Soap opera

Pursuing Snoop Dogg's inspiration for Shane Cotton reminded us of how often these sorts of connections are repeated in art writing without us getting to see pictures of the sources. One very famous example relates to how Colin McCahon got the idea of using voice bubbles for paintings like The King of the Jews and Crucifixion according to St Mark from the back of a Rinso soap flakes packet. 

The source of this brilliant connection is, as is so often the case, McCahon himself this time in a letter to collector and friend Rodney Kennedy. “The inspiration – the legend from a Rinso packet… the use of legend with space composition could be very telling,” McCahon wrote to him in 1947.

And telling is the word when you find the Rinso packet in question (thanks Google). But you should also check out McCahon's Crucifixion according to St Mark of the same year. Here the idea of arranging voice panels around the image appears to have come even more directly from the Rinso design. 

You can see images of Colin McCahon’s King of the Jews here here and his Crucifixion according to St Mark here

So you say

For any New Zealander interested in the visual arts the words I AM will always belong to Colin McCahon. Off-shore this ownership is not so certain. Pharrell Williams who owns the company I Am Other Entertainment has taken recording artist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas to court to try and stop him using the I am phrase. The battle of the Williams (does McCahon’s son William know he his father's I AM lodged in his first name one wonders?) rests on the Peas William inserting periods to create the name will.i.am. If the Entertainment Williams wins this battle (I Am Other Entertainment, LLC v. William Adams, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 13-4547) a quick dive into Google will find him plenty of other I AMs to battle waiting in the wings.
Image: the first 16 I AM hits off Google images

Fag ends

Back in the late 1970s the Dowse Art Gallery as it was then was offered the opportunity to organise and open the Benson & Hedges Art Award. The Award was well established and had already been won by artists like Richard Killeen and Don Driver so the question “would we be interested?” was responded to with a hearty "would we hell." 

The icing on the cake was that James Mollison director of the Australian National Gallery and purchaser of Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles was to be the judge. To seal the deal tobacco company W.D and H.O Wills who made the B&H brand (known in the Valley as Rothmans after the cigarette made in the Hutt) invited the staff (all two of us) for a tour of the factory and lunch in the management dining room. Somewhere in there they mentioned they were targeting their marketing to get young women smoking. “Really, how interesting.” (Different times, but still the shame of it looking back). There was also a bid to have young women (girls in the Rothmans speak of the day) in short skirts handing out packs of fags at the opening. That we did stand up to.

About 500 paintings turned up to the Rothmans factory in Lower Hutt and they were trucked round to the Dowse where Mollison gallantly looked at them all and gave the award to Ian Scott. It was on this same NZ trip that he visited Peter McLeavey’s gallery and purchased four Colin McCahon works on paper for the Australian National collection (you can see them here 1-2-3-4).

And all this to show you a 1969 Harald Szeemann drawing poking a stick at one of the great cultural sponsor of the time, although incredibly Philip Morris was still giving grants totaling $9.3 million to 295 arts and cultural organizations as late as 2003.
Image: Harald Szeeman drawing done in preparation for the When attitudes become form exhibition in 1969

The old switcheroo

A couple of years ago we postedon Glen Hayward’s replication of painted conduit and a light switch in the restored McCahon House. Now to show that great minds think alike, here is some conduit and a switch from Fallingwater care of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Redeemer

Is this a lookalike or someone channeling McCahon from beyond the grave? Whatever, the style of Caltex’s giveaway promotion at the very least strongly echoes the proposal drawings McCahon made for a mural for Caltex. It was 1963 and Caltex was moving its head office in Auckland’s Fanshaw Street. A mural was called for. McCahon's design was not accepted, apparently because a name change was in the offing. In fact that didn’t happen for another three years and only affected the corporate name changing to Caltex Petroleum Corp. 

Images: Top, Caltex campaign and bottom, McCahon Caltex painting reproduced in the Les and Milly Paris auction catalogue. Also showing as a bonus is Milan Mrkusich’s Golden passive element. (Thanks S. Thanks again, that cap is on its way… really.)

Sixty five years later

A bottle of pure water compared to Colin McCahon
(Thanks S)

And his favourite opera? Gotta be Starlight Express

"He's a strange one, isn't he? I just find it all a bit ... bleak ….There is too much gloomy art in New Zealand. There is not enough light and frivolity."
 

Minister of Culture and Heritage Hon. Chris Finlayson commenting on Colin McCahon’s Muriwai Canvas and Necessary Protectionin the Parliamentary collection. (According to the NZH Mr Finlayson's own favourites hang in his office and include one of Piera McArthur’s series on Bishop Pompallier)  More here if you want to punish yourself further.

