By Peter Simpson
Gretchen Albrecht: Between Gesture and Geometry
Luke Smythe (Massey University Press, $80)
This handsome wide-format hardback is perfectly shaped to accommodate Gretchen Albrecht's most widely recognised works: the hemispheres (two quadrants bolted to form a semicircle), predominantly from the 1980s, and the elliptical ovals which succeeded them in the 1990s. Since the early 2000s, Albrecht has often returned to more conventional rectangular formats without abandoning the shaped-canvas forms with which she has become identified. As an almost exclusively abstract painter (since giving away figuration in the 1970s), Albrecht's distinction has been to effectively combine and synthesise the two main branches within abstraction, the geometrical (Mondrian) and the gestural (Pollock) – a significant historical achievement as Luke Smythe points out in his well-written and informative essay. Smythe is particularly good at locating Albrecht (without pigeon-holing her) within a gendered version of art history and at explaining how she uses titles and other literary and art historical references to convincingly expand her visual language beyond the purely formal.
Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys
Mary Kisler and Catherine Hammond, eds (Auckland University Press, $75)
With the publication of this fine book and the impending opening of the large exhibition which accompanies it, Auckland Art Gallery finally launches its huge and multi-pronged Frances Hodgkins project. If the quality of this book is indicative, the whole enterprise has been thoroughly worthwhile, definitively placing Hodgkins - on the 150th anniversary of her birth - within the wider context of her New Zealand origins and the European theatre in which she made her mark. After a couple of introductory chapters plus chronology, a further six chapters trace her development from New Zealand beginnings to its climax in the 1940s when she reached (in her own words) "Star Power during [her] lifetime". After her 1946 Retrospective, the Spectator called her "one of the most remarkable woman painters of our own or any country, of our own or any time", a judgment borne out by the scores of brilliant paintings and drawings (many unfamiliar) reproduced in this well-researched and well-documented publication.
Finding Frances Hodgkins,
Mary Kisler, Massey University Press ($45)
As a by-product of the larger Hodgkins' enterprise, Mary Kisler, senior curator at Auckland Art Gallery who has headed the project, has written an entertaining and informal account of her research, in particular her efforts to trace Hodgkins' intricate movements around Europe between 1901 and 1947 in search of subjects to paint and draw. Organised not chronologically but geographically with separate short chapters for each of the many locations where Hodgkins rested for a season or a year or two, the narrative sometimes seems cheerfully disorganised but is well sustained by Kisler's enthusiasm, good humour and innumerable identifications of specific locations for Hodgkins' artworks. Some of her most interesting discoveries are that precise locations cannot always be established because of Hodgkins' habit of changing things around to suit her picture – making a church in Ibiza face inland instead of out to sea, for example, or painting from memory rather than direct observation. Fidelity to the imaginative truth of her picture ultimately meant more to her than topographical accuracy. The book is well illustrated with photographs, postcards and reproductions of relevant artworks and is a pleasure to handle and read.
Mitchell & Mitchell: A Father & Son Arts Legacy
Peter Alsop, Anna Reed and Richard Wolfe (Potton & Burton, $80)
This large and lavishly illustrated hardback is devoted to father-and-son artists, Leonard C. and Leonard V. Mitchell, who have a low profile within New Zealand art history, although the father (1901-71) was a popular and successful commercial artist while the son (1925-80), a talented exponent of portraits, landscapes and murals, sought recognition in the fine arts both in New Zealand and the United Kingdom and twice won the Kelliher Prize for traditional landscapes. The book argues that the Mitchells' comparative obscurity is underserved, resulting from a bias against popular culture and conservative and traditional art styles by generations of critics and curators. Whether it convinces will, of course, depend largely on readers: anti-modernists will presumably applaud the book, while admirers of modernism are likely to find it exaggerated and somewhat overblown.
