Dear Colin, Dear Ron Look Inside

Dear Colin, Dear Ron The Selected Letters of Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly

Peter Simpson

To the families of Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly

Contents

Preface 8 Part I: 1944–1951 16 Part II: 1953–1964 146 Part III: 1966–1981 272 Riffing Ron – Mathew O’Reilly 488 An Inherent View – Finn McCahon-Jones 496 Appendices 500 Image credits 513 About the contributors 514 Index 516

Preface

I

first became aware of the correspondence between Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly – initially only through McCahon’s letters, not O’Reilly’s – when I was working on my book Colin McCahon: The Titirangi years, 1953–1959, which was published by Auckland University Press in 2007. At that time Colin’s letters to Ron were in the possession of Ron’s son Matthew O’Reilly, who with the agreement of his sister, Rachel, kindly allowed me to read them and copy out relevant passages for possible inclusion in my book.

At that time, because of the limited temporal scope of the project, I confined myself to letters written between 1953 and 1959. Over subsequent years I approached Matthew again for access to letters related to various other projects I was working on, such as an essay about McCahon’s Christchurch years between 1948 and 1953, written for the Christchurch Art Gallery’s Bulletin,1 for which Matthew kindly sent me photographs of letters from that period. I approached him yet again while researching my two-volume study of McCahon for Auckland University Press, published in 2019–20 to coincide with the centenary of McCahon’s birth, and I spent time at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (where Matthew was then working as a framer), copying and photographing letters and other documents.2 In those books I made a definite feature of McCahon’s letters as a primary resource, including excerpts from his letters not only to O’Reilly but also to his parents, his sister Beatrice, Charles Brasch, Rodney Kennedy, Toss and Edith Woollaston, John and Anna Caselberg, Doris Lusk, Patricia France, Peter McLeavey and others. As I had hoped, these excerpts communicated in his own voice, so to speak, important information about McCahon as a person and as a painter, bringing the reader closer to the man himself and his artistic vision than any other source.

9

Colin McCahon at a social gathering in Christchurch, around 1950.

Within McCahon’s extensive letter-writing activity (many hundreds if not thousands of letters in total), his correspondence with O’Reilly is probably the largest and most prolonged. The earliest of their 360 or so surviving letters (fairly equally divided in number between them) were exchanged in 1944, the last in 1981 – a span of thirtyseven years. Furthermore, from the start O’Reilly engaged passionately with McCahon’s practice at many levels, from acquiring works for his private collection to organising numerous exhibitions, and as a consequence their exchanges are stacked with invaluable information about individual paintings, series, exhibitions and many other aspects of McCahon’s artistic practice and career. Among his close circle of regular correspondents, Colin McCahon probably engaged in more intimate and extensive dialogue about his practice with O’Reilly than with any other person.

It wasn’t until after the publication of my double-volume study of McCahon between 2019 and 2020 that I first got the opportunity to read O’Reilly’s side of the correspondence, which is now located among the McCahon papers in the Hocken Collections at the University of Otago in Dunedin. Because of Covid travel restrictions, I was unable to visit Dunedin to examine the original letters – which (incidentally) had been deposited there by McCahon or his family both prior to and after his death in 1987, along with many other letters and personal papers. However, thanks to the generosity of the Hocken staff (especially Head of Archives Anna Blackman), I was sent electronic scans of all of O’Reilly’s letters to McCahon and was able to read and transcribe them.

I should also point out that in 2022, after I had completed the transcription of Colin’s letters to Ron, Matthew and Rachel O’Reilly deposited their father’s letters and other papers in Hocken Collections. Both sides of the correspondence are now held in the same institution (as is also the case with the Brasch, Caselberg and Patricia France correspondence). I am most grateful to Hocken Collections for the invaluable help they have provided me in accessing this material and for giving permission to publish it.

Grateful thanks, too, for the kind permission to publish material still under copyright to the McCahon and O’Reilly families, and for their generous support of this project, which could not have proceeded without them.

Reading O’Reilly’s letters to McCahon greatly enhanced my appreciation and understanding of Ron as a person – distinguished in his own right as a philosopher, librarian, educator, administrator, exhibition organiser, art writer, amateur painter and gallery director – and of the multiple roles he performed as McCahon’s friend and supporter over many decades. Furthermore, O’Reilly’s letters continuously complement, engage with and illuminate McCahon’s letters to him. I soon came to realise the great value to anyone interested in the cultural history of New Zealand in the twentieth century, and in McCahon in particular, of publishing the whole correspondence, or at least a significant portion of it.

On reflection, it became apparent to me that for publication purposes a large selection

Preface

11

would be more feasible than the full, unedited correspondence. Many of Ron’s letters are very long (some over thirty pages), and if published in full his contribution would tend to overwhelm Colin’s generally (but not always) briefer letters. Furthermore, O’Reilly’s letters often include material of lesser relevance to an audience primarily interested in New Zealand’s cultural history and McCahon in particular, which I envisaged as the book’s core readership. In my selections from each writer, I have deliberately focused (though far from exclusively) on passages immediately relevant to the art of McCahon and the visual arts in general.

