Some biographers are finding estates denying publication of works by our greatest creators. Photograhy: Marti Friedlander
A man, a working man, holds up his hand in defiance. His mouth is pressed shut, his gaze slides away. His hand, palm to the viewer as if blocking a photographer, dominates the canvas in a dramatic configuration of light and dark and determined resistance.
No!, a 1971 painting by Tony Fomison, epitomises the artist’s dark, brooding intensity that even now, 35 years after the artist’s death, holds its power through an expansive catalogue of dying Christs and maverick joker men, mythic landscapes and ogrish figures.
In 2017, when Fomison’s friend and fellow political activist Murray Horton was asked to select his favourite artwork at the Christchurch Art Gallery for its Bulletin publication, he chose No! “It’s emblematic of his art which was confrontational and definitely not user-friendly,” he wrote.
This year, for the same publication, TVNZ journalist Jack Tame chose the same work, recalling the large print in his family home: “It wasn’t rebellious. It was resistant. And it was very different to the kind of pictures that my friends’ parents all had on their walls.”
In 2013, an enlarged reproduction of this work was pasted up on a brick wall newly exposed by the Christchurch earthquake. The scale, the surrounding devastation, even the graffitied message – “Keep your shit for the gallery” – may well have pleased the artist.
“More than anything,” says Mark Forman, author of the new biography on Fomison, “Tony wanted his work to be seen and shared as widely as possible. He really leaned into that working-class thing. He didn’t like the fact that galleries would lock away his work, he didn’t like the fact that it would be in private ownership. He wanted to paint murals because of that – it was the sole means of getting his art out there and communicating as widely as possible.”
Forman’s book is a comprehensive portrait of the man and the artist: his humour and generosity; his abrasiveness, drunkenness and addictions; his utter commitment to an art practice that, alongside the work of fellow painters Philip Clairmont and Allen Maddox, stormed through New Zealand’s art scene in the 1970s and early 1980s with a raw, expressionistic currency.
Reviewing Fomison’s first solo show at New Vision Gallery in Auckland in 1972, Hamish Keith wrote, “Fomison’s target is the imagination, and he goes straight to it – no hesitation or polite coughs of warning for the delicate.”
Artist and lifelong friend Llew Summers was more blunt: “It was his fucking soul he was painting.”
Copyright refused
But if Fomison wanted his work to be “seen and shared”, it does not happen in Forman’s book, Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist, not visually at least. As the biography neared completion, Fomison’s estate refused permission for the reproduction of any of the artist’s work or extracts from previously unpublished letters.
It was disappointing, says Forman, but not unexpected. While working on the final draft, “It still wasn’t certain whether or not the family was going to support it but my hunch was they weren’t. I suppose I wrote about the art as if readers wouldn’t see it.”
Auckland University Press publisher Sam Elworthy says, “It would have been good if pictures were in there.
“A family has a right not to support a project, and we respect that, but the public airing of art and ideas and that ongoing critical engagement is important for New Zealand culture. It keeps that person’s art alive, keeps people talking about them. But I feel the finished book is totally worthwhile, even without the art.”
Forman’s is not the first art book to be published without the art.
In 1999, Auckland University Press published Martin Edmond’s portrait of Philip Clairmont. The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont remains a widely admired text but, as with Forman’s book, there are no reproductions of the artist’s paintings. In this case, copyright permission had been granted, but problems arose when the then Arts Council of New Zealand (now Creative New Zealand), which had agreed to fund the required photographs of artworks, insisted the resulting transparencies be given to the council.
Edmond had already agreed with the then copyright owner, Clairmont’s widow Rachel Power, that the transparencies would go to the Clairmont Estate. “Rachel never refused me permission, but I thought I could never ask her under these conditions,” Edmond says now.
What was to be a short biography with 40 colour plates and a number of black and whites had to be completely recalibrated.
“It doesn’t make sense. Creative New Zealand is not a library – it perplexes me to this day.”
In 2020, Penguin Books published The Dark is Light Enough, Vincent O’Sullivan’s remarkable and sensitively told portrait of Ralph Hotere. Again, there are no reproductions of Hotere’s work.
O’Sullivan had been approached by Hotere, through his then partner, Mary McFarlane, in 2004. Would he be willing to write a biography of the artist? He would.
As publisher Claire Murdoch, at that time with Te Papa Press, told the Listener in 2012, “A biography of Ralph Hotere by Vincent O’Sullivan, one of New Zealand’s greatest living artists, undisputed, and one of New Zealand’s greatest biographers at the height of his powers – it sounded like another fantastic Hotere collaboration and such a significant cultural milestone.”
Hotere provided O’Sullivan with a signed note, introducing his biographer and “old friend”. “If he asks for assistance,” it said, “I would be grateful if you would help him please.” O’Sullivan regarded this letter as “the founding document” between writer and artist, a communiqué backed up by numerous assurances that he could use any images he needed.
