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Recommended Readings
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Contemporary Painting in New Zealand
by Michael Dunn
This new book explores the different perspectives that have helped shape the current directions in New Zealand painting, including neo-expressionism, recent forms of abstraction and colour painting, the 'new figuration', and the bi-cultural contribution of contemporary Maori painting. Professor Dunn provides an introductory overview of the contemporary art scene in New Zealand and follows it with profiles of both established painters and exciting younger artists who are now making their mark in different ways. The book makes particular mention of the work of Maori painters who address important social issues in their art.
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Dealer and Public Galleries in NZ
Art galleries came into existence during the 19th Century. Prior to that, people either owned art or saw it in churches and palaces. In the 19th century, with the rise of the middle classes and the merchant class, saw the need for public education in the arts through collections of art. The two different kinds of galleries in New Zealand are the public galleries (national and regional) and dealer galleries, and they have a different role as art museums.
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The Women's Art Movement and Feminist Art
Until the late 1960s the idea of the artist was unquestionably masculine. The Women's Art Movement was closely aligned with the Women's Movement, which arose in the 1970s. It sought artistic equality in terms of education, exhibitions, criticism and recognition and criticized all aspects of the continuing oppression of women in the visual arts.
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Links to NZ contemporary Women artist:
Jacqueline Fahey
Alexis Hunter
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Rita Angus
Rita Angus (1908--1970) studied at the Canterbury College School of Art and briefly at Auckland's Elam School of Art and Design. The regional realist style which she developed provided the model for a distinctive New Zealand style of painting.
Angus depicted local motifs which came to be seen as a typically New Zealand style, i.e. being linear, hard-edged and sharply-defined.
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Colin McCahon
Colin McCahon (1919--1987) is now widely regarded as New Zealand's most important modern painter. He wrote extensively about his painting and in some of his notes made it quite clear that he did not subscribe to the formalist purity of non-figurative abstraction. Mostly McCahon was self-taught--- a fact that freed him to some extent from the style and approaches of the art schools.
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Toss Woollaston
Woollaston was born in 1910. He is one of the pioneers of modern art in New Zealand, especially with his early landscapes and figurative paintings of the 1930s. Woollaston's work was based in ordinary landscape. He had an unusual approach to its treatment though. Instead of using the hard outlines and strong forms of regionalism, he used a far more expressionist approach to line, colour and form.
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