I have aimed in my selections at achieving an appropriate balance between the two correspondents. Few whole letters have been excluded (mainly brief notes, travel details and the like), and by far the greater proportion of their joint dialogue is included. I should add that my selections have been seen by both the McCahon and O’Reilly families, and my inclusions and exclusions reflect their suggestions and have their consent. All excisions from the original letters are marked with an ellipsis [. . .]; explanatory notes are provided throughout. Some ink sketches included in the letters are reproduced in facsimile. The full unabridged text of the letters is of course available (with permission) at Hocken Collections for anyone who wishes to examine the complete record of their transactions.

W

ith a very few exceptions, all of the letters from both men were handwritten, so my first, marathon-like task was one of transcription. As is evident from the photographic facsimiles included in this book, O’Reilly’s handwriting is almost always easy to read and seldom presented difficulties. On the other hand, McCahon’s handwriting, though familiar, of course, from his paintings and generally legible, is not invariably so, and some passages or phrases or individual words proved to be indecipherable – sometimes because of damage to the paper or failure of writing equipment such as pens or ballpoints – despite lengthy scrutiny and consultation. All such occasions are noted in the text.

I should also note that all of my transcriptions of both writers have been meticulously checked by Matthew O’Reilly and corrected where necessary. I am most grateful for the scrupulous care he took. In the rare cases of unreadability, we have compared notes and either agreed on probable readings or on indicating the very occasional indecipherable passages. Some obvious spelling errors or slips-of-the-pen have been silently corrected, but any significant changes are included in square brackets. Some first and surnames have been added in square brackets for ease of identification. Idiosyncrasies of spelling or punctuation have mostly been deliberately preserved or any changes noted. Ellipses have been used to indicate where passages have been omitted. Long dashes indicate section breaks or other hand-drawn annotations in the original letters.

The letters are published in chronological sequence so far as this can be established;

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

Ron O’Reilly in his campus flat in Ibadan, Nigeria, between 1964 and 1966, when he was teaching librarianship at the University of Ibadan. Colin McCahon’s Landscape theme and variations (D) is on the wall behind him.

not all letters, especially McCahon’s, are clearly dated as to the day, month and/or year. The manner in which they each recorded addresses and dates has been standardised for ease of reading. The punctuation of salutations has also been standardised in many places. There is one exception to chronological ordering. In Appendix 1, some fairly lengthy aesthetic/ philosophical statements by O’Reilly dating from 1963 have been brought together and printed separately from the letters in which they originally appeared, mainly in order to avoid significantly interrupting the flow of the narrative and so that they may more easily be read and digested. Appendix 2 consists of O’Reilly’s valuable introduction to the catalogue of Colin McCahon: A Survey (Auckland City Art Gallery, 1972), his only published essay solely about McCahon.

Reproductions of artworks by McCahon (and some photographs) have been included, the selection of reproductions being governed by significant references to these works in the text. Often the reproduced works are among those that were either acquired by O’Reilly by purchase or as gifts from the artist, or are works in whose exhibition he played a significant role.

Given the highly personal nature of such private correspondence, I thought it would be appropriate to include a perspective from the McCahon and O’Reilly families. With the publisher’s agreement, I invited Matthew O’Reilly (Ron’s son) and Finn McCahon-Jones (son of William McCahon, and Colin’s grandson) to contribute some thoughts about the correspondence. Their valuable input, for which I am most grateful, is included as a twopart afterword.

I

t remains for me to thank some others who have helped this book into being. I am most grateful to Nicola Legat and the staff of Te Papa Press for the support they have shown throughout the preparation of the book, not to mention the highly professional skills they have brought to its realisation. Grateful thanks for their expert contributions to project editor Olivia Nikkel, copy-editor Kate Stone, proofer Mike Wagg, indexer Brian O’Flaherty, imaging technician Yoan Jolly and designer Kate Barraclough.

I have already mentioned the McCahon and O’Reilly families without whose consent the book could not have proceeded, and I would like to add a personal word of thanks to Victoria Carr, Finn McCahon-Jones, and Rachel and Matthew O’Reilly for their patience and belief in the project. Grateful thanks, too, to the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust for permission to reproduce all of those works by Colin McCahon contained in these pages.

Many thanks, too, to Jenny Gibbs, Peter Cooper, Helen Beaglehole and Gow Langsford Gallery, who have made a generous financial contribution to the production.

The publication is more handsome and comprehensive because of their generosity.

I am grateful also to the various individuals and institutions who own the paintings,

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

photographs and written archives reproduced within. To John Gow, Laurence Simmons, Dunstan Ward, Martin Edmond, Viv Stone, Grant Banbury and Sam Elworthy I owe a personal debt of gratitude, as I do to my wife, Helen, whose love and support have enabled this book to happen, as it has all the others she has lived through with me.

Almost every phase of McCahon’s grandly evolving career is illuminated by these letters, from tentative but striking early portraits and landscapes – Elespie Forsyth (1937–39), Ruby Bay (1945) – painted during the Second World War, to late, great paintings such as the ‘Truth from the King Country’ series (1978–79) and A Painting for Uncle Frank (1980). Furthermore, by recording the comings and goings and ups and downs of a rich and mutually rewarding friendship, and because of the intimate involvement of both men in many key aspects of the life of their time and place, their correspondence also serves as a comprehensive portrait of New Zealand’s cultural history in the middle decades (1940s to 1980s) of the twentieth century – the backdrop, as it were, to the greatest visual artist of his time.

