IMPORTANT PAINTINGS
A SEQUENCE OF SECRETS: FIVE IMPORTANT PAINTINGS BY JEFFREY HARRIS
Described by Justin Paton in 2005 as “New Zealand art’s definitive explorer of emotional thresholds”1 Jeffrey Harris has built worlds of visual fiction comprised of the dichotomy of opposites. What at first seems to be disconcertingly autobiographical, strange and unsettling in fact quickly declares itself to be universal and obsessively intimate as it then enters into the realms of mystery and fable. Psychologically epic, “skewed and unsettling,”2 containing a vast cast of characters, signs and symbols, replete with references and with no single reading, the five paintings comprising this exhibition are visual conversations between apparent event and emotion, between possible fact and thought. The narrative slips and slides back and forth, as the imagery errupts, as probabilities emerge and intensify. These works are open and closed, confessing and denying, primitive and modern, personal and universal, dissonant and uncertain, and unforgettably revealing “a community of botched aspirations”3 where the flawed are engaged in a ceaseless theatre of love and loss. Each of these five paintings is accompanied by an essay from an art critic. Their willing contributions, noted with considerable gratitude, collectively stand as testimony to “the insistent potency of his work and the abiding impact of his images.”4 Stephen Higginson Milford Galleries Dunedin
1. Justin Paton, Jeffrey Harris, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Victoria University Press, 2005, p. 40 2. Ibid, p. 62 3. Vincent O’Sullivan, Jeffrey Harris: Renaissance Days, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2016, p. 61 4. Priscilla Pitts, Jeffrey Harris, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Victoria University Press, p. 6 2
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Religious and Allegorical Painting (1973) Oil on board, panel 1220 x 1220 mm
Oscar Wilde claimed that in every first novel the hero is the author as Christ, or Faust. Much the same might be said of certain painters. Certainly there is something novelistic, narrational, poetic, about the arc of early artworks by Jeffrey Harris, with their numerous paintings on the theme of the Crucifixion of Christ. Religious and Allegorical Painting was produced by Harris in Wellington in August 1973, when the artist was 23 years old. Raw and visceral and collage-like - a dream scape - this is a painting that, despite the gaiety of colour and occasional sardonic detail, is pervaded by melancholy. Each of these figures seems locked inside their own contemplative sadness, even while they act in concert in a theatrical spectacle staged in a backblocks of lonely hills and tamed farmland. Based on Christian iconography skewed to a New Zealand perspective, and offering multiple sometimes contradictory readings, the painting evokes the bloody pastoral of farmyard slaughter and the country itself as a fallen arcadia, a golgotha, an abbatoir. The upper edge of the painting reveals a pair of hands dangling like low-hanging fruit, while in the background a small Christ-figure with his hands cut off is pinned to a tree trunk wide as a barn door. This might be a country where artists have their hands chopped off 4
and gathered into baskets and their carcases delivered to the meatworks. Christ is shown as an artist sacrificed by a benighted, conformist, repressive culture that denies the role of artist as miracle-worker and as a maker of signs and symbols for people to live by. Such imagery makes the immediate point
down from the cross, he is being examined by a Doubting Thomas archetype who peers at the stab wound in his chest. This sceptical authority figure, symbolised by his hat, is also similarly unclothed, a beefy, rubbery column of flesh, a pillar of the community, and possibly a ‘Father’, that is a priest, celebrating the Mass by holding up a small chalice to collect the blood of Christ from his stigmata. Possibly too he represents the artist’s father, that is someone who was antagonistic towards his son making a career as an artist - considered misfits, non-conformists, outsiders.
of comparison the crucifixion works of Colin McCahon, Michael Smither, Paul Gauguin and Francis Bacon.
Christ is dressed as a competitive swimmer for a time when we extolled our athletes. Depicted in a lower corner is a competitive sports type, a bull-necked youth whose muscular physique and flushed angry expression suggests a relationship of betrayal with Christ. If he is the envious or malicious Judas, then the woman behind him at the side of Christ is the compassionate Veronica holding a cloth with which to wipe Christ’s brow. Behind her, a tree flourishes with green leaves, while balancing this, on the other side of the scene, near the masculinist authority figure and a maternal spectator figure, there’s a tree blasted and barren, branches pointing heavenwards.
