The caped crusader writes again

In four decades, Herald art critic TJ McNamara has never missed a deadline. Picture / Brett Phibbs

No survey of the 40 years Terry McNamara has spent writing about the arts for the Herald would be complete without reference to a little four-letter word: cape.

During the early '90s, McNamara cut a courtly, slightly eccentric figure as he traversed Auckland's burgeoning gallery circuit, the swirling black cape a prop in his own artistic drama.

He doesn't wear the cape much any more, but still finds it "marvellous" for his annual Christmas sojourns to wintry Europe.

"You just pull it on or slip it off, it's so easy to wear," he enthuses. "It's long and heavy material so it's nice and warm. And it has no pockets so no one can pick your pockets."

McNamara, who recently turned 71, acquired the cape when he was travelling around England 20 years ago with an early music group called the Kings Company. His job was to provide the link between songs, reading poetry by the likes of Ben Jonson.

A lady admirer in Oxford enjoyed his performance so much she told him he deserved a cloak, and presented him with her late husband's cape.

But McNamara took the costume a step too far when he matched it with a cane, topped with a skull carving. "That was pure affectation," he shudders now, "just bullshit."

The debut of 'TJM'

When McNamara first hit upon the idea of writing about the arts for an Auckland newspaper in the mid-60s, he was "feeling restless", teaching English at Auckland Grammar. He was developing, through "an enormous amount of reading", an interest in art history he'd developed as an only child of elderly parents in the "Orakei state suburb".

He wrote to the editor of the Auckland Star, who turned him down, saying the paper had plans for an arts review "committee".

Undeterred, McNamara, by now working at teachers' college, gave a series of art history lectures for the Society of Arts. Then-Herald deputy editor Noel Chappelle was there, and liked McNamara's style.

"He wrote me a letter asking me to write for the Herald" - and so the byline initials "T.J.M" made their grand debut on May 11, 1966. He believes he was paid five guineas per story for the first six months.

His first article, "Techniques Vary at Exhibition", was a piece on the Society of Arts Festival featuring work by Peter and Theo Janssen, Kees Hos and Alison Pickmere.

It was followed two days later by a report on an exhibition of Shakespeare lithographs at the John Leech Gallery. The byline reads in error "T.J.McW." He has never missed a deadline in 40 years of writing.

This was arts writing, not as a weekly column, but as news and McNamara loved the ambience of the newsroom, a world he'd never glimpsed before.

"In those days, the openings were on a Monday and I'd go to the opening, make some notes then go to the newsroom and write. The newsroom fascinated me - it was another world. It had bare wooden floors, mechanical typewriters, everyone was smoking and it was almost all men.

"There were pneumatic tubes to send the copy down to the typesetters and you knew that down below were the big presses ready to roll. There was a kind of romanticism about it."

In the initial stages, photographs to accompany the articles were rare unless McNamara discovered a show with a "special kind of excitement".

"But, dare I say it, the photographer would come, look around the gallery, try and find the prettiest girl, stand her against the painting and photograph the pretty girl."

At the time, Auckland had only a handful of galleries, including the Barry Lett Gallery and New Vision, which was part gallery-part craft shop.

Now McNamara will wrestle with the increasingly frequent dilemma of how to cover 20 shows opening in one week; back in the mid-60s there would be only one or two. However, with artists like McCahon, Mrkusich and Smithers coming through, it was an extraordinary time.

"Everyone would go to the Lett Gallery, say, and there'd be novelists and poets and artists and writers. They'd go to the opening and then to the long-gone Victoria Tavern in Victoria St which had paintings all over the walls, and talk and argue. It was more bohemian, it was also very exciting."

McNamara met McCahon several times, then made the error of asking him to appear in a series on artists he was making for what is now the Concert programme on National Radio. "He absolutely refused. He said all that matters is what's on the wall. I took that on board."

Responding to what's on the wall

McNamara has always had a particular take on his job - that he's writing for a newspaper audience. "There are two types of critics - some live alongside artists, they go to the studios, they talk, they belong to a circle and they can have great insights. But I am writing for a daily paper. I sort of see myself as a representative of the person who goes into the gallery. I have always written my response to what's on the wall.

"I have never really been great friends with artists or gallery owners because it is a small town.

"What has gone from me is the extreme judgmental thing. I would never nowadays say, as I have in the past, that 'this is the worst show of the year'. I did say things like that when I was starting out because I think young critics do. Early on, I made some terrible blunders by questioning an artist's motives."

McNamara is aware he has his critics but is adamant that, for his part, he dislikes "a lot of the writing about art which appears in the small specialist magazines, its elite vocabulary for a limited audience. And yet those people, I think, look down on my writing because it is understandable.

"I am caught between this academic world of people writing esoteric things which is often bullshit, and the world of journalism, and I don't belong to either."

What McNamara has noticed in the past 40 years is "a tremendous confidence" emerging in New Zealand artists. "In my time, artists like Pat Hanly and Ralph Hotere, who made considerable reputations overseas, have been able to come back and find a climate of acceptance.

"This was in complete contrast to somebody like Frances Hodgkins, and the Katherine Mansfield syndrome; that you had to get out and it all happens in Europe, that you find your soul in Europe. Well, it is possible, in this last 40 years, to find your artistic soul in New Zealand."

McNamara has been travelling to Europe every year for the past 15 years, visiting as many galleries and exhibitions as he can squeeze in during the short break he takes from teaching English as a second language (he was made redundant from teachers' college when he was 63). What he sees affirms his assessment of contemporary New Zealand art.

"I am more fascinated by the historical exhibitions in London. I try to look at the latest things in the galleries but I find it nowhere near as interesting as what's happening in Auckland. It is much more interesting than a great many of the manifestations of art in England."

McNamara owns few paintings himself.

His small home is instead adorned with posters and prints from the European galleries, and a single, lovely Lois McIvor landscape hangs above the fireplace.

There is a pragmatic reason for this. McNamara used to live with his wife, with whom he has four children and five grandchildren, in a large villa in Epsom. The walls were full of New Zealand paintings. When the couple split around 20 years ago, they decided to sell the lot and split the money.

"Money is easy to divide," he says. "Paintings are not."