Ten×Ten: Art at Te Papa
Edited by Athol McCredieIntroduction: Curators’ choices
Ten/01 Head of Art – Charlotte Davy 18
Ten/02 Historical International Art – Mark Stocker 44
Ten/03 Historical New Zealand Art – Rebecca Rice 68
Ten/04 Historical Photography – Lissa Mitchell 92
Ten/05 Modern Art – Chelsea Nichols 118
Ten/06 Decorative Art & Design – Justine Olsen 140
Ten/07 Modern & Contemporary Māori & Indigenous Art –Megan Tamati-Quennell 164
Ten/08 Photography – Athol McCredie 186
Ten/09 Pacific Art – Nina Tonga 212
Ten/10 Contemporary Art – Sarah Farrar 234
The curators 260
The artists
credits
choices
McCredie
I once overheard a couple of women talking about the art on the walls at an exhibition. It was a series of comments along the lines of ‘Oh yes, that one’s nice,’ ‘No, I don’t like that,’ and so on; an account of likes and dislikes bounced back and forth between the two. I wanted to go up to them and say, ‘Judgement is easy but it closes things off. More difficult but more rewarding is to go into your thoughts and feelings as you look at the work – to let it speak and to explore your response.’
In this book, ten of Te Papa’s art curators – including Head of Art, Charlotte Davy – have each picked ten works from Te Papa’s collections that particularly speak to them. This may seem precisely a series of likes or faves. But the difference is that each curator has written about why they find certain works interesting, resonant or significant. They have indeed explored their responses.
A personal selection approach contrasts with the usual format of collection books, which tend to showcase highlights as they are defined by the consensus of curators, critics and scholars. Such books often appear as art histories – minus the connecting narratives – as told from a particular collection. But there is also room for an alternative sort of publication that complements the received account with direct, individual responses.
This book accompanies a renewal of the art experience at Te Papa – a gallery revamp which brings art down to where the audiences are on level four and increases the amount of space to show it by 35 per cent. Both this book and new forms of digital access will complement the expansion of exhibition space, each offering increased ways of showcasing Te Papa’s collections. The thrust of the renewal is not only to show more of the collections but also to make art accessible to as broad a spectrum of the public as possible. This book works in parallel, aiming to draw back the intimidating screen of anonymous authority that tends to surround museum exhibitions and publications.
It goes behind the scenes a little to reveal the curators as real people, and identifies their selections by grouping them in blocks of ten, each roughly sequenced by the period of history covered by their portfolio. Themes come across in both the writing of these curators and their selections that allow you to recognise their interests. The texts are generally more informal and personal than is conventional, and the curators often mention their own connections with the works. In all these ways we hope to make art appreciation less of a mystery and to allow viewers to connect with work by seeing it through the eyes of curators, handing them the confidence to reflect on their own responses in turn.
By avoiding a ‘greatest hits’ approach to making a selection we also reveal some of the diversity and richness of the collections. A collection book like this allows curators to select pieces unconstrained by the usual demands of fitting a theme, representing an artist, period or type of art, or of making connections with other works. This opens a space for art that might otherwise be rarely seen. Having
artists, and paintings by George Dawe, Sydney Lough Thompson, Archibald Nicoll and Rhona Haszard.
In common with many a museum building project, there was little provision for operational funding once the building opened, either for the museum or the art gallery, and no money for acquisitions. However, a profit was realised from mounting the Centennial Exhibition of International and New Zealand Art in 1940,3 an exhibition of imported British art combined with an expansion of the academy’s regular annual display of local work. These funds were used for the purchase of art and, including gifts, 40 works were acquired from the exhibition. These were mostly by British artists, despite the suggestion of the governor-general in his opening speech that a ‘national effort to locate works of early New Zealand art of a high standard with a view to acquiring them for this gallery’ should be made.4
The British emphasis on collecting continued post-war once funding from endowments and bequests by individuals such as Ellen Eames and Sir Harold Beauchamp became available. This was made possible by the appointment of honorary representatives in London, placing selection of works very much in their hands. Their scope was modern British artists, from the early twentieth century to the present, and some fine works were acquired, including paintings by Walter Sickert, William Nicholson, Spencer Gore, Ivon Hitchens and Stanley Spencer
The other collecting thrust was eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British watercolours, justified by director Stewart Maclennan in 1966 as the area where ‘our artistic beginnings are recorded almost exclusively’5 – a philosophy that was significantly out of step with an emerging New Zealand art history that located such origins more directly in this country’s colonial period.