Image: Finlayson and McArthur Pompallier painting

Snap

Rounding a corner in the copy painting village of Da Fen in southern China, we saw a startlingly familiar image. A copy from a postcard was being made of Picasso's Pitcher, candle, and casserole, but our jolt of recognition connected to an early Colin McCahon painting A candle in a dark room that we had first seen in the late seventies.

One of the advantages of being in New Zealand is the easy access you have to most parts of the art world. And that was how, thanks to being in the public art museum business and writing the text for a book on contemporary artists, we got to meet Colin McCahon a couple of times. He was very welcoming and happy to talk with a couple of people who were pretty junior in the scheme of things. At one stage he said, “You two are from Wellington, I’ll show you something from my first Wellington exhibition. It’s under the bed” and dived out of the room. The painting he brought back was a little worn but spruced up it is now on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery, presumably by the McCahon family.

Although the date is unclear on the painting itself, it was recorded as 1947 and listed as entry number 37 in the catalogue sheet when it was shown in an exhibition of McCahon's paintings by Ron O’Reilly in the newspaper room of the Wellington Public Library the following year.  This date makes the 1945 Picasso painting almost certainly a key influence. You can see the black triangular shape at the edge of Picasso’s candle flame is enlarged and repeated in the McCahon work, the colour range is startlingly similar and the candle and holder are obvious soul mates. It certainly lit us up there on the streets of Da Fen.

Image: Left, a Da Fen painter’s copy of Picasso’s Pitcher, candle, and casserole (the Picasso original is in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris) and right, Colin McCahon’s A candle in a dark room currently on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery.

McCahon sat here

Colin McCahon once famously wrote on a drawing of the cliffs at Muriwai: “McLeavey sat here”. But where did McCahon sit? If Trade Me is anything to go by for at least some of the time it was on a Scandinavian-style couch with a small bench end that doubled as storage space. And yes, this piece of furniture refurbished has now ended up online with an ‘opening bid’ of $1000. 

According to the seller it was purchased from descendents of Colin McCahon who said that it had originally been used by him but when it became tatty, it had been given to them for a flat. After being passed around the family for a number of years, the current seller purchased it with its original “faded blue weave” (for any McCahon obsessives out there).

You can bid for the couch which is now “covered in a very expensive linen” here. 
(Thanks for the heads-up P)

From the stream

McCahon infiltrates the M of E

Hunting in the abstract

The discovery in the US of a $50 Renoir (now valued at $85,000) in a Virginia flea market recently reminded us of the possibility of an NZ-related find for anyone travelling in the States. Back in mid-1963 American businessman E. J. Danziger purchased twenty abstract paintings by Colin McCahon from the IKON Gallery in Auckland. As McCahon’s exhibition that year consisted of landscapes (including the large Landscape theme and variations given by Creative NZ to Te Papa), the Danziger works were probably selected from stock. 

Danziger and his brother had been partners in the movie business producing over 70 B-grade thrillers (including So evil, so young, and the 1957 shocker The depraved – more here) in the 1950s and 1960s. By the time 1958 rolled around - as McCahon was painting his pivotal Northland panels - the Danzigers had shifted focus and taken over the Gordon Hotels group whose operations included the 406-room May Fair Hotel in London. It was to decorate rooms in this hotel that Danziger purchased the works by McCahon in 1963. A year after the purchase the Danzigers stepped out of the hotel business presumably leaving the 20 c.1962 abstract paintings by Colin McCahon in place. The hunt was on. 

Over the years the ‘missing’ Danziger McCahons became a bit of a legend. Every now and then there would be talk of this dealer or that combing their way through the files and travelling to the States to try and track the 20 down. Martin Browne, a dealer based in Sydney, talked with the 81-year old Danziger in 1990 and located eight of the 20. 

Then in 2006 another of the Danziger works turned up. The painting which certainly looks like it is from the Bellini Madonna series was made available on eBay with no reserve from a seller tagged quicksellit-westpalmbeachfl. A winning bid of $US4,500 was posted but the vendor refused to give up the work. The painting is not included in the Colin McCahon online catalogue although an image of it appeared on the eBay auction site at the time. 

By our account that leaves 11 works somewhere out there. OTY. 

Image: The painting put up on eBay as one of Colin McCahon’s Bellini Madonna series in 2006

CORRECTION 1 OCTOBER: It turns out that Renoir was stolen so not quite the bargain we'd bargained on