Peter Simpson Auckland November 2023

Notes

1

Peter Simpson, ‘Colin McCahon: The Christchurch Years’, Bulletin no. 185, pp. 32–41 (Christchurch Art Gallery); a longer version of this article is online at www.christchurchartgallery.org.nz/ bulletin/185/colin-mccahon-five-years-in-christchurch-194853.

2

Peter Simpson, Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction. Volume One, 1919–1959, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2019; Peter Simpson, Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land?

Volume Two, 1960–1987, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2020.

Preface

15

Part I: 1944–1951

OPPOSITE Handwritten letter from Ron O’Reilly to Colin McCahon, 4 August 1944. (See pages 26–30.)

T

he correspondence of Colin McCahon (1919–1987) and Ron O’Reilly (1914– 1982), extending over nearly forty years (1944–81), is a testament to their close and productive friendship. The whole correspondence, now held in Hocken Collections in Dunedin – where they first met and became friends – consists of over 360 letters, an almost equal number from each writer, and all but a few handwritten. The surviving body of letters is certainly not complete; it is clear from internal evidence that some have not been preserved while others have missing pages; it is probable, however, that the majority of their letters were preserved.

Certainly, each man greatly valued the other’s communications and took care to retain them: ‘What a stimulating letter you write’, O’Reilly exclaimed on one occasion (9 August 1947); ‘A magnificent letter’, McCahon wrote on another (4 February 1951).

Whether or not either envisaged eventual publication is a matter of speculation. There is no reference anywhere in the letters themselves as to their being preserved or eventually published, though as a librarian, O’Reilly was alert to the value of archives, while McCahon demonstrated his awareness of the importance of correspondence by depositing many inward letters in the Hocken Library during his lifetime.1 Once the surviving correspondence got under way – in 1944 for O’Reilly, and in 1946 for McCahon – there are only a few extensive time gaps: namely, between mid-1951 and mid-1953, when both were in Christchurch and had no need to exchange letters; in 1958, when Colin and Anne McCahon spent four months in the United States; and similarly in the period mid-1964 to mid-1966, which O’Reilly spent in Nigeria. Otherwise there are letters for every year from 1944 to 1981 – sometimes as few as one or two per year, sometimes (as, for example, in 1948) as many as nearly forty.

1944–1951

19

Both McCahon and O’Reilly were dedicated correspondents, not just to each other but also to numerous friends, family members and other contacts; it was of course the most normal mode of communication for articulate people of their generation living in different places. McCahon also corresponded regularly with his parents, his sister Beatrice, his wife and children (when temporarily separated), and with friends such as Rodney Kennedy, Doris Lusk, Toss and Edith Woollaston, Charles Brasch, John and Anna Caselberg, Gordon H Brown, Peter McLeavey, Patricia France and many others. O’Reilly also had multiple correspondents, including Woollaston – likewise a friend of long standing, whose letters he preserved. On the whole O’Reilly’s letters tend to be longer and more deliberate in manner; McCahon’s are often (though not always) dashed off at spare moments during a busy life of work and painting.2 McCahon’s regular correspondents included those whom he sometimes spoke of as his ‘tribe’ – the circle of close friends and supporters who were an essential part of his modus operandi.3 His art was controversial from the start and often met with public censure and derogation. Friends who valued and understood his work, who defended him publicly and supported him privately, were essential to him. From early on, O’Reilly was a key member of the ‘tribe’; in 1950, McCahon described him (with only slight exaggeration) as ‘my oldest supporter’.

Over the decades, O’Reilly performed many services for McCahon beyond those of simple friendship – buying (or being gifted) numerous paintings, commissioning artworks, arranging subscriptions for the purchase of paintings, writing references, offering hospitality, writing supportive letters to newspapers, arranging and organising many exhibitions, speaking at openings, writing essays for catalogues, photographing paintings, and (of course) writing many often voluminous letters4 – the list goes on and on.

McCahon was important to O’Reilly, too: as the primary focus of his ever-expanding collections, as a sounding board for his ideas about art, politics, religion, museums, librarianship and education, as a frequent host and accommodation provider, as a referee for job applications, and in other ways. It was a true partnership at many levels. Naturally such a long-standing relationship had its ups and downs, including disagreements and misunderstandings (especially in later years): these, mostly short-lived, are fully documented in the letters along with the many harmonious and productive phases.

M

cCahon was a student at Dunedin School of Art when in 1938 he first met O’Reilly, who was studying philosophy at Otago University. O’Reilly recalled the circumstances in his introduction to Colin McCahon: A Survey at Auckland City Art Gallery (ACAG) in 1972. They met through a theatre production for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) of The Insects by the Brothers Čapek; McCahon and Kennedy designed the set and O’Reilly was in the cast.

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

In the summers, McCahon left Dunedin for employment, first (in 1938) with a travelling variety show, then from 1939 in various parts of Nelson (Māpua, Pangatōtara, Riwaka, Ruby Bay) as a seasonal worker on orchards and tobacco farms, accompanied after their marriage in 1942 by his artist wife, Anne Hamblett. This nomadic lifestyle continued through the war years (McCahon was medically exempted from active service).

According to O’Reilly, he and McCahon corresponded during these years, though nothing survives before 1944 (of O’Reilly’s letters) and 1946 (of McCahon’s).