Works on paper from Britain and Europe in general were to become a strength of the collection. In the 1950s the British watercolours were substantially increased by a gift from Archdeacon FHD Smythe, and London dealer and expatriate New Zealander Rex Nan Kivell donated a total of 581 mostly modernist prints, ranging from the 1920s work of Claude Flight to contemporary prints by Henry Moore and Eduardo Paolozzi. And each year from 1952 to 1973, Wellington advertising agency director Sir John Ilott gifted a range of international historical prints, eventually totalling more than seven hundred. They included works by Dürer, Rembrandt and Wenceslaus Hollar, through to Whistler, Muirhead Bone and Gerald Brockhurst.
However, by the 1950s, and certainly into the 1960s, the emphasis of the National Art Gallery on collecting British art started to look increasingly untenable. World War II had loosened New Zealand’s ties with Britain, and it was no longer a case of ‘Where she goes, we go’, in the famous 1939 words of Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage. The idea that New Zealand’s cultural and artistic development required exposure to British exemplars was eclipsed by the view that the most interesting art for New Zealanders was being made in their very own country.
Rhona Haszard Morning calm, Camaret (1926) oil on canvas, 442 x 546 mm gift of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, 1936
Walter Sickert
The blue hat (1914) oil on canvas, 465 x 384 mm purchased 1951 with Harold Beauchamp Collection funds
3 Not to be confused with the art-historically more significant National Centennial Exhibition of New Zealand Art organised by AH McLintock for the centennial celebrations.
4 Viscount Galway, quoted in ‘Centennial Art Exhibition’, Dominion, 11 November 1939, p. 13.
5 Stewart Bell Maclennan, ‘Art in New Zealand: Survey, trends, and influences, 1938 to the present’, An encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Government Printer, Wellington, 1966, vol. 1, p. 87.
This came to a head in the mid-1960s, when one newspaper article described the government acquisition funding as a ‘disgrace’ and a ‘public humiliation’ to those who ran the gallery,6 and another suggested that the gallery should be ‘living up to its name as a national gallery by concentrating on the purchase and display of the work of New Zealand artists’.7 Perhaps prompted by such criticism, the government began to allocate money in special grants from 1966 to acquire contemporary New Zealand art. The gallery consequently bought work by Rita Angus, MT Woollaston, Ralph Hotere, Robert Ellis, John Drawbridge and, in 1969, its first Colin McCahon, after declining a gift of his work in 1964. Mounting complaints about members of an amateur society controlling a government institution were also eventually heard, and in 1972 an act of parliament eliminated direct involvement of the academy in managing the National Art Gallery.
Even with these changes the gallery was hampered by minuscule acquisition funding. When McCahon’s Northland panels (see pages 236–37) was offered to the gallery in 1978 it was initially turned down on cost grounds. A one-off New Zealand Lottery Board grant saved the day, and from 1982 the board supplied acquisition funding on an annual basis. ‘For the first time ever the National Art Gallery was able to step into the national and international markets with some confidence’, noted director Luit Bieringa in 1982.8 This enabled a significant effort to expand the collection of recent New Zealand art, with work by artists such as Ralph Hotere, Gordon Walters, Jeffrey Harris, Vivian Lynn and Don Driver added, along with a series of significant paintings by McCahon. To a lesser extent this effort was also extended to back-buying work of earlier artists, including Rata Lovell-Smith, RN Field, WH Allen and A Lois White.
International collecting now shifted to the affordable area of print-making, both modern and contemporary, as well as to photography. The National Art Gallery had begun tentatively collecting photography in 1976, and by the 1980s, at the instigation of Bieringa, led the country in collecting both contemporary New Zealand and international photography.
Downstairs in the same building, the National Museum was also increasingly engaging with photography. In 1943 it had acquired one of the cornerstones of its photography collection, some six thousand nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury negatives by the Burton Brothers/Muir & Moodie studio. Other collections of historical negatives were acquired over the following three decades, including those by James Bragge, Leslie Adkin, Gordon H Burt and Spencer Digby. By the 1980s the museum was beginning to understand that, more than an image library of illustrative material, it had a photographic history collection.
