'Nationalism' - Francis Pound's big book. 6

I have had a good time reading this book. If I were top award ratings,

definitely5 stars. Even so I feel I should make clear some of my reservations

about its argument. Two sections of this book of special note: 

1. The City & the Land Sexed. Best for Francis Pound's genial delight in taking

the usually implicit sexual metaphors of 'Nationalist' criticism as literally

as possible. He has a great comic time naming genital parts & sexual acts that

were presumably unmentionable from the 30s to 50s in NZ.  The gender

implications are made clear. Some assistance from Alex Calder is one of the few

exceptions to Pound's near-silence about And.

This is a New Zealand Dunciad

beyond compare. !8th century British satirists would have been proud of this

section. 

2. In Chapter VIII: Primitivism & the National Purpose, the accounts of Gordon

Walter's adaptation of Maori & Pacific motifs to his clean-edged 'geometric'

abstraction & of his relation to abstraction in Europe and America are fine

pieces of writing -- maybe the most incisive commentary of Walters to date.

It gradually becomes clearer as the book goes on that the monster of

'Nationalist' criticism and its attendant 'timid modernism' was finally

destroyed by Walters [as classic mythological hero, Perseus or Theseus

perhaps]. 

Colin McCahon in this account is still too stuck on Christian religiosity &

landscape ['Nationalism']to do the deed. For all that, Pound makes his case

with some thoroughness and sensitiviy. His later work is as full of symbolizing

as the art of Joseph Beuys.

What was needed to kill the monster was not,it appears, McCahon's wide-open

acceptance [also 'forbidden'] of US painting of the 40s & 50s --- Harold

Rosenberg's Action Painting with its attention away from formal geometry &

containment of easel painting by the frame to process, nor to McCahon's keen

attention to Alan Kaprow's art and the 'Happening'.

As soon as Clement Greenberg's term 'Abstract Expressionism' appears it is

usually the case hat questions of formal overall treatment & surface versus

depth, painting versus drawing will follow, remaining within the terms of

a formalist aesthetics.

re- Pound's comments on my early account of McCahon's visit to the USA in the

Bulletin of New Zealand Art History, 1975:

that attempted to elicit the documented facts of McCahon's visit --  what he

could actually have seen.

Far from excluding as much as possible, the later part of the article pays

attention to the effect of US painting on him, along with the other things he

admired by Gauguin, Tessai, Capogrossi and Mondrian.

& US influence is more clearly acknowledged in my essay of 1992 for Headlands.

In Buffalo a year later, I was struck by the look of Robert Motherwell's Elegy

for the Spanish Republic, no. 34, as if I had found a McCahon I hadn't seen

before. 

What counts is Walters' static, framed, contained aesthetic of the idealist

formality of the geometrical, as practised by the painters and sculptors

Walters encountered in 1950 in Europe, Over a previous knowledge of Miro &

Klee, probably Capogrossi, Vasarely, Sophie-Taueber Arp & Herbin [perhaps also

Sonia Delaunay] are the models  This is the territory of apparently forbidden

by 'Nationalism': 'Ultra-Modernism'. Even so, as Pound continually points out,

it still bears the 'signature of place' with its references to Maori motifs. 

Mrkusich is another hero [though his art does not get the same attention here

as does Walters'], because he never was a figure painter. 

When Walters' art finally got the serious attention it undoubtedly deserved --

and still deserves -- it was 1966. In terms of overseas art, it was much too

late. & though in New Zealand the whole argument Nationalism/Internationalism

remained among some critics, but not all, & with little hold on artists after

1970.

[I did see Len Lye mentioned in a footnote -- footnote 'names' do not appear to

be indexed. But in spite of Lye's very early liking for -- and appropriation of

Pacific arts materials -- he doesn't count in this story, which tends to be

confined to NZ residents]. 

It is still one of the most ambitious accounts of New Zealand critical

positions in the first phases of New Zealand's modernism, clear and incisive in

its attack on 'Nationalism', full of excellent detailed discussions, a finely

readable text. 

Comments

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