Seven years and 110,000 words later, he informed Te Papa Press he was stopping work on the book. “One simply doesn’t give more of one’s life to prolonging a situation that is so far from what Ralph and I intended,” he wrote.
In an interview with the Listener in 2012, O’Sullivan, who died last year, described difficulties in arranging one-on-one interviews, lack of feedback on draft chapters, and delays in securing permission to use images of the artwork from Hotere’s estate. “It had become contemptuous of both me as a writer and Ralph himself,” he said then. “I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
Permission was never refused and, as Hotere Foundation Trust chair Judith Ablett-Kerr points out in an email, in 2021, the trust did approve the use of a series of Hotere’s images to illustrate a talk by O’Sullivan at a Wānaka bookshop. But the issues faced by O’Sullivan seem at odds with the objectives of the trust, including to “make the artworks available as far as practicable for public viewing and for educational purposes”.
Where copyright is simply part of an estate however, there are no such obligations.
‘Vetting everything’
In May was the launch of Nicola Francis’s 2024 biography of New Zealand-born Australian artist Rosalie Gascoigne. My own sort of heaven: A life of Rosalie Gascoigne tracks the artist’s early life in New Zealand then Australia, her marriage to astronomer Ben Gascoigne, then her late-in-life turn to art, concocting elegant compositions of found objects that drew on the landscape and the social context from which they came.
The book began as a doctoral thesis. Like Forman, Francis set out to write, not just about Gascoigne’s art, which had been done previously, but also her life and “the context in which she achieved fame”. Even then, when trying to make the thesis available online, she was stymied by constraints imposed by the artist’s estate, then represented by Gascoigne’s elder son Martin. These included limits on the number of artworks, their size, where they would be placed and the wording for captions.
“He wanted to be vetting everything, basically. It’s not an ideal way to do biography.”
Despite widespread interest in it, Francis was worried the lack of art images would deter publishers. But when Australian National University (ANU) Press came knocking three years ago, she went back to the copyright holder. “It became really difficult again. I was heartbroken, it really hurt.”
Encouraged by another member of the Gascoigne family, who threw her support behind Francis’s biography, ANU Press offered to publish it without the images.
The resulting book has numerous photographs of Gascoigne, her family, landscapes, even found objects selected by Gascoigne but never used in her art. But there are no images of Gascoigne’s work.
In the book, Francis points readers to the relevant page in the artist’s 2019 catalogue raisonné compiled by Martin Gascoigne and also published by ANU Press.
“But it’s not the same as checking the page and looking at the image,” she says now. “It doesn’t make sense, does it? Sure, they are not going to agree to everything a biographer says, but you would think they’d want their family member to get more publicity, to be out there, for people to read about them.”
Following Martin Gascoigne’s death last year, the copyright has passed to his two siblings – if Francis was publishing now, she would have been able to include images of the artworks. As it is, she says, she worked with the resources she had, “which is what Rosalie did with her art. She collected materials for her art; I gathered what I could for this narrative of her life.”
She had few options. Under copyright law, the artist owns the copyright to the work they have created.
“When the artist dies,” says Auckland barrister and intellectual property adviser Sheana Wheeldon, “the ownership of the copyright forms part of their estate. In the same way that the artist has no obligation to promote their work, the owner of the copyright has no obligation. If I own copyright in an artwork, I don’t have to let anyone see it or copy it, no matter how important it is. Copyright gives zero obligations, just the right to allow or not allow other people to reproduce.”
Still, she says, it is an unusual scenario where there is a book about an artist but no reproductions of artworks because the author hasn’t been able to get any permission from the estate. “It feels a little bit futile what they have done but I guess if they don’t like the book, this is a way they can express their displeasure.”
Family resistance
Forman began researching his Fomison book in 2010, two decades after the artist’s death. He contacted Fomison’s sister Anna, then her mother, Mary, who was responsible for her son’s estate.
Forman recalls “a kind of light resistance” from the family, “but I thought if I met with them and talked with them we could get on the same page.”
At one stage, Mary Fomison suggested he send a list of images he wanted to use in the book, “the implication being that she would grant copyright permission for reproduction of key works. But I knew things would never be that straightforward.”
They weren’t. Since Mary’s death in 2020, the estate is now represented by her three daughters. When Forman sent them a draft manuscript for feedback, he writes, “They expressed their deep disappointment with the work and insisted it was full of assumptions and inaccuracies.”
Errors were corrected, ambiguities removed. Others were checked and retained. But, as Sam Elworthy says, “It’s often not really a question of individual little facts. It is a question of the family’s relationship, with their brother in this case, and emotion and sense of protection that I can only really guess at.”
In his book, Forman says the feedback from Fomison’s sisters, “was less to do with factual errors and more to do with a family wanting certain parts of a brother’s story to be emphasised and others left out”.
