Artist Colin McCahon photographed in his studio in 1982, with the painting Elias cannot save him now (1959).
The database that stores information on 1800 works by Colin McCahon is old and failing. Kim Knight speaks exclusively to grandsons Finn McCahon-Jones and Peter Carr about an ambitious plan to save and expand the artist’s legacy.
Everytime he looks at the painting, he sees something else. Fingermarks on the selvedge of the canvas: “Like small landscapes - I hadn’t noticed those before.”
Finn McCahon-Jones is small against his grandfather’s artwork. It’s a preliminary version of McCahon’s Urewera Mural (a painting that will, one day, make major headlines) and the massive three-panel piece fills an entire wall of a private room at Gow Langsford Gallery Onehunga.
His eyes move across the canvas. “Who needs a television?”
“I tell you what you would need,” observes his cousin, Peter Carr. “A very big wall.”
They’ve been called the heart and the head of the Colin McCahon Trust. The eldest surviving grandsons of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most famous contemporary artist; key members of the organisation that this week launched a $1m-plus fundraising project to preserve a cultural legacy.
The Colin McCahon digital archive was created before Facebook, Instagram or even Google. It contains records for more than 1800 artworks, but the original technology is obsolete. No new material can be added and, prior to very recent remedial work, the database was at risk of complete collapse.
McCahon-Jones, 43: “You know when you try and put an old adapter into a new thing?”
Carr, 53 (Waikato, Ngāti Maniapoto): “If we let it fall over, it would be frozen in time. We want something that can be kept alive and evolves.”
In 2022, a work by McCahon set a new record for the highest price ever paid for a painting at public auction in New Zealand - $2.39 million, including buyer’s premium. Two more of his works feature in the country’s top 10 list of all-time auction sales.
The failing archive is the go-to resource for all things McCahon. It is used by art historians, students - and buyers looking to authenticate work that is, thanks to skyrocketing prices, increasingly attractive to forgers. It is the only database of its kind in the country to comprehensively focus on a single artist and tonight the McCahon Trust goes public with its two-year plan to save it.
The Colin McCahon Legacy Project will completely overhaul the archive, adding new research and education resources, and making it more searchable and accessible. In the process, it hopes to uncover lost McCahons.
Finn McCahon-Jones recalls the creation of the archive in the early 1990s: “The family put in a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of thought . . . I remember our living room being cleared and paintings being hauled out and pinned up on to the walls and photographed. They sent Gerald [Barnett] off around the country with tripods and cameras and really hot lights and film, to photograph all of these works on colour transparencies.”
The entirety narrowly escaped being stored on CD-ROMs - “this thing called ‘the internet’ was popping off.”
The downside?
“Some people were unsure about showing their hand. Websites were new and it was like ‘what - you want to put my picture online?’ And so there are a lot of people who bought McCahons, right at the beginning, who I’ve known and met and they haven’t put their works up, because they’re really personal, really private.
“But we’re not going to publish who owns it or where it is - we just want to expand McCahon’s story, because sometimes there are certain works that are key to understanding a broader body of work.”
While the McCahon Trust is occasionally called on to verify possible works, neither grandson would estimate how much art remains uncatalogued.
Carr: “It’s the unknown unknown. It’s been so long and there’s obviously been a dribble of new works being revealed - my brother found four under the house . . .”
McCahon-Jones: “I really hope some delicious ones from the South Island turn up.”
He is also hoping for some international finds. McCahon is known in Australia, collectors have taken his work to the UK and, in 1958, he travelled to America with his wife and fellow artist Anne (nee Hamblett).
“His practice has legs, and for people who understand contemporary art, he fits into this global context. So we don’t know what’s happened behind closed doors out there.”
Slated for completion in December 2026, the legacy project has an estimated cost of $1m-$1.5m. The bulk of that will be spent on new research. Arts patron Dame Jenny Gibbs has kicked things off with “a generous donation” and the trust has accumulated royalty and image licensing fees, but the biggest cash injection will be from the sale of a fine art reproduction of McCahon’s 1975 painting Clouds 3.
McCahon-Jones has overseen the limited edition run of 100 that will sell for $12,000 a piece. It’s a first for the trust and, last week, the Herald sat in as each print was embossed and hand-labelled.
“Why Clouds? Why clouds indeed!”
Read the painting on multiple levels, says McCahon-Jones. The numbers that refer to the biblical stations of the cross and an allegory for life - or the simple one-two-three of a child learning to count? The gleam of clouds in the moonlight, as seen by McCahon on a night walk - or the “rocks in the sky” described by a 3-year-old Peter Carr on a visit to a stormy beach and his grandfather?
McCahon (who was the deputy director of Auckland Art Gallery and a lecturer at Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts) was a full-time artist when he made the painting in the studio he’d erected on a Muriwai property owned by his wife.
“If you’ve been out to Muriwai, it’s a very stark landscape,” says McCahon-Jones.
“It’s got black sand, it’s got waves coming in, the wind gets you, the gannets are living on the precipice, the beach is so long you can see the curvature of the world. When the sun is out, the reflections off everything makes it this black-and-white landscape. But, equally, the mist can roll in, or the cloud can roll in, or a tidal wave can come in.”
It was the mid-1970s. Some of the artist’s friends were dying and his children were having babies.