For an artist, hands are not only instruments of enquiry but also devices for making flesh palpable, and this is a very fleshy painting. The large, central Christ figure is wearing a pair of lime green swimming togs and nothing else. With his head lowered as if just brought
The scene is also demarcated by two symbolic barriers or perhaps connection devices. One is a schematic set of black lines draped from the shoulder of the priest authority figure, which, with its numbering, suggests the Stations of the Cross as a map of railway 5
stations on the main trunk line with branch lines running off it. Or it may represent the whip with which Christ was scourged and chastised. And there is a church communion rail, against which the devout worshipper might kneel in order to receive the symbolic blood and body of Christ, shared out during Mass. Just as the whole scene is enclosed by enfolding hills, so too do the arms of the deposed Christ encircle his helpers. One of these helpers has an unclothed, ashen-white body, ghostly and ectoplasmic, like a recording angel, or else he is John the Evangelist, the witness whose writing quill could also be a cataract of tears as he prepares to write his testament in a small book. Christ has on his head not a crown of thorns, nor a halo, but a kind of bathing cap featuring a red cross on a white ground, a symbol that derives from Italian Renaissance religious imagery, in particular the San Zeno altarpiece by Andrea Mantegna, where the same device is a shield on which Roman soldiers, throwing dice, gamble for the clothes of Jesus. If unclothed bodies evoke heroic aspiration and sports prowess, they also suggest the erotic. In the background the artist has painted a fabular unicorn with a white horn, identified in medieval theology with Christ and with weakness of the flesh, that is lust. This unicorn prances like a priapic subtext. And in the distant background, a young woman, barefoot, liberated and free in a brightly coloured dress is walking away along 6
a track, accompanied by a merrily frolicking dog. If there is religious and allegorical oppression, there is also love, hope and secular redemption, here on earth. David Eggleton PROVENANCE Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Stations of the Cross, 1981
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Untitled (Self Portrait) (1980) Oil on hardwood, panel 1197 x 1197 mm
The self-portrait is perhaps the most vulnerable and psychologically expressive of all painting types – an exercise in total introspection, and especially in the case of an artist like Jeffrey Harris, for whom all painting is an act of nakedly candid self-reading and deconstruction in the traditions of Expressionism and New Objectivism. “A lot of the painting,” says Harris, “is about negation and sacrifice”. Untitled (Self Portrait) is an important work. It appeared in Harris’ major survey show Jeffrey Harris at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1981, and in 1982 was selected by American critic and curator Gene Baro, along with work by Milan Mrkusich and Greer Twiss, to tour the United States and Australia as part of the prestigious Carnegie International. The artist stands holding (though the hand is a stump, a reference to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s 1915 painting Self-Portrait as a Soldier) a long stick, the tip of which is blurred out, although in other paintings appears to end in a koru form. “If anything,” says Harris, “the pole now reminds me of the pole with the sponge that was used to wipe the blood of Christ on the Crucifixion. That would fit in with the mood of sacrifice which pervades the painting”. The artist’s torso is incised with a vivid bloody mandorla from which his heart 8
tumbles, tracing a cartoonish comet’s tail arc of movement to land in a dish. Similar symbolism, the open chest and cloud stick, is found in Harris’ Judith series of 1978-79, perhaps connecting it to his relationship with actress Judith Laube in the 1970s. The telephone, quoted from Dalí, represents, says Harris, “disconnected, broken communication”. What we see here is not so much an attempt to deliver an accurate likeness, but rather to capture an inscape, the artist’s state of mind. The face is undecipherable, erased by a Francis Bacon-esque smear of existential angst. The pose is that of the Modernist artist-hero cross-pollinated with the kiwi “man alone”. The abstract background references the Otago Peninsula filtered through Mrkusich’s formalism. Inside and outside merge as a geometric motif. The path trailing away can only be walked by one, leading to abrupt and forbidding cliffs. Andrew Paul Wood Quotes from communication with the artist.
PROVENANCE Peter Webb Galleries, Auckland, Recent Works, 1980 Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Jeffrey Harris, 1981 Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, New Zealand Paintings, 1982/83 Seattle Art Museum, New Zealand Paintings, 1983 Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, New Zealand Paintings, 1983 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, New Zealand Paintings, 1983 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, New Zealand Paintings, 1983 Centre Gallery of Contemporary Art, Hamilton, Carnegie Paintings, 1983 Deutscher Gallery, Melbourne, Australian Art Post-1960, 1988 9
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Three Figures (1988) Oil on linen, stretcher 2435 x 1820 mm
As old as art itself, the trope of three figures in a landscape is recurrent throughout Jeffrey Harris’ work. Unholy trinities anchoring the picture plane are an economical means to combine his impulse to narrative with a solid structure. Confronted with a composition like this, art historians in search of iconography to decode might sense in the disguised symbolism a reference to a moral dilemma from Greek mythology. But this is not as easily read as a painting of “The Choice of Hercules� where the central figure is always shown dithering over whether to knuckle down and follow Virtue on the difficult route to glory, or to be enticed by Vice down the easier road to ruin. Here the imagery waxes more cryptically allegorical. Mutely holding their arms rigidly at their sides, these three figures appear absorbed in some important ritual. Occupying the shallow space of a mounded foreground, they dominate the composition. A zig zagging brown line connects them into a dynamic diagonal which leads across the dark blue midground to the clashing orange and lime green in the background beyond. With their forest green jackets and pronounced nasolabial folds, the two figures on the left seem variations of the same man. 12