I

n 1944, when the extant correspondence begins, O’Reilly was living in Wakari in Dunedin and working in the Customs Department, while McCahon was in Māpua, near Nelson, where he and Anne had moved earlier that year after several months in Wellington in 1943. After a year or so, they moved again to nearby Ruby Bay. Apart from a first lengthy overtly political letter arguing against McCahon’s Christianity from a Marxist perspective, O’Reilly’s letters from Dunedin largely focus on the excitement of adding new paintings by McCahon to his growing collection, and his advocacy of McCahon’s work at the progressive, cooperative bookstore Modern Books and elsewhere. His enthusiasm is typified by his remarks on acquiring a small crayon and ink portrait by McCahon of a fellow farmworker: ‘ ‘Tobacco worker’ [Mavis] is a marvellous thing, Colin. Absolutely magnificently proletarian’ (21 November 1944).5 O’Reilly’s letters reveal the multiplicity of roles he performed and sustained throughout McCahon’s career. Firstly, beginning with such works as Art school still life (c.1936–38) and Otaio Gorge (1938), he was a major collector, steadily amassing over four decades the largest and best McCahon collection in private hands. Many works were gifted by the artist, often in gratitude for O’Reilly’s help with exhibitions. For instance, McCahon wrote in 1948: ‘Ron, would it please you to add the ‘Singing Women’ to your own collection. I feel I owe you something for all your work and much more your enthusiasm at the time of the Wellington show’ (16 June 1948).6 He insisted O’Reilly should acquire only the best examples. For instance, he wrote after his 1949 exhibition: ‘Which from this show would you like[?] – please let me know, I have to approve the choice, I like you to collect cream & not mock cream’ (2 August 1949).

A second role O’Reilly instigated in Dunedin was that of exhibition organiser and informal agent. He was on the committee of Modern Books and arranged for paintings to be displayed in the shop. O’Reilly also had some of McCahon’s drawings photographed for sale as prints. This self-originated advocacy role was greatly expanded when he moved to Wellington, and later, Christchurch. As the letters document, O’Reilly helped to organise McCahon exhibitions in 1948, 1949, 1958, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1970, 1972 and 1977.

Another role was that of critic and informant. From the start, O’Reilly engaged critically with McCahon’s practice, working diligently to appreciate new work that often

1944–1951

21

ABOVE Art school still life, oil on cardboard,

394 x 485 mm, c.1936–38, pc, cm000563.

(See pages 21, 202, 204.)

CENTRE Otaio Gorge, oil on cardboard,

348 x 401 mm, 1938, pc, cm000565.

(See pages 21, 109, 180, 202, 204, 238.)

RIGHT Photograph of Monday Morning

near Takaka, 1948, before it was repainted as Triple Takaka. (See pages 24, 62, 65, 66, 72, 73, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 135 n161.)

initially challenged his understanding, as with, for example, Singing Women (1945–46), a work later gifted to him: ‘. . . it is very powerful and somewhat disturbing . . . Suffice to say that I was strongly moved by the painting . . .’ (15 November 1945).

O’Reilly did not confine his critical comments to McCahon’s own work. He participated actively in the art life of the cities he lived in, and often shared information and insights about exhibitions, such as the 1945 Otago Arts Society show, which he found ‘gutless’ on the whole but offered typically thoughtful, judicious and forthright opinions on various contributions (15 November 1945).

Early in 1946, O’Reilly and family moved to Wellington so Ron could attend the newly established Library School, settling in Heretaunga, near Upper Hutt. Meanwhile McCahon was preparing for a return to Dunedin as discussed in his first surviving letter, written at Ruby Bay, near Māpua. The ‘disjointed epistle’– his phrase (c.6 May 1946) – ranged across the availability of a house at Portobello, including people in his landscapes, a possible mural for Otago University’s library, door-to-door selling in Dunedin, children’s books in preparation, reactions to Kafka’s The Trial, plus responses to various issues raised by O’Reilly’s last letter – a not untypical mixture of topics.

After a six-month sojourn in Dunedin, McCahon returned to Nelson, renting a house near Tāhunanui beach from December 1946 to March 1948. This led to a prolific period of painting dominated by highly innovative and controversial figurative biblical paintings (interspersed with occasional landscapes), a series which began in Dunedin in late 1946 with Entombment after Titian and continued until 1952.7 Despite the stimulating and exacting demands of library training, O’Reilly soon resumed promoting McCahon’s interests, proposing an exhibition at Wellington Central Library, which, under librarian Stuart Perry, encouraged such events. Through 1947 they exchanged visits and many letters discussing arrangements for an exhibition, which was finally realised in February 1948. McCahon’s first large-scale solo exhibition, it included forty-two works made between 1939 and 1948, though focusing on recent work.8 O’Reilly acted variously as assembler, framer, cataloguer, installer, publicist and disperser for the exhibition.

Although generally enthusiastic about McCahon’s work, O’Reilly was by no means uncritical, and occasionally even made suggestions as to how paintings could be improved.

For example, regarding Crucifixion with Virgin (1947), which O’Reilly had borrowed, McCahon wrote: ‘And how does [Crucifixion with Virgin] wear . . . it needs eventually a good coat of varnish to bring all the bits of painting done with different amounts of oil & at very different times together again . . .’ (August 1947). O’Reilly responded: ‘I am not content with the crucifixion Colin . . . I see no more in it than I did when I first looked at it, and that was not quite enough. The Mater Dolorosa,9 I think she’s the trouble and [the] arms of Christ, they brood like wings but no tragedy there . . . .’ (28 September 1947).

