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| Rata Lovell-Smith, Hawkins, 1933 Oil on canvas board, 345 x 460mm Collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, purchased, 1981 |
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Rita Angus, Cass, 1936
oil on canvas on board, 370 x 460 mm
Collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, purchased 1955
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Whilst in Christchurch I visited the Art Gallery to see some of the works that constitute New Zealand Regionalism, which focused on depicting the landscape of Canterbury and Otago in a realist manner. Typically the Regionalists (eg., Rita Angus, and Rata Lovell-Smith) were pre-modernist and opposed to the modernist shift to European abstraction and to American abstract expressionism.
The regionalists depicted the landscape without people, using buildings as the stand-in for the signs of human inhabitation. An example is WA Sutton, a Christchurch-based painter who taught at the very conservative University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. This art school in the 1950s was resolutely committed to representational painting and encouraged accurate drawing rather than experimentation.
The Canterbury regionalists rejected the romantic traditions of scenic grandeur (including the sublime) and they developed a distinctive imagery focused on marks of settlement and physical features that typified the region.
Rata's representation of the Canterbury landscape in paintings such as 'Hawkins' (1933) and 'Bridge, Mt Cook Road' (1934) influenced later artists, including Rita Angus and William Sutton. This regionalism showed an interest in subjects that were characteristic of the localities with which the painters were most familiar. The Canterbury School was a regionalist movement which expressed a growing awareness of a local identity and harboured aspirations for a distinctive New Zealand art.
Today, its the regional difference that stands out in a globalised world and international tourism.
Excerpted from the opinionated art/photography blog junkforcode by Gary Sauer Thompson in 'NZ Realism / Regionalism,' April 9 2009, http://www.sauer-thompson.com/junkforcode/archives/2009/04/, accessed 3 November 2009. Check out the other posts on Peter Peryer's bloated cow and Anne Shelton's Doublet (I could not bring myself to make another Parker Hulme post!!).
And from the more historically accurate NZHistory's 'History of New Zealand Painting: Regionalism':
In the 1930s and 1940s a distinctly New Zealand style of painting began to emerge. At this time there was an increasing demand by critics like James Shelley (1884–1961) and A.R.D. Fairburn (1904–57) for painters to pay greater attention to local subjects. What developed was a New Zealand style of regionalism that is characterised by a preoccupation with place and local identity. The centre of regionalist painting in this country was Christchurch, with pupils and teachers at the Canterbury College School of Art the main exponents.
[...]
Regionalism in New Zealand was not such a formal doctrine. Artists tended to approach the landscape with a diversity of styles and a range of interests. They dealt with themes of isolation and loneliness, and celebrated rural life and the virtues of honest work. Another aspect often remarked upon in these works is the crisp, clearly defined forms and stark contrast between light and dark. This is attributed to an artist’s response to the harsh qualities of the New Zealand light as championed by Christopher Perkins.
The regionalist style can be characterised by a number of features: flattened forms, strong outlines, broad areas of flat colour, and a decorative treatment of form and space. The depiction of unpopulated landscapes with motifs to signify settlement is also typical of this period.
'A new New Zealand art', URL: http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/nz-painting-history/a-new-new-zealand-art, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 20-Dec-2012. Accessed 3 November 2015.
Mmmmmm, no bodies, but a focus on the "signification of settlement". Maybe settlement is a not so important term for us, but something in there seems pertinent or harvestable to the incoherent self, partial body image, etc.
ReplyDeleteThose hills tell stories about the logging and clearing of the bush for farmland by the colonial settlers, who earned their living by exporting produce back to their 'Motherland' Britain. I guess Rita and Rata would have been a generation since then? Anyhow, in the foreground...
ReplyDelete1929 brought the Great Depression and like most other countries, New Zealand was hit hard well into the 1930s. It "affected the country via its international trade, with farming export drops then going on to affect the money supply and in turn consumption, investment and imports. The country was most affected around 1930–1932, when average farm incomes for a short time dipped below zero, and the unemployment rates peaked." (15% unemployment, although when factoring in the numbers of women and Maori who were not counted in the census at this time its estimated to be 30%). (Wikipedia, History of New Zealand).
This context just had to have contributed to the sense of isolation in these scenes and also provided an impetus for the desire of the Canterbury Regionalist school to create a new style, distinct from European landscape traditions and no doubt also provided an audience and support for it too. Incoherent self finds need to adapt aesthetic languages, to make them more vernacular. Incoherent self needs to prise some independence from the traditions of forebears in order to represent the actuality of what is in front of her?
NZ landscape painting IS our visual history, it's the artworld's version of Rugby and ITS HEAVY.