In the same decade, the Te Maori exhibition of customary taonga that toured New Zealand from 1986 shook up the museum world in this country. In museums holding such items it forced a new engagement with iwi and a rethinking
MT Woollaston View towards Mount Richmond, Nelson (c.1938) oil on paper on cardboard, 421 x 468 mm purchased 1966
Gordon Walters Untitled (1955) oil on muslin on hardboard, 504 x 617 mm purchased 1983 with New Zealand Lottery Board funds
6 GLE, ‘Frugal living for National Gallery’, Evening Post, 29 May 1965, p. 30.
7 ‘Aloof art gallery’, Dominion, 18 March 1966, p. 2.
8 Annual report of the National Art Gallery, National Museum and National War Memorial Government Printer, Wellington, 1982, p. 7. 11
Te Papa’s Head of Art Charlotte Davy in the movable storage rack area of the museum’s paintings and small sculpture store. The painting slid out of the rack on the right is Gretchen Albrecht’s In a shower of gold (see pages 38–39).
Curator Historical New Zealand Art Rebecca Rice and Curator Pacific Art Nina Tonga in Te Papa’s Pacific Cultures collection store. Behind them are u‘u (clubs) and tokotoko pio‘o (staffs) from the Marquesas Islands, and a woven mu‘umu‘u (dress) and military jacket believed to be from Tuvalu. The drawer Nina Tonga has slid open holds the tīvaevae Ina and the shark (see page 216).
Anne Estelle Rice
Portrait of Katherine Mansfield (1918) oil on canvas, 655 x 520 mm purchased 1940 with TG Macarthy Trust funds
This iconic portrait of New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield is bold and modern – much like the writer herself. It was painted by her close friend Anne Estelle Rice, an American artist whom Mansfield met in Paris. There, Rice was part of the circle around the Scottish colourists, a group of avant-garde artists known for their use of strong, confident colour. The dramatic red that dominates this painting was a favourite of both women. Rice made the colour pop even more by adding complementary green hues into the shadows on Mansfield’s neck and skin, and into the floral patterns of the background.
However, the green tinge in Mansfield’s face also reminds me of how ill with tuberculosis she was at the time. When this portrait was painted, Mansfield was recovering in Cornwall after suffering her first major lung haemorrhage. Knowing this makes the blood red of her frock feel grimly foreboding. The disease would kill Mansfield just a few years later, at the age of 34.
Beyond the tragic intimations of the palette, Rice’s use of red also captures something of Mansfield’s innermost passions. The colour scarlet appears throughout Mansfield’s writings, associated with female desire. Similarly, the floral background might reference Mansfield’s recurring use of flowers as a symbol for feminine beauty. These motifs come together in Mansfield’s unpublished poem ‘Scarlet tulips’ (1913), a thinly veiled expression of her lesbian desires which reads in part, ‘Strange flower, half opened, scarlet / So soft to feel and press / My lips on your petals … A violent scarlet passion / Stirs me so savagely’. This work is more than a picture of a modern writer with a sassy haircut – to me, Rice’s portrait is intimately bound up with Mansfield’s death and desires.
Rita Angus Leo Bensemann (1938)
oil on canvas, 356 x 302 mm gift of the Rita Angus Estate, 1998
Rita Angus’s portrait of Leo Bensemann contains the best set of eyebrows in New Zealand painting history. Eyebrows are surprisingly powerful – they give a face its emotion and character. A 2003 study conducted by the University of Lethbridge found that eyebrows were the most essential element of facial recognition – our brains struggle to identify familiar faces when the eyebrows are missing. In art history, this may account for some of the mystique of the Mona Lisa (who is missing her eyebrows) and the enduring power of Frida Kahlo’s distinctively uni-browed self-portraits.
In Angus’s portrait of her fellow artist, Bensemann’s strong eyebrows mimic the sharp peaks of the Southern Alps behind him, making him seem one with the landscape. But rather than a rough mountain man, she depicts her friend as a handsome and rugged movie star from 1930s cinema posters, his black hair shiny and perfectly coiffed. Perhaps Angus was depicting a new type of New Zealand man, one to match the confident modern woman of her self-portraits?
Angus and Bensemann were good friends, and shared neighbouring studios on Cambridge Terrace in Christchurch between 1936 and 1939. The flats became a hub of the New Zealand art world, where the seeds of New Zealand modernism were nurtured by a vibrant group of artists, literary figures and musicians. Bensemann and Angus challenged each other intellectually and artistically, and she produced some of the finest works of her career during this happy period, including this striking portrait.