By contrast, O’Reilly was full of admiration for Crucifixion According to St Mark

1944–1951

23

(1947), describing is as ‘a truly terrible and awful picture . . . something specifically and overwhelmingly religious’ (22 February 1948). Gratified, McCahon responded: ‘Am most pleased you like the St Mark’s Crucifixion. It is the sum of all the others without their academic residues . . .’ (1 March 1948). Some, including Charles Brasch, strongly disliked the speech bubbles in the picture, but O’Reilly strongly defended them: ‘[Charles] . . . does not by the way like the St Mark Crucifixion which I think is the finest painting I have ever seen . . . In that picture the words are the meaning and the picture the meaning of the words – they are complete’ (14 March 1948).

Many other paintings included in the Wellington exhibition were discussed in letters, including (not a complete list): Entombment after Titian; I Paul to you at Ngatimoti; Caterpillar landscape; Crucifixion with lamp; The King of the Jews; Maitai Valley; Anne, abstract; The Valley of Dry Bones; Ligar Bay; and Monday Morning near Takaka (repainted as Triple Takaka) – all painted in 1946–48.

O’Reilly’s letters reveal him vacillating between academic philosophy and librarianship as a career path. Eventually libraries won out, and he began working at Lower Hutt Public Library, a venue to which (incidentally) he transferred much of McCahon’s 1948 Wellington exhibition after it ended.

The McCahons were forced to leave their Nelson house in March 194810 but couldn’t find anywhere suitable to rent, despite searching from Central Otago to Ōtaki. They temporarily split up: Anne and children stayed in Dunedin with her parents, and Colin boarded with Doris Holland (Lusk) and her family while seeking accommodation in Christchurch. After months of frustration (extensively documented in his letters), he finally found a place in Barbour Street, Linwood, in June 1949, and the family reunited after more than a year apart.

T

he years 1948–49 were particularly active for the correspondence; around fifty letters were exchanged in those years. Many concerned O’Reilly’s determined efforts to organise new exhibitions for McCahon (and Woollaston) in Wellington and Auckland. An Auckland possibility fell through in 1948, but a proposal for joint McCahon–Woollaston exhibitions in both cities eventually came to pass in July–August 1949. For McCahon, these exhibitions included work, often discussed with O’Reilly, made during an unsettled year in Christchurch, including important biblical paintings such as The Virgin and Child compared (1948) and several crucifixions. Some landscape paintings looked back to Nelson, such as the majestic Takaka: night and day (1948), while others newly engaged with Canterbury landscapes, including The green plain (1948–49) and Plain with winter landscape (1949), the latter entering O’Reilly’s collection.

In one remarkable letter, McCahon discussed this transition from Nelson hills to Canterbury plains: ‘Am starting to see flat land at last & [am] possessed by it. Me who

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

only painted hills. Now I would stand in the middle of the plain & find that good. There is such peace.’ The letter turned quasi-mystical in expression: ‘But it[’]s awful to know that what has happened before will happen again[;] the landscape turns & rends you . . .’

(17 January 1949). O’Reilly expressed some bewilderment (‘I have never wrestled with a landscape’) but staunchly took McCahon at his word: ‘I hope the grace you found in the plains will stay with you’ (6 February 1949).

McCahon subsequently expressed disappointment with his exhibition at Helen Hitchings in 1949, commenting: ‘Visions of splendour are all in the future. An exhibition wipes away the past & gives release from one line of work’ (2 August 1949). O’Reilly largely blamed himself for any shortcomings: ‘Several mistakes on my part, based perhaps on false assumptions as a result of last year’s Library show . . . The final mistake was the short period – a great number had apparently postponed an intended visit till too late’ (August 1949).11 McCahon’s despondency continued for months: ‘Myself, am doing nothing at all . . .

I’m just too tired to build up courage for the next step’ (19 December 1949). However, as the new decade began his mood lifted and fresh works emerged, including The Marys at the Tomb, Easter morning and Crucifixion: The apple branch (all 1950). Changes made as these works developed (sometimes illustrated in letters with rapid ink sketches)12 worried O’Reilly: ‘I am sorry you felt the Easter Morning needed altering . . . What you do is so good, so good, it doesn’t seem to me to matter much if you leave a painting which is not quite what you want: the development goes on so richly’ (12 April 1950). McCahon replied: ‘About repainting, I don’t know, but I think Picasso is right that nothing is lost[,] the destroyed discovery reappears in a new and better form’ (July 1950).13 Such lively back-and-forth discussion is recurrent in the correspondence.