It was becoming clear, he says now, that “[Anna Fomison] had a version of Fomison which was different from that of his friends and what I had begun to put together. That is not to say her version was incorrect, but it was a sister’s version and it did not embrace the whole of him as a person.
“I do have genuine respect for a family who is having a sibling written about, I can understand that you would feel vulnerable. But on the other hand, Tony is a public figure, he is one of our greatest artists, he wanted his art to be shown. How do you weigh up these two things? Should an estate be asking what would Tony want? Or is it just this doesn’t portray our family in the way we want to be portrayed?”
Frame’s legacy
Once an artist, or writer, dies, interpreting what they might have wanted is the responsibility of their estate, in many cases surviving family members. This has been the case following the death of Janet Frame in 2004. Since then, the Janet Frame Literary Trust, founded by the writer in 1999 and chaired by her niece and literary executor Pamela Gordon, has been working assiduously to ensure scholarly and creative attention focuses on Frame’s work as a writer rather than her earlier experiences of psychiatric institutions, fuelling accusations of restricted access to the author’s archived papers.
As Gordon told the Otago Daily Times in 2010, “Everyone’s interested in Janet Frame’s life but it’s her work that I’ve been given this role to nurture and foster and guard, and I’ve had to be a bit of a guardian this year because academics especially have a sense of entitlement that everything should be theirs the minute they want it.”
That same year, Dame Fiona Kidman defended Gordon’s execution of her role in a letter to this magazine: “Surely she is doing the job she was asked to do.”
Tony Fomison seems to have had no scruples about revealing the narrative of his life. A 1974 profile written by Murray Horton for University of Canterbury student magazine Canta was open about Fomison’s drug and alcohol use, his sexual preferences, political activism and antipathy towards the local arts scene.
Before publication, Canta’s printer asked Fomison to sign a legal waiver. He put his name to the document: “I TONY FOMISON having read the article by MURRAY HORTON for printing in Canta consider it to be correct in all ways and a true and accurate record of interviews. I authorise publication of the said article and consider it in no way defamatory and indemnify all concerned in its reproduction in Canta against all claims or demands which I may be able to take but agree not to do so.”
There were no secrets with Fomison, Horton says. “He wasn’t leading a double life. He wasn’t a closet something or other.”
If I had presented this kind of cleaned version of Tony, none of his friends would have recognised him, and to include all that stuff, to me, it is integral to understanding him as a person and his art.
Forman is adamant his book is not a tell-all – he left out information he considered overly salacious or unproven – but he does not present a manicured version of Fomison’s life. He charts his childhood in Christchurch, his archaeological work mapping Māori rock-art sites, his years at the University of Canterbury School of Art, his involvement with the Christchurch Gay Liberation Front, the Political Youth Movement, his integration into Auckland’s Samoan community. But there is also the real-life messiness of drug and alcohol addiction, the dingy flats, the police raids.
As Forman writes, he wanted to look at the paintings and drawings, “but I also wanted to know the man who made them.”
What did the family want? Forman believes the estate was hoping for a monograph by an established art historian, giving less of the detail of the life, he says, “and more just a distant view of the art”.
“If I had presented this kind of cleaned version of Tony, none of his friends would have recognised him, and to include all that stuff, to me, it is integral to understanding him as a person and his art.”
A scholarly book on Fomison, says Horton, “would be completely out of sync with him – and frankly boring”.
The only response from the estate for this story is an email from sisters Anna and Julia Fomison: “For our family, our decisions around copyright are simply based on protecting our brother’s legacy. We consider all requests carefully and are happy to support quality scholarship about his life’s work.
“Without more information, we can only guess at the use of word “quality”.
Certainly, there is scholarship around Fomison’s art. Art historian Lara Strongman’s 1991 MA thesis, An Artist’s Life, is a thorough overview of Fomison’s work and art. “The experiences of his life stimulated and informed his work: his images documented and disseminated his values and uncompromising vision,” she writes.
Three years later, a substantial catalogue of essays and artworks, researched and edited by curator and friend Ian Wedde was published to accompany the 1994 retrospective Fomison: What Shall We Tell Them? at City Gallery Wellington.
Like Gascoigne biographer Francis, Forman is not an art historian – his first book was a discussion of St Paul’s concept of inheritance – but his biography includes elegant descriptions of his art and photos of the artist himself.
The book has been described as a sensitive, fair and balanced portrayal. According to poet and friend Denys Trussell, who Fomison asked to write his biography in the 1980s, (Trussell declined), the book is a well-researched account of Fomison’s life, neither “passing judgment on its flaws or exaggerating its virtues”.
Forman is hopeful that the family might organise another retrospective, accompanied by an art book with essays perhaps, or Anna Fomison’s interviews – in 2015-16, she interviewed five of her brother’s friends for an oral history project. His book could then sit alongside, “which would be something”.
In the meantime, in this book at least, the “No!” stands.