Michael Parekowhai
He kōrero pūrākau mō te awanui o te motu: Story of a New Zealand river (2011) original Steinway grand piano (Model D), added wood, automotive paint, pearl and pāua shell; with piano chair, added automotive paint and brass, 1030 x 2750 x 1750 mm (piano), 855 x 410 x 460 mm (chair) purchased 2011 with the assistance of the Friends of Te Papa
He kōrero pūrākau mō te awanui o te motu: Story of a New Zealand river was the central sculpture in Michael Parekowhai’s Venice Biennale exhibition, On first looking into Chapman’s Homer. It is a fully playable, ornately carved 1926 Steinway concert piano, once owned by Hungarian-born pianist Lili Kraus. From its legs to the lattice of the lid, Parekowhai has enfolded the piano in detail. Its outside surface has a high-gloss, red lacquer finish and – carved at the artist’s direction by a non-Māori carver – it is covered in an endless arrangement of patterning: including whakairo (Māori carving), naive folk-influenced motifs and sculptural tropes including a maritime rope.
This is the sixth piano sculpture that Parekowhai has made. The others include the two bronze pianos created for Venice complete with standing and resting bulls, his 2007 sculpture The Horn of Africa, in which he balanced a concert grand on the nose of a seal, a ‘white piano’ work (The ghost of Gondwanaland) and his 2001 piano Story of a New Zealand river, which, like this sculpture, references New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion’s 1993 film The piano and the 1920s novel by Jane Mander from which the film was adapted.
He kōrero pūrākau mō te awanui o te motu is redolent of two key principles of Parekowhai’s practice, as proposed by art curator Robert Leonard: ‘the representation of objects from art or everyday life in epic form and the recoding of European culture to speak for Māori concerns’. Parekowhai’s piano can be understood as a type of readymade, only complete as an artwork when it is played. The music from the piano, he has said, ‘fills space like no object can’.
Michel Tuffery
Pisupo lua afe (Corned beef 2000) (1994) tin cans and rivets, 1150 x 650 x 2170 mm
purchased 1995 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds
Corned beef is a popular and prestigious food item in the Pacific, and one of my favourite items at a family lunch. But Michel Tuffery’s sculpture Pisupo lua afe (Corned beef 2000) is a reminder of the serious risks associated with this delicacy.
The life-size sculpture is constructed from flattened pisupo (corned beef) tins riveted together to create a freestanding tin bull. The incorporation of ‘Golden Country’branded tins harks back to the use of ready-made, everyday materials in pop art. Like iconic works such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans (1962), Tuffery’s sculpture provokes a much deeper contemplation of his chosen material. In this case, Tuffery’s witty reconstruction of a bull from its processed parts delivers a strong political commentary on the ongoing impact of global trade in the Pacific.
For several Pacific communities, corned beef has been incorporated into cultural customs as the gift of choice, replacing local foods used for feasts and gift-giving. Tuffery’s bullock questions foreign intervention in the Pacific and whether it creates a dependency on imported commodities such as corned beef, which are typically high in fat, salt and cholesterol. I think Tuffery gives this issue emphasis by selecting sections of tin where the lists of ingredients are visible.
Gordon Walters
Genealogy III (1971) acrylic and polyvinyl acetate (PVA) paint on canvas, 1830 x 1370 mm purchased 1993 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds
I grew up familiar with Gordon Walters’ koru works without knowing much about them, and I suspect the same is true for many New Zealanders. From his widely reproduced and imitated paintings to his logo design for the New Zealand Film Commission – or perhaps because they appeared on the walls of the fictional Shortland Street Hospital –these works have become part of our popular imagination.
Walters’ obsession with the koru began early. As a boy, he spent hours exploring the Māori and Pacific works at the Dominion Museum. Along with Māori artists, he made illustrations of koru, kōwhaiwhai and tā moko for Te Ao Hou, a magazine published by the Department of Maori Affairs.