Is it the artist himself, renowned for his severe self-portraits? If so, he seems to be consigning one version of himself to the past, rendered indistinct by a blurred face. The central figure steps resolutely towards the viewer. Has he seen the book on the ground, open and awaiting the inscription of his next chapter? Or has his life to date been an open book? Colour transforms this figure. Patches of pink and mauve pattern the shoulders and arms linking in with the promising sunrise-pink sky above the horizon line. The husk of the former self will be left behind, mired in the inky dark that enfolds his form. To the right, a long-haired third figure enters the scene, the camel-coloured form of the upper body cropped out by the edge of the painting. With bowed head, this figure acts as a witness, perhaps an angel portending new beginnings. Linda Tyler
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White Painting (1988) Oil on canvas, stretcher 2130 x 1525 mm
“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.� - Rainer Maria Rilke White Painting was made in 1988 four years after Jeffrey Harris had packed up and moved to Australia. He was 39 years old and ready to challenge the wisdom of the time that artists had to stay put at home if they were to retain their reputation. Instead he used the stimulus of a new culture to open up new possibilities in his work. Harris has often spoken of his unease at the way New Zealand audiences fixated on the personal narratives they read into his work. He felt strongly they were seeing stories rather than the paintings as objects. White Painting challenges this response. Through its sheer size along with its direct encounter with the painting process, it is an important marker. Harris is asserting himself as an expressive painter of psychologic states and connections. It was one of a series of bold moves in scale, format, coloration and content that he was to make during his years in Australia. Of course White Painting can be also open to simple story-telling, but Harris has 16
mixed in a complex of symbolic imagery to complicate matters. Masks, heads, a hand, unattached limbs, an ear all float in the space occupied by the impassive figures. It is a meta-narrative full of our illusions about relationships, personality and the important things often left unsaid. Go ahead, make a convincing story from these almost Lynchian elements if you can, Harris seems to imply - the real story though lives in plain sight on the surface of the canvas. The achievement here is the creation of a profound sense of equilibrium out of a fury of painting gestures. Strangely, for all the extravagance, beauty and detail of the painted marks, what we are looking at here is control. To use a photographic term, Harris has created a ‘decisive moment’. To give some painterly heft to his introspection Harris has conjured up a few artists from the past. Edvard Munch is here and so too Willem de Kooning and perhaps even the Australian abstract expressionist Tony Tuckson. As a painter he has never been afraid to reference his influences and cultural heroes. The result is an evocative context to weigh against the silence of the painting’s two protagonists. White Painting eloquently captures the contradictions, inconsistencies and uncertainties of life within the awful 17
beauty of its painted world. Emerging as we have from the enforced isolation of a pandemic lockdown, such an encounter is an intense experience. That an artwork can still be so relevant to us today shows how successful Harris has been in speaking directly to the disturbing ambiguities of life. Jim Barr and Mary Barr PROVENANCE Deutscher Gallery, Melbourne, Jeffrey Harris Recent Work, 1989 Milford Galleries Dunedin, Studio 18D, 2017 Milford Galleries Queenstown, The Wakatipu Chronicle, 2017 Milford Galleries Dunedin, Auckland Art Fair, 2019
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Two Figures Falling (1988) Oil on linen, stretcher 1830 x 3655 mm Two Figures Falling was painted in Melbourne where Harris had settled after his residency at the Prahran Victoria College of the Arts. Its expansive scale, seen in other works of the period, seems commensurate with the shift from Dunedin, insular and provincial, to a large, energetic city. The painting is physically overpowering and eschews the introspection of earlier works. There is no definitive reading of a Jeffrey Harris work. The artist himself has stated that “A lot of the paintings are about two or three or four things. They’re to be read on that many levels”.1 Personal experience, the human condition, the role of metaphor, and the means of representation seethe through his practice. Harris’ portraits are intimate explorations of private relationships but also reflect the unspoken societal rules and structures which shape all human interactions. There are many ways to fall. In and out of love, into a rage. We can fall victim, fall into despair, fall asleep, fall for someone, fall ill. In the act of falling, we are not actors but are acted upon. The stasis of the falling figures in this work amplifies this lack of agency. While the confident outlines and block colours Harris uses for the couple brings them into sharp focus, they reveal neither overt motion nor emotion. They are trapped between cause 21
