When Good Art Goes Bad
/Don’t let anyone tell you that art history is dry and boring. For those of us who have studied it we know it is full of humour, debauchery, drama, controversy, gossip and the bizarre.
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling was quickly perceived as ‘godless’ and homosexual. ‘Modesty’ coverings were painted over the exposed genitals not long after Michelangelo’s death. Their existence, and possible removal, is still debated.
The Victorian art critic John Ruskin married Effie Grey in 1848. Six years later she successfully petitioned to have the marriage annulled on the grounds that their union had never been consummated. She had fallen in love with Pre-Raphaelite painter, and Ruskin’s friend, John Everett Millais after posing for him and married him a year after the annulment was finalised. The scandal was significant and their love triangle remains a source of much speculation – what was really happening between them?
Salvador Dali made a strange and inscrutable appearance on What’s My Line? in 1957. The television series blindfolded participants and they proceed to question famous figures to reveal their identity. Dail is, to put it mildly, a very confusing guest. I implore you to watch, it is a master class in performance art.
New Zealand’s art history is no different.
Dutch/New Zealand artist Theo Schoon has been back in the news recently with a major exhibition at City Gallery in Wellington. A difficult figure he famously ‘fixed’ or ‘improved’ the rock art he found here while also bringing it to the public’s attention for the first time. He also made his own ‘Māori’ art in the form of carved gourds and paintings with kowhaiwhai designs. His place in our art history is fraught and the exhibition drew significant protest at the canonisation and lionising of an artist such as Schoon.
In Nelson we have had our own brushes with art historical arguments.
France Hodgkins’ Ruined Mine, Wales, along with six other paintings, was shipped out to New Zealand for exhibition not long after the artist’s death. It is an example of Hodgkins’ more mature style, and shows why she was regarded as a leading modernist painter in Great Britain. She never entirely ‘lost the subject’ and in this painting her sparing calligraphic brushwork has captured the silhouetted form of the mine buildings, stone walls, roads and fields in the foreground.
Frances HODGKINS (New Zealander, b.1869, d.1947), Ruined Mine, Wales, 1932, gouache on paper. Presented anonymously in 1949.
The paintings were sent out to New Zealand because the Canterbury Society of Arts felt that, with Hodgkin’s death the year before in 1947, it was time for some of her later work to enter New Zealand collections. She had spent much of the previous 50 years in Britain, with only sporadic visits back, meaning that she was primarily represented in public collections by her early paintings and drawings. In Christchurch it was proposed to buy a painting called the Pleasure Garden for the Robert McDougall Art Gallery (now the Christchurch Art Gallery), which started a very public row that divided the Christchurch art community, and raged for several years. Her work proved too modern for the New Zealand audience. In Nelson the proposal to buy Ruined Mine also caused a stir and great upset to the Trust’s then longest serving trustee, Mr F Gibbs who was in his eighties. Even after the painting had been bought by public subscription and offered to the Gallery, the trust board’s minutes hint at their reluctance to accept it. But how quickly the tide of taste turns, by December 1950 The Suter was crowing about a major loan exhibition of Frances Hodgkins it was about to show.
All we can wonder now is: what will be the next incident? Who will cause it? And what will be written about it 70 years later?
Sarah McClintock
Suter Curator
Read more about the artists here:
Frances Hodgkins
Theo Schoon
Read a fascinating contemporaneous account of The Pleasure Garden Incident at the Pantograph Punch.