However, for many years Walters was so anxious about the potential reaction to his koru paintings that he ‘could hardly bear to show the work’. Their first significant public appearance was at Auckland’s New Vision Gallery in 1966. At the time, Walters emphasised their compositional elements, perhaps because he was uncertain how his use of the koru – an indigenous motif – might be interpreted, but also because of the tough reception that abstract art was getting in New Zealand at the time. ‘My work is an investigation of positive/negative relationships within a deliberately limited range of forms ... [which] have no descriptive value in themselves and are used solely to demonstrate relations,’ he wrote.
Later Walters would give his works Māori titles to make the connection more obvious. For Māori, the koru can symbolise new life and has a special place in customary art. Its use by non-Māori artists such as Walters has been hotly debated. Even so, Walters’ koru works have become some of the most celebrated works of art in New Zealand.
Simon Denny
Modded server-rack display with some interpretations of imagery from NSA MYSTIC, FOXACID, QUANTUMTHEORY and other SSO/TAO slides (2015)
mixed media: various materials including powder-coated 19" server racks, Cisco Systems WSC2948G switches, LAN cables, Bachmann power strips, HP Proliant 380 DL G5 server, steel trays, vinyl and brushed aluminium on coloured Plexiglas, laser-cut letters, Fisso stainlesssteel spacers, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, stuffed white-tailed eagle, ropes, aluminium poles, painted fibreglass globe, Hormel Foods Spam can, painting, playing card, Shadowfist game cards and boxes, powder-coated steel and aluminium components, UV prints on various materials and LED strips, 2900 x 3000 x 1000 mm purchased 2015
This is one of the central works from Simon Denny’s 2015 Venice Biennale project, Secret power. The Secret power works are important because they demonstrate that contemporary art can powerfully engage with significant contemporary issues. In a post-truth era where alternative facts abound, works like these prompt us to critically consider the information we receive and the ways in which we receive it.
The exhibition contained a selection of information and imagery from documents leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. This particular work focuses on the activities of the NSA’s Secret Service Operations (SSO) division, which allegedly conducts mass surveillance on American and international targets. As a member of the ‘Five Eyes’ international intelligence network – along with the UK, Canada, Australia and the US – New Zealand is implicated in the NSA’s activities, as the Snowden leaks reinforced. This alliance has been thoroughly researched by New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, whose 1996 book Secret power was a key source for Simon’s project.
The work is dominated by the presence of an American bald eagle – the national symbol of the United States – holding the world in its talons. This terrifying image of global dominance and control is purportedly the in-house logo for the SSO and was never intended to be exposed to public scrutiny. The eagle is surrounded by images of wizards holding mobile phones and a cartoon fox burning in a barrel of acid – apparently referring back to other SSO projects, MYSTIC and FOXACID. It’s tempting to dismiss this material as part of a fantasy dreamt up by some lone gamer, except that the white explanatory text on the glass panels has the air of museum interpretation – and museums are reliable sources, aren’t they?
Ten/01 Charlotte Davy is Head of Art at Te Papa, and traces her first connection to the museum back to 1994, when she sold tickets to The Queen’s pictures exhibition at the then National Art Gallery’s Buckle Street site. ‘I quickly moved on to packing up the art collection for the move to the new waterfront site and I didn’t look back!’ She has a BA in art history and an Advanced Diploma in design. She was head of exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for four years and has lectured in the Masters of Museum Studies programme at the University of Sydney.
‘My role is strategy based, so I am looking across the collection and thinking about longer-term aims and intent for what we acquire and exhibit, and considering our responsibilities as a public art institution. I largely leave acquisitions for the specialist curators to propose, but I did love that the first acquisition I approved in my current role was Colin McCahon’s A poster for the Urewera no.1 (1975).
‘I enjoy facilitating and collaborating with creative people, particularly artists and designers. I love encouraging anyone in their journey with art. I am greatly motivated by exhibition-making; spatial and exhibition design are fascinating to me, and with exhibitions I enjoy trialling things, playing, building on my previous experience to make more meaningful and fabulous exhibitions.
‘The strength of Te Papa’s art collection is its great New Zealand modern collection, particularly late McCahon, Angus, Henderson, Woollaston and so on. Curators in recent years have done a stunning job in developing the modern and contemporary Māori collection into something meaningful and significant. There is real magic in the historical New Zealand collection, and Te Papa holds its own in New Zealand jewellery, ceramics and glass. It’s broad and, like many collections, patchy, but it adds up to an excellent take on the breadth of New Zealand art.’