and effect: eternally falling, eternally frozen. The lean, elongated bodies dominate the structure of the painting; the male figure, his body figured in bold blue and red is twisted to face the viewer and seems on the edge of falling out of the picture plane. Both compelling and repellent, it is the featureless faces that draw the eye. Are they yet to take human form or have they been stripped of their humanity to become “a face without a heart”?2 Combined with limbs and appendages that have been likewise reduced to line and form, the depersonalised figures are everyone and no-one. A shift from the intense introspection and emotive expression of Harris’ earlier works, Two Figures Falling
occupies not just a larger physical space, but a larger conceptual one. Three masks stare and grin from the corners of the painting; pointed and shield-like, they exude a fetishistic energy that is a counterpoint to the blank passivity of the figures. Possessed of faces, albeit limited to the most basic of elements, their narrow gazes are uneasy and it is unclear if the watching objects have been cast off or are waiting to be put on. The symbolic language the artist uses has no simple translation; as with any interpretation, meanings alter with context, and at times slide away from the viewer altogether. Likewise, Harris’ visual syntax shifts throughout his practice, at
times crossing back on itself and or moving ever further from its initial form. Part of this syntax is an intensity of mark-making which characterises Harris’ practice, whether in the detailed, scored lines of his drawings or the muscular application of paint. In Two Figures Falling, the couple possess a solidity that anchors them within the work but also stills their movement. The figures curve, Icarus-like, beneath a bloated yellow sun whose viscous light bleeds out from the centre of the painting. Short, stabbing brushwork and sweeps of flame and ochre throb and flare to create a fractured, unsettled backdrop. Whereas it is the falling subjects who are ostensibly in motion, it is their surroundings that pulse with life. Throughout his career, Jeffrey Harris has peeled back the skin of the everyday. His faceless figures here are a paradox: perpetually falling, yet motionless; surrounded by potential threat but seemingly untouched by it. To embrace Two Figures Falling, means to embrace the tensions and contradictions the work reveals: we need to cast off our own mind forg’d manacles3 and fall as well. Lisa Wilkie 1. Jeffrey Harris in “A Conversation with Jeffrey Harris,” Art New Zealand, No. 18, Summer 1981. 2. WIlliam Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV, 7,105-7. 3. William Blake, “London,” Songs of Experience. PROVENANCE Deutscher Gallery, Melbourne, Jeffrey Harris Recent Work, 1989
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CONTRIBUTORS [1] David Eggleton has written extensively about the work of artist Jeffrey Harris for a variety of catalogues, magazines and books. A poet, arts critic and book reviewer, he is the current New Zealand Poet Laureate. [2] Andrew Paul Wood is a Christchurchbased critic, writer, and independent cultural historian and curator. [3] Linda Tyler is currently the Convenor of Museums and Cultural Heritage at the University of Auckland. She writes regularly for Art News and in 2020 has curated art exhibitions for the Maritime Museum and Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland. [4] Jim Barr and Mary Barr are art commentators and collectors from Wellington. [5] Lisa Wilkie has a background in language, literature, fine arts and art theory. She completed her Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies in 2016 and is interested in the intersections of art, power, and violence. After seven years as an art consultant/curator, she now works as an arts advisor at the Dunedin City Council.
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ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Jeffrey Harris is a self-taught artist who has drawn extensively from modern art history and the influence of his peers. Preoccupied with people and their relations between each other and the world, Harris has revisited certain subjects throughout his practice: the crucifixion, family and social relationships, the self-portrait. Opposing emotions such as love and hate, joy and despair are juxtaposed as creative and combative elements. The humanistic focus and emotive and intellectual power of his works leave the viewer in no doubt about the mood or intention of the artist or the emotional significance of the event depicted. As well as a clear continuum in Harris’ subject matter and symbolic message, the style of his work has fluctuated between a robust expressionist style and obsessively detailed work. He acknowledges sources of inspiration openly and influences of German Expressionism and New Zealand painters Michael Smither and Rita Angus can be seen in his energyfilled brushwork, bold use of colour and line, and flattened perspectives. Jeffrey Harris was born in Akaroa in 1949. He has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and Australia and at Carnegie International Pittsburgh (1982), Wooster Gallery New York (1985). He has been the recipient of numerous major awards, most recently the Wallace Award (2003), New Zealand’s major painting prize. He was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 1977. In 1978 his first Survey Show toured New Zealand public galleries. He is represented in public gallery collections throughout New Zealand and Australia. A second survey exhibition was curated by Justin Paton for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and toured through five New Zealand public galleries 2004-06. This was followed 10 years later by a solo exhibition of largely new works at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2016. 25
Jeffrey Harris in his studio, Dunedin, 2020
Jeffrey Harris, Five Important Paintings, 2020 Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition held at Milford Galleries Dunedin 25 July - 18 August 2020 All artworks in the exhibition are for sale Jeffrey Harris is represented by Milford Galleries Dunedin
Milford Galleries Dunedin w w w. m i l f o r d g a l l e r i e s .c o. n z
Artwork copyright © Jeffrey Harris, 2020 Text copyright © of the individual authors, 2020 Catalogue design and photography by Glenn Frei Catalogue copyright © Milford House Ltd, 2020 26
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