Getting the McCahon message

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is hosting a huge Colin McCahon exhibition. PETER CALDER found it deeply moving - but something was missing.

The hot dog stand outside was selling coffee but spelled it "koffie". The streets, broken by curved bridges across ancient canals, were full of trams and bicycles. But here, inside, the walls were full of iconic imagery from the other side of the world.

There they were: the glowering hillsides; the melting, aching faces; the runic arrangements of numbers, Arabic or Roman, backgrounded by ghostly landscapes; and everywhere that familiar rounded, upright handwriting and words full of longing and wonder.

Colin McCahon was in Amsterdam.

The 78 works on show in a dozen rooms at the Stedelijk Museum make up the biggest offshore showing by far of New Zealand's greatest artist.

The Stedelijk has a long reputation for bringing regionally important artists to world attention and the show, A Question of Faith, which runs until November 10, represents a huge leap forward for McCahon's international visibility.

But its impact on an individual level was powerful, too. Seeing the familiar (and many unfamiliar, long-unseen) works on the other side of the world was a bracing experience for a pair of Kiwis who had broken a journey for this purpose.

It was like looking at them with fresh eyes and they exerted a powerful visceral tug, in the same way as the haka performed on foreign soil makes the neck-hair bristle more than normal.

The sight of one particular North Otago landscape, a gift to the Stedelijk from art patron and McCahon-lover Jenny Gibbs, filled me with such a sense of place and pride of ownership that I felt like crying out to the other visitors: "This is my country, this. And this is exactly what it looks like, too."

Indeed, seen so far from home, the landscapes seemed to possess a haunting, almost photographic realism. In that environment the paintings were still full of mystery but quite without obscurity, postcards from the edge of the earth.

The Stedelijk galleries were busy, if not bustling, like those in the Van Gogh Museum next door where busloads of bumbag-wearing tourists filed solemnly past unquestioned masterpieces. In the Stedelijk, the watchers moved slowly, sat for long periods.

One, a lean and handsome man with Arabic features, said it was "too clever for me", a comment I interpreted as self-deprecating rather than critical (whatever one might say of McCahon, after all, it's hard to justify the accusation that he's "clever") until he added that there was "too much about the Bible".

But he was still there 90 minutes later, peering closely and moving back to regard from afar.

The European audience's appreciation of the exhibition will be considerably hampered by the fact that a catalogue will not be ready until after the exhibition has left Amsterdam for Australasia. Staff in the museum bookshop said they had been inundated with requests for information about the artist, and the works and have a long list of orders for the catalogue.

In the meantime, the catalogue text is available for sale and laminated information sheets are located in key parts of the gallery.

Chris Saines, the director of the Auckland Art Gallery, which helped the Stedelijk by gathering and shipping the New Zealand-based works, said the absence of a catalogue was regrettable because it makes the show "harder to get".

"The catalogue is the intellectual framework on which you are basing your selection of the works. It's how you articulate the ideas you are trying to shape around the artists. Take it away and there is so much more left to the viewer."

But the curator of the exhibition, Marja Bloem, said the late delivery was due to the Stedelijk's determination to make a good fist of work which should long ago have been done in New Zealand. The 120-page, five-essay publication which had been planned has been expanded into a full, almost definitive text on McCahon, she said.

The publication will contain five essays, including one by William McCahon, the artist's son; the first complete bibliography of writing about McCahon; the first comprehensive listing of McCahon's exhibitions; and a 60,000-word chronology of the artist's life, including quotes from almost all his major writings.

"This publication - a task which appears to have eluded New Zealand publishers, including the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust in the 15 years since the death of the artist - will without doubt be the most important contribution to the McCahon scholarship ever made," Bloem stated.

She added that many of the existing colour images, including some provided by New Zealand public institutions, rendered the colours inaccurately and works had been re-photographed at the Stedelijk.

The publication was so important that "there was no question that the catalogue should appear later rather than sooner and inadequate", Bloem said.

If the quality of the show is any guide to the Stedelijk's standards, the catalogue will be worth waiting for. It is certain to make a further enormous contribution to McCahon's reputation which, as Bloem seems to suggest, ought to have already been made.

Meanwhile, the European audiences - some 22,000 have visited the museum since the show opened - will have to make do with the paintings. They can read all about it later.

* A Question of Faith runs at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam until November 10 before moving to Wellington (December 7), Auckland (March 29), Sydney and Melbourne.