The O’Reillys moved to Christchurch in mid-1951, when Ron was appointed librarian of Canterbury Public Library. About that time McCahon was in Australia viewing old masters in the National Gallery of Victoria and taking lessons on Cubism from Mary Cockburn Mercer. O’Reilly wrote with distinction about the innovative, Cubist-inflected On building bridges (triptych) exhibited on his return: ‘What has interested the artist is the contrast between the cold, rectangular shapes of the steel, and the warm, triangularly faceted hill country . . . No one more than McCahon has grasped the rhythms and pyramidal forms of our landscape’.14 After the 1952 Group Show ended O’Reilly hung On building bridges in the library, where it impressed Eric Westbrook, the newly appointed director of Auckland City Art Gallery (ACAG), who after meeting McCahon at O’Reilly’s instigation immediately offered him a job in Auckland – an opportunity he jumped at. The McCahons left for the North Island on 3 June 1953, the day after the last performance of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a Christchurch production that Colin designed and with which Ron was also involved.

1944–1951

25

1944 19 Greenhill Avenue, Wakari, Dunedin, 4 August 1944 Dear Colin I am glad you finally wrote. There was nothing you had to fear as far as I was concerned: I cannot say that I actually expected your message but it came without any surprise: with the kind of obviousness of the end of a jig-saw puzzle. Nothing else would have fitted.

Yet we had not visualised it so. On the contrary as I suppose you could see, I had vague hopes of steering you in other directions, but even here with a fair intuition of the kind of ‘temptation’ that were going to make it impossible for you to go there.

It may well be as you say that the Christian goal is ‘so much larger than the final largeness of the less great that it can be seen only as a stage and not as a final state’. If you see what I cannot see, and what I have I think tried honestly to see, and what you cannot show me or explain to me no matter how clearly you yourself see it, I do not dismiss your vision as hallucination, (though I of course do not entirely dismiss that possibility), because I have no doubt of your integrity or of the integrity of those like you. I do however think you are guilty of some ethical fallacies and if my logic is earthbound and imperfect I cannot help that – it is my only weapon and I at least do not try to crack open Heaven with it, but to solve earthly problems, by use of earthly resources.

I know quite well that joining the [Communist] Party was only another extension of your fear – in other words you never joined the Party: you went through the motions that is all: you knocked on the door but did not go in. To escape your guilt you came to that door: not because you saw the urgency of the talks that awaited within. Because on the threshold your guilt promised it could not be escaped you didn’t go in. And now you say that you have accepted instead the ‘one world plan and the one personal plan, the only solution for all economic and moral problems’. I say you have turned your back on the problems: not solved them. To solve them demands unconditional purity and unselfishness and love; and infinite patience and thankless toil: not a feeling of sublime powers but an active wrestling with obdurate matter. The Party fights for nothing less than the liberation of mankind: the creation of a universal society of fully conscious and responsible individuals, learning ever more and more how to work together. That is your ‘lesser goal’ – I understand the meaning of your words only too well, but the point you must answer is this: if as you say the lesser is only a stage, (and I shall not dispute that this is quite possible), is it not a morally worthwhile stage nevertheless, one that we should bend our efforts to attain even if, when we reach it, or even if when we approach it ever so little, we see there is much much more beyond us as you affirm, and I, in a somewhat different sense, expect? I do not want to trap you with your words: you are quite free to state that you were only trying to explain your attitude to the ‘greater’ and did not as a result give so much as a passing

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

glance at the ‘lesser’ so great was the radiance and perfection of the ‘greater’. Let it be so. I still demand that you now contemplate the other goal and say whether or not it is really worthwhile; whether or not so far as this world is concerned the most worthwhile goal. It is moreover quite forbidden to say that it is a good goal without implying it must be worked for: your only counter as it seems to me is to state that it is after all not a good goal, that it is not really even a stage, but a glittering diversion of the evil one. That in fact is a piece of theological orthodoxy: it is your theology?

Or you might say that it is a stage, but only a stage if you can see it together with its greater, otherwise it is not even a stage but a diversion. That is more subtle: it implies that I could be working for the devil and you for God in doing apparently similar things, because yours would be merely a part of a wider activity. Well that may be too. I should however ask to present your other activity together with what you claimed were the good analogues of my own and taking all the circumstances that I could see I should then judge whether or not they were more, or less worthwhile than my goal. My ethical judgments are to me final for that set of circumstances: to you they may conflict with a higher authority – you will obey even if it seems bad to your earthly moral sense. There I think the argument cannot be pushed further – the utmost in morality for you is the negation of morality for me: having sought out all the evidence and made our judgment we have no choice but to act – if this be in spite of all the judgment-of-God-for-us then I am content, but if it is on the contrary something to be disregarded because of the demands of a higher but nonspecifiable authority I cannot see. In other words you must point out to me the actual additional circumstances that make the goal of the Party so partial as to be morally in error or affirm that your God opposes that goal for reasons you cannot specify, but which you are under compulsion to believe right.

I am however bound to say that from Christians in general I have heard much about world economic plans (& moral ones) but I have seen remarkably little done. And of what I heard, for that matter, nothing whatever advocated in a concrete way, naming the moneychangers in the temple by name, or showing any understanding of the nature of society: how it has developed and how it can be changed. Nothing but platitudes: the antithesis of morality, (morality by definition concerning our practical life, and that alone).

I do not dispute the doctrine of individual redemption but I do dispute the ethical validity of what is put forth as individual redemption in so many churches today: that suggests in so many ways its antithesis to social responsibility. Morality is of course an individual concern and the aim of politicians calculated in so much more material welfare alone are badly in error. But the categories of moral judgments always concern social relationships, and an individual cannot be morally good, (or as they advocate morally better) without his perceiving more accurately the nature of his social tasks.