Ten/02 Mark Stocker PhD has been Curator Historical International Art at Te Papa since 2014. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Canterbury, and a senior research fellow at the University of Otago. He lectured in Art History at the University of Canterbury from 1986 to 2003 and at the University of Otago from 2003 to 2013. He has more than 200 published items to his credit, not including the blogs that he much enjoys writing for Te Papa.
Mark treasures Te Papa’s collection of historical international art for its beauty, rarity and age. ‘While there are few great paintings, the collection is particularly strong in historic European prints, including works by Dürer and Rembrandt. I relish the opportunity to exhibit wonderful historical art, to acquire it, to write about it and to talk about it with responsive people. Since 2014 I’ve acquired a number of important Japanese prints (one may be seen on page 59), the charming realist bronze La brodeuse (The embroiderer) by Dalou (see page 64) and a painting by Monticelli. The latter is one of the most progressive made in the mid-nineteenth century, both technically and in its modern-life subject matter.
‘I’ve also acquired European prints, all powerful, beautiful works of art, including a sublime panorama by Piranesi of the Castel Sant’Angelo, built by the Emperor Hadrian. This immediately went on exhibition at Te Papa in European Splendour, 1500–1800. Some of our visitors can relate to such historical works more easily than modern or contemporary art, especially if they are provided with an explanation. As a former academic, I may have an elitist background, but now as a curator, I fully identify with Te Papa’s aspirations to intelligent populism.’
196–97 Laurence Aberhart is a self-taught photographer who was born in Nelson in 1949 and has lived and worked in Russell, Bay of Islands, since 1983. He has been a leading figure in New Zealand photography since the late 1970s and is known for his black-and-white images of Masonic lodges, churches, marae, cemeteries and war memorials. These are subjects that speak of the past: of memory, mortality and melancholy. Each is captured on a large-format camera mounted on a tripod and then printed as contact prints – the same size as the huge 10-by-8-inch negatives. This technique, complete with long exposures, follows nineteenth-century practice, creating a resonance between Aberhart’s process and his history-laden subjects. He has had a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2002, a survey at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia, in 2005 and a major retrospective at City Gallery Wellington in 2007. The latter was accompanied by a substantial publication titled simply Aberhart His more recent work, on World WarI memorials in Australia and New Zealand, was published as ANZAC in 2014. Aberhart was made an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2013.
36–39 Gretchen Albrecht CNZM was born in Auckland in 1943. She graduated from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts with a Diploma in Fine Arts with honours in 1963. In the years following she established herself as a leading artist of her generation, with a diverse practice encompassing figurative painting, watercolour, prints and sculptural works, and as one of New Zealand’s most influential abstract painters. In 1978 she travelled to Europe, where the experience of European art history at first hand had a profound influence on her work. Shortly after her return to New Zealand she was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, in 1981, and in the same year began to exhibit the shaped ‘hemisphere’ canvases saturated in colour that are among her most distinctive works. She has exhibited widely in New Zealand and overseas: highlights include her first major survey exhibition in 1986 at Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua, Whanganui, and subsequent surveys in 2002 at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and in 2005 at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Albrecht now divides her time between Auckland and London and continues to investigate the potential of colour and abstraction in her hemisphere, oval and rectangular paintings.
228–29 Edith Amituanai was born in Auckland in 1980 and has an MFA from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. Her early photography is characterised by an exploration of scenes set in domestic spaces that frame the identities and interactions of her subjects. Amituanai has often turned her lens on her family and members of her West Auckland community to explore ideas of home and the interface between private and public space. In 2008, she was the first Pacific finalist of the lucrative Walters Prize for her exhibition Déjeuner, a series of photographs of professional rugby players overseas and the family homes they left behind. Amituanai describes this as ‘third-wave’ migration where the children and grandchildren of Pacific peoples who emigrated to New Zealand also move out into the world to seek new opportunities. Amituanai has participated in a number of high-profile group exhibitions in New Zealand and abroad and was the inaugural recipient of the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award in 2007.
