The galleries: Work of master returns home

By T.J. McNAMARA

He is a legendary painter. Know what the fuss is about; go, pass your own judgment but take time to stop, look and think. The grand exhibition of the work of Colin McCahon, shown last year at the celebrated Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, is now at Auckland Art Gallery until June 15, after a showing in Wellington. It is essential viewing.

In many ways it has come home, since the Auckland Art Gallery was instrumental in its organisation and many of the works come from the gallery's collection or are lent by Auckland collectors.

The show is called Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith and Stedelijk curator Dr Marja Bloem says she avoided the purely landscape works in favour of those that showed the painter's spiritual quest.

The division is not simple. The key to McCahon's work was that he used landscape as symbolism to convey his spiritual journey and the landscape is peculiarly New Zealand.

The exhibition has been arranged chronologically and it is important to follow the show as a journey through the artist's life and concerns. The gallery provides a map and signs as a guide.

This is a tough exhibition, one that cannot be hurried through. Thanks to some private patrons, there is now no admission charge so it is possible to visit several times.

For many, there will not just be a question of faith but also "Why?" Why is McCahon considered so important? Why did he paint the way he did?

Years after his death there are still many people as dismissive of his work as there were in his lifetime and still many who are genuinely puzzled.

Even in the art world McCahon is a difficult painter because, although obviously modernist in style, he cannot be fitted into any particular school or category or be shown to have a line of direct influences.

So when McCahon painted a work that states, "Here I Give Thanks to Mondrian" it is not the formal simplicity of Mondrian's work that is the subject - rather the tribute is to the intellectual and artistic struggle toward the utmost simplicity and power of concept.

Struggle, trouble, faith and questioning were all part of McCahon's long journey so powerfully expressed in this show. Everywhere there is the pressure of thought. There is never the simple recording of a scene, never the simple expression of a decorative idea, never a sense of playing games with images that was so much part of 20th-century art.

There are certain motifs running through the work like leitmotifs in an opera. The motifs do not in themselves make the work powerful but are part of the mechanism by which the work illuminates the artist's thought and helps to communicate images that resonate in our mind.

The first motif is light as a symbol of the spirit. We are drawn toward the light as a manifestation of God, of the pure spirit. McCahon is in many ways a Christian painter but that does not mean he identified with any particular doctrine or dogma.

He saw the figure of Christ as a great symbol of truth and enlightenment, one that was widely shared.

Christ as symbol of spirit is extended to The Fourteen Stations of The Cross. There are conventionally 14 steps in Christ's passion and death and the numbers 1-14 are another recurring leitmotif. They symbolise the journey every human must make and some paintings are made up entirely of such journeys - some with bright beginnings and clouded endings, others that are difficult in the middle but have a triumphant end.

One of the finest paintings is a visionary walk in 14 panels along Muriwai Beach. The work is multilayered, simple in expression but immensely complicated in thought. Each panel shows the line of beach, sea and sky and is a distinct mood of the weather. Yet each is true to the nature of each Station of the Cross and links to any individual's journey through the light and dark of life. Anyone looking for just a picture of Muriwai will find it, but much else besides.

In the early work McCahon gives memorable expression to conventional subjects. The Marys at the Tomb - with its massive rock rolled away from the empty tomb's entrance, its swooping angel and its ridge with the trees that recall the Crosses - shows the three Holy Women as troubled, thoughtful and wondering. Revelation is not easy.

The exhibition begins with I Paul to you at Ngatimote (1946). The monumental prophet brings a message to the people. These are modern times; the word would probably come by plane. The war and trouble signified by barbed wire is in the background.

Two years later McCahon's writing becomes more explicit and illuminates the symbolism in The Virgin and Child Compared to a Lamp and a Jug of Pure Water. The symbols are very old, found in many paintings of the Madonna. Yet it is not the symbolism in itself that makes the painting great but the strong, questing look of the child and the thoughtful sadness of the mother.

Even what appears as a simple landscape in Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury has the spiritual blood of sacrifice flowing in the centre.

As the paintings develop the words become larger and more biblical in intonation. One approach is to say the words to yourself as you look at the paintings. They have the nature of a prayer and at times are like thunder.

You move past the waterfalls that are a flow of light and on to the Journeys. First there is the explicit Fourteen Stations of the Cross, each a mood related to dark, light and the fall of light.

The theme of resurrection and hope, the movement from dark to light, culminates in this show in the astounding Practical Religion where the prayers and hope are concentrated around the story of Lazarus whom Christ returned to life.

The sheer quality of the painting is apparent here. The weight of Mt Martha, the wonderfully painted ridge that suggests so much landscape and intense luminosity beyond the ridge, are a tribute to the artist's skills as a painter that are often overlooked in discussion of his meaning.

The artist's life at Muriwai, where he settled after his time in Titirangi, is reflected in the Jump series where he mediates on the leap of faith needed to achieve anything and in the grandeur of the long line of the beach and sky.

The increasing desire to achieve stark confrontational effects is apparent in the later work and shows, what is seldom admitted, that McCahon was an increasingly uneven painter in his last years though he could achieve inexpressibly moving work.

One of the last works is called I Applied my Mind. It is sad that in another of his last works McCahon quotes Ecclesiastes on the emptiness of all endeavour.

McCahon had great ideas for paintings, he applied his mind and through his unremitting endeavours made them full of meaning in a uniquely powerful way.