Responsibility is the moral function of knowledge, his only the responsibility who understands the nature of the situation in which he must act. One does not make men

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RIGHT Mavis, crayon and ink on

paper, 1944, 175 x 126 mm, pc, cm001082. (See pages 21, 32, 73, 130 n5, 202, 204.)

BELOW Ruby Bay, oil on paper,

394 x 473 mm, 1945, Te Papa, cm001023. (See pages 15, 34, 35–6, 38, 79, 109, 128, 145 n455, 199, 202, 204, 456.)

OPPOSITE, ABOVE Painting for

children, ink and watercolour on paper, 276 x 378 mm, 1944, pc, cm000562. (See page 33 n37–9.)

OPPOSITE, BELOW Bathers,

Motueka River, ink and watercolour on paper, 115 x 158 mm, 1943, Te Papa, cm000569. (See pages 15, 30, 32, 79, 202, 204.)

spiritually better by increasing their feelings of guilt for the petty little past shortcomings of their circumscribed world, but in giving them an insight into the nature & urgency of the present problems of a wider world, and in helping them to the necessary confidence in themselves and their abilities. I have not the evidence that this latter is the Christian way.

That is all for now Colin. Give me news of your painting and other doings. How is Anne and how is Bill?

Yours sincerely Ron O’Reilly Customs Department, Dunedin, 19 November 1944 Dear Colin Would you consider £3.3 for your ‘Bathers in River’ that was in Otago [Art Society] Exhibition?15 That is all we can manage but we do love it.

The Findlays have gone as I suppose you have heard . . .16 ...

I feel very sorry about it all. I hardly saw them at all this year, partly I think because they identified me with the Harris17 crowd whom I see even less (not however that I am at odds with them, but they do make any roles other than that of satellite rather difficult).

However I did have an evening with the Findlays a week before Aileen left, and again a crowd of us were in on a party with John just before he vacated the house in Castle St. Dunedin’s cultural and intellectual society is so limited that the rift that developed between the Findlays and Harrises assumed alarming significance. The Left Book Club had its squabbles and cliques but one looks back on its passing with a great sense of loss: certainly no idea fertilises in our incubator with this awful blockage in the circulation system.18 Perhaps it can be mended now.

The one tangible sign that this may be possible is a meeting last night at Modern Books addressed by Denis Glover.19 A jolly good crowd there. Partly of course because it was Denis Glover, but from remarks dropped it was clear that similar meetings even with less distinguished stars would be welcomed. He was excellent by the way, giving an impromptu and inconsequential talk on England today. Inconsequential as New Zealanders are apt to use the term, but in itself a personal link between us provincials and the ‘centre of the universe’. We even prevailed upon him to give some charming and utterly libellous comments on English poets and writers he found in odd pubs around London.

Betty is at present in the North Island with Rachel at a place called Karioi near Ohakune (near Ruapehu).20 They are with my sister. Betty had a miscarriage early last month and is having a holiday as a result. She is well and in much better spirits. Rachel too can regard the trip from a convalescent angle, because she was in hospital for 6 weeks in August/September, poor little girl.

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

I am going up to Karioi for a short holiday at the beginning of December, returning before the Christmas rush gets to its most feverish, with the family.

I was intrigued by Anne’s sketches of William.21 Actually there was little to get excited about besides the very few specimens from the McCahons, in the whole show this year.22 Sutton had a big landscape which the Art Gallery bought:23 Very mannered however with his usual pregnant hill in the background.

There was another of his giving a much more authentic vista of N.Z. hill country without the Suttonian gesture: just ridge after ridge after ridge going back and back and back in the entirely unromantic way of much of our back country: a magnificent sense of space and desolation. This however did not go into the Gallery. [Colin] Wheeler24 continues to develop and [Roy] Dickison25 to get smugger and bloodier, Eana [Jeans] stagnates;26 [R.N.] Field27 had one picture of a discontented woman, almost a portrait, someone reclining on a couch, which had the merit of being attacked in the O.D.T.28 because life is sad enough without our allowing to admit it is or something. The picture actually was quite good except for one silly mistake which goes to show how impossible it is for Field to be self-critical.

I am thinking of starting to campaign for 9 p.m. closing. I think the 6 p.m. touch accounts for the biggest part of the gracelessness of N.Z.’s moral soul. Specifically: we are educating our district to the viewpoint of the need for a bar in our community centre (when we have a community centre,) to make it take its full part in the life of the district, but of course with 6 p.m. closing a bar would turn the place into any other N.Z. pub and be as bad in effect as a bar under more sane conditions would be good.

That is all. My regards to your household. Would you let me know early if my offer is acceptable because once my family is restored even 3 guineas will be beyond us, such is competition at the trough these days.