26–27 126–27 Rita Angus was born in 1908 in Hastings. A student at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts from 1927 to 1933, she developed an interest in Renaissance and medieval art, Vermeer and Cézanne. These influences helped shape her distinctive painting style, with its bold colour and hard-edged clarity. Angus became a pioneer of modern painting in New Zealand during the 1930s and 1940s, and was a pivotal member of the progressive Christchurch artists’ network The Group. Best known for her portraiture and Canterbury and Otago landscapes, Angus often deployed in her work a highly personal language of symbolism shaped by her pacifist and feminist beliefs and her interest in Eastern religions. Although her work was always appreciated by fellow artists, widespread critical acclaim came relatively late in her career, due in part to her reluctance to sell work. However, by the late 1960s, she was beginning to be recognised as one of the leading New Zealand painters of her generation. After her death in 1970, her reputation continued to grow, and exhibitions like the National Art Gallery’s major show of her work in 1982–83 and Te Papa’s Rita Angus: Life and vision in 2008–09 confirmed her status as one of the outstanding artists of her generation.
240–41 Billy Apple ONZM was born Barrie Bates in Auckland in 1935. In 1959 he was awarded a New Zealand government scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art, London. In 1962 he decided to blur the line between art and life by changing his image as well as his name – to Billy Apple – and went on to be one of New Zealand’s most internationally successful artists. In 1964 he left London for New York, where his work was included in early exhibitions of American pop art. In the late 1970s he had a series of site-specific exhibitions in New Zealand dealer and public galleries. He followed this in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of works interrogating the art market. Apple returned to live in New Zealand in 1990. In 2006 Apple registered his name as a trademark and in 2012 he deposited his somatic cells in the American Type Culture Collection as part of his project The immortalisation of Billy Apple®. He has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1974; at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam in 2009; and at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 2015.
188–89 WS (William) Baverstock
OBE was born in Norfolk, England, in 1893. While studying at the Canterbury College of Art in Christchurch he won two scholarships and was awarded a first-class diploma by the Society of Arts. His wide range of interests included caricatures, illuminated designs, drawings, paintings and photography. He was prominent on the committee of the Friends of the Canterbury Museum and was an honorary staff member of the museum, for which he restored paintings. He was secretary-treasurer of the Canterbury Society of Arts from 1943 to 1959. In 1948, he was appointed honorary curator of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery (now the Christchurch Art Gallery), and from 1960 to 1969 he was its first full-time director. Less is known about his photography, but he was an early member of the Christchurch Photographic Society and in the 1920s and 1930s he was a frequent contributor to illustrated annuals such as the Free Lance, Otago Witness and Brett’s Annual. He died in Christchurch in 1975.
114–15 Janet Bayly was born in 1955 in Tauranga and graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, with an MFA in 1979. She began making lens-based work from the mid-1970s, a period when photography and film were not highly regarded as serious art forms in academia. Her strongest influences at Elam included Anne Noble, Rhondda Bosworth, Gillian Chaplin, Megan Jenkinson and other, largely women, photographers who were embracing the roughly handmade and experimental and using new equipment such as the plastic Diana and Polaroid SX-70 cameras while exploring more intimate, gendered or domestic content. The feminist movement and Bayly’s study of international women photographers and other Polaroid artists were another catalyst. Bayly regarded Polaroids as akin to unique daguerreotypes and appreciated the ability they gave her to exploit colour in more abstract or painterly ways. Bayly was included in the prominent 1982 National Art Gallery exhibition and associated publication, Views/ exposures: 10 contemporary New Zealand photographers.
180–81 Gordon Bennett was born in Queensland, Australia, in 1955 and has been recognised as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists. His art career, Australian art historian Ian McLean has said, was built on ‘politically motivated artwork’ which critiqued the injustices of colonialism in Australia and the impact of the colonial enterprise and racism on indigenous cultures and lives. For much of his career, however, Bennett refused to identify his art as Aboriginal and himself as an Aboriginal artist, believing that positioning his work that way determined both its interpretation and reception. An intellectually based and inventive artist, Bennett continually changed his style and renewed his practice to avoid being typecast. Those changes included creating work under the name ‘John Citizen’, an alter ego inspired by pop art and representative of the Australian everyman. They also included works ‘in conversation’ with the work of black Haitian New York artist JeanMichel Basquiat and an ongoing series of purely abstract ‘stripe paintings’ with no political content. Bennett’s work has been represented in major biennales and exhibitions in Australia and internationally, the most recent being Documenta (13) in 2012. Bennett died in 2014.
New Zealand’s national art collection is held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. In Ten x Ten, Te Papa’s ten art curators each select ten works, and explain why they are special to them and why they matter. www.tepapapress.co.nz