European art, departures in space, time, mood

By T.J. McNAMARA

European art in New Zealand is a story of arrivals and departures. One important departure was when Frances Hodgkins left to become part of the art of the British Isles. She belonged to a generation who felt that their talent could not flourish on this side of the world.

She departed but many of her paintings came back. At first they were not welcome. The public gallery in Christchurch rejected the gift of one of her works. More enlightened, the Auckland City Gallery collected a representative selection of work across her career. Most of this fine collection is at present on show in the Auburn Room alongside some of the work of her contemporaries in the British neo-romantic movement of the 1930s.

It is a splendid collection which the citizens of Auckland should delight in. The principal delight is in the colour, subdued but incomparably rich. The colour is allied to immaculate drawing that brings distant landscapes and still-life close together in lyrical compositions.

There is strength, too. If you have time to see no other work look at Spanish Shrine, which is a tribute to the enduring, monumental qualities of working women.

Frances Hodgkins went to Europe and Europeans came to New Zealand. There is a curious exhibition at the University's Gus Fisher Gallery in Shortland St which shows the work of three expatriates, an artist and two architects, all Jews, who left their homes for obvious reasons.

The artist is Tom Kreisler, who is rightly described in the accompanying leaflet as an enigma. His paintings, which are mostly words with some rough images on oddly shaped bits of canvas or blackboards, are like messages scrawled by a prisoner and pushed out through the bars of his jail. Significantly, the Marquis de Sade, jailed for years, plays his part here, as well as black jokes, sardonic philosophy and puns.

One architect is Henry Kulka, who was a pupil and colleague of the great Viennese architect Adolf Loos. Loos was a polemic writer who condemned ornament as "crime". His plain, bold style found its place in New Zealand when Kulka joined Fletcher Construction.

Big, plain architecture was demanded of Friedrich Neumann who became Frederick Newman when he joined the Ministry of Works as architect on hydro-electric projects.

One fascinating touch in this show is that alongside photographs of Newman's work is an exquisite design done by his father in elaborate rococo style for a staircase in an opera house.

We see the plain style throughout New Zealand but we do not often see evidence of what it was reacting against.

The germ of this exhibition is a magnificent idea surely destined to provoke a grander exhibition some time in the future.

The exhibition by Gretchen Albrecht at the Sue Crockford Gallery is a departure of a different kind. In the big paintings she departs from her usual sonorous colour to work only in sombre black, white, grey and ochre. The format is her customary oval shape with a vortex of energy in the background stabilised by dense rectangular bars in the foreground of the canvas. The canvases themselves are a special Belgian linen and, left almost bare in many places, contribute a great deal to the energy and spontaneity of the swirling shapes.

Nevertheless, the concentration on sombre colour sucks energy and mood out of the paintings. The bars often hide the centre of the vortex and, surprisingly, the paintings are called Blind, Mai Mai and the whole exhibition is called Blind. As adjective, verb or noun it does nothing to clarify the work. The power has been leached away with the colour.

There is one brilliant, epic exception and it is called Claritas. Narrow bars leave the centre unobscured and silver and white give a wonderfully celestial effect.

There is a return to colour in the smaller room, where a number of works combine opaque watercolour with collage. There is lyrical use of blue, red and green but the scale and the medium mean these are small, sweet songs.

The new paintings by Peter Wichman at Oedipus Rex Gallery are departures, too. They take us to the world of the 18th century, although modern revolvers find their nasty place.

This is a world of tempest, revolution, guillotinings and hideous tensions. Goya is his master. Even shepherdesses, stripped to the waist and caressing a sheep, are completely lacking in any hint of pastoral innocence. In another canvas the Norns or Fates play with the rope of destiny. They are dressed in the narrow-waisted Spanish costume of the Duchess of Alba, the femme fatale who may have been the mistress of the ageing, sick and deaf Goya. She broke his heart and died young.

Tensions between people are exemplified by a painting of a bishop with barbed wire around his mitre playing chess on a vast board with a figure, again like the duchess, who is armed with a pistol.

Most of the work exaggerates individual characteristics: a nose, a hat, a waist. The outstanding work is Wind where at the top of some steps, figures that include yet another bishop are swept by winds of passion, power and desire.

No other artist in New Zealand does these operatic situations quite like Wichman. At best they offer enough material for a novel. At least they offer a little shudder of rather pleasing horror.