“There’s hope, and there are ideas of time passing . . . people who really get McCahon’s work love this period because, at first, it appears very simple, but it takes you somewhere, it makes you think . . . I guess also choosing this print was for the hardcore McCahon supporters out there!”
Timaru-born McCahon is credited, alongside Rita Angus and Toss Woollaston, with introducing New Zealand to modernism. In 2002, a major retrospective of his work at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum described him as “the first modern New Zealand painter of major international importance”.
The current McCahon online catalogue records: “By the late 1970s McCahon’s health was deteriorating because of his long-term alcoholism, and by the mid-1980s he was suffering from dementia. In 1984 the exhibition I Will Need Words was presented as part of the Biennale of Sydney, but McCahon was barely able to appreciate his growing international reputation.”
He died in 1987, aged 67. Peter Carr was in his mid-teens. He remembers his grandfather from a distance.
At the house in Arch Hill: “Anne was more present than Colin, because he’d be off in his studio or doing whatever else. The things I remember about Partridge St are honey on Vogel’s bread kind of stuff - and Anne.”
At the house in Ponsonby: “I remember standing in the driveway of Crummer Road, and Colin is interrogating Matiu, my older brother, about how you draw water and waves. He wasn’t just satisfied with a squiggly line. He wanted to understand.”
His younger cousin nods. “Colin really wanted to talk about art all the time. He didn’t like chit-chat.”
Colin and Anne had two sons, two daughters and nine grandchildren. McCahon-Jones and Carr have replaced their respective parents (William and Victoria) on the seven-seat McCahon Trust.
Carr: “Mum always kind of raised us at arm’s length from the artworld and the art community, so my relationship with Colin’s work is quite different.” He thinks, perhaps, “the weight of McCahon’s legacy doesn’t bear as heavily on me”.
McCahon-Jones: “You were at arm’s length? God, I was in the armpit of it.”
His father is not an artist, but: “If you talked to him, you’d think that he had a practice . . . every weekend we were at the beach or the art gallery, we’d be looking at art and talking about things, going to the museum, looking at composition. Through high school, we had posters of old Masters that we’d discuss at breakfast time . . . ”
McCahon-Jones says his grandfather’s art practice was “very much” tied to his family.
“When I was a kid going to the gallery with my dad, the labels would be very didactic. And then my dad would tell a story. So the paintings, to me, were always like photos from a photo album.”
Today, those “photos” are worth millions - and McCahon’s art is never far from the headlines.
In 1997, Tūhoe activists controversially removed (and subsequently returned) his Urewera Mural from the visitor centre at Lake Waikaremoana. More recently, there have been provenance, ownership and authenticity concerns around auction sales of his work and intriguing tales of “missing” McCahons.
In 2021, the Weekend Herald reported an Auckland auction house had hit pause on an $87,000 McCahon sale, while it tried to establish ownership history of the painting. The work was from the same series as a different painting local experts had labelled “highly likely” to be fake when it went under the hammer for just $16,800 in the UK - a bargain.
Meanwhile, in 2020, a painting created and sold in New Zealand as a McCahon tribute somehow ended up being resold in a London auction house with the original artist’s signature sliced off the bottom and a forged McCahon signature and date added.
Dr Sarah Farrar, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s curatorial and learning head, says McCahon is “undoubtedly” one of Aotearoa’s most significant artists.
“His exceptional work contributed to the development of modernism in this country. McCahon forged a new path for art-making in New Zealand, and his impact can be seen through subsequent generations of artists.”
McCahon-Jones hopes the revamped archive will expose more people to his grandfather’s work. Digital tags will mean images can be searched by colour, subject and even mood, improved imaging will allow students to zoom in on paintings up close, and more comprehensive exhibition and social histories will be added.
“We get most of our art history in New Zealand in books. Even for me, like coming in today and seeing that big triptych - the depth of the colour or the translucence of the brushstrokes - there’s nothing better than seeing real art. The website is going to be the next best thing!”
The Legacy Project has launched with a McCahon landscape Six days in Nelson and Canterbury (1950) as its “hero” image.
“He changed the landscape in a way that people who don’t even know McCahon recognise the landscape now through his painterly ideas. He dropped it down into this abstract thing, but he was so good at finding those in-between moments,” says McCahon-Jones.
“He never painted Mt Eden or One Tree Hill or whatever. He was looking for those in between landscapes that you get glimpses of when you’re walking. You see them, between buildings. The sunsets, when the Waitākeres become this line and the cloud sits above it, or the orange sky comes down.
“And, sometimes, you think his paintings are abstract but there’s these days and moments in the year where you’re like, oh, he is a realist painter. That’s what I love. I see the landscape and I think about his art and I end up going somewhere quite existential.”
AT A GLANCE: THE COLIN McCAHON LEGACY PROJECT
Launch: Webb’s, Wellington, Nov 13; Gow Langsford Gallery Onehunga, Auckland, Nov 20.
Exhibition: Colin McCahon: A Journey, Gow Langsford Gallery Onehunga, Nov 23-Dec 21.
Website: mccahonproject.co.nz
Share your McCahon story: catalogue@mccahon.co.nz
Fundraising limited edition art print: Colin McCahon, Clouds 3, 1975 (2024). Screenprint on 640 gsm Hahnemüle paper. Edition of 100. Reproduction courtesy of the Colin McCahon Trust.
Kim Knight is an award-winning arts and lifestyle reporter with the Herald’s Premium Lifestyle team.
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