Yours Ron O’Reilly [Added later]: I haven’t had any official connection with Modern Books since Varsity started. Betty couldn’t keep up the work (mainly because Rachel wasn’t getting proper attention.) But since I made the initial collection of pictures, almost nothing has been added, and almost nothing sold, except a few wood engravings of Rona Dyer (who has blossomed forth into a first class illustrator under Aileen [Findlay’s] influence by the way.29 I haven’t yet seen Anne’s work yet with Aileen.) The Committee were unwilling to operate a lending system, largely because the probable service would be most likely used most by students who are a bit too unreliable in such matters as care of, and prompt return of, pictures.30 My idea of a lend plus lottery business was thought good but no-one has got round to organising it. The book side of the business after a long period of its not paying its way under Bill Crawshaw whose spine is not all it could be, has at last picked up and put itself into a

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prosperous state as a combined result of decent stocks at last arriving and Mrs Freeman’s management.31 Without some sort of loan system and/or easy purchase plan it is impossible for good pictures to ‘turn over’ in Dunedin. Any of course but the cheapest. Have you ever done woodcuts or anything in a reproductive medium because that is the best bet from a financial angle today, and I’m not sure from a cultural angle if it isn’t a good thing too (e.g. the effect on French popular taste of [Honoré] Daumier’s etchings.) The point comes to mind because Glover mentioned how nowadays in England most of the good young artists worked as a matter of course in conjunction with a publishing house. He regretted that this wasn’t so here.32 Customs Department, Dunedin, 21 November 1944 Dear Colin Thanks for the wire. I enclose money orders for the 5gns.

I’m afraid I have almost cursed you for upsetting my peace of mind. When I had originally decided to offer 3gns for ‘The Bathers’ I did so with an unclarified conscience because Betty has been singing out for some decent furniture but having decided and taken out the money order I was settling down nicely again: until I saw the other pictures.

Then the whole process began again with all the trouble of making a choice. Yesterday’s offer was the compromise of a few sleepless hours over the weekend. Talk about the curse of gold: all my avidity and baser cunnings are called up in a situation like this.

‘Tobacco worker’ [Mavis] is a marvellous thing, Colin.33 Absolutely magnificently proletarian. I first decided I couldn’t live with her but it would be equally hard to live without her. The other portrait (why in the same frame[?]) I find interesting but not in like degree. ‘Landscape from Deci Wells’ orchard’ is the most satisfying of all.34 I showed them to the Sheens35 and it was always to this one we returned, getting progressively more and more from it. I debated taking this instead of ‘Bathers’ whose appeal is more obvious.

From a decorative angle, which of course has to be considered in a house[,] I preferred the colours, especially these colours, in which for a change you seemed suddenly very happy and very French. When I got the notion that I might have both, or the next thing to it, by photographing the black-and-white I was somewhat hesitant wondering what you’d feel on hearing such a request. I’m glad you are able to accede to it. I am taking 3 prints, one for Parker (who has just returned to New Zealand), one for the Sheens. This will help me recover the outlay. Then I shall send you the negative.

The decision to offer the extra guineas so as to acquire the ‘Tobacco Girl’ was also hard to make. I shall send you back the other portrait sketch along with the negative & original of the landscape.

Yours Ron

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

1945 c/- Customs Department, Dunedin, 7 August 1945 Dear Colin and Anne I got a little tipsy on your pictures on Sunday afternoon. Rachel and I went to inspect your ‘few things’ and I am beginning (or am I?) to be braced for just one or two new McCahons: but a whole roomful!36 We propped them all around on chairs on the piano on the floor against whatever would hold them and I felt completely happy as a lover who trusted his beloved, and slightly distrait with the variety. Rachel loved the ‘story’ ones but so did I: she shall have one for her birthday (and we shall share it) but the problem is which. The sound with Sancho Panza crossing the bridge and the greens and blues is loveliest: but it has this defect as a children’s picture: the gay colours are lacking.37 The most exciting colours are in that of the arrival of the passenger boat38 but your people thought so too, and have chosen it for a present for some country child. I think my next preference is the one with the lovely straight chain of hills each with its tunnel and trains:39 but it doesn’t matter.

They should be made into picture books and all good children have a book. You two are very good for one another and for the world!

Catherine is a very beloved child.40 I should very much like a print of the photo of her portrait. There is a fault in the photo by the way that could be removed by an expert: the original attempt at a face that you obliterated with ink shows up in the photo. ...

I felt that those figure studies in indian ink should be photographed, enlarged to original size on matt surface, mounted and sold for about £1.1 – or less depending on cost of mount etc. My experiment in this line with your ‘Deci Wells’ Orchard’ is very successful. If you would like one too I think I could arrange a trial. If only we had a tame framer with whom we could collaborate but they like all the rest of us must eat. However the outlay wouldn’t be much for me and if successful we might slowly expand the experiment.

[Interpolation:] I have decided for the ‘Sound’. In the long run Rachel will like it more than the gayer ones.

Of the others the mad fierce thing of mountains with (I think) a flash of sea on the left upper portion, where your colours are more brilliant than anything I know, is probably going to turn out to be one of your best,41 but you will have to give me time, because to start with it had come out of its mount and your father said: ‘This one we don’t know which way up it should be’, and I haven’t yet found my way around it, or pushed its planes into solids except in a rudimentary way and that may turn out not to be the way. Your people told me that Doris [Lusk] said, ‘O no don’t spoil it by worrying what it’s about – just accept it’, but I disagreed. I don’t think that is what you think: it is not what I think. Pictures may

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be obscure for me on the one condition that I do make such headway in discovering them that I know I shall gradually become more and more at home with them till all they are (or most of it) has the clarity of morning sunlight. I felt that of this picture. Some people (no need I suppose to tell you,) never would begin to slide down into Wells’ Orchard and scramble through into the valley and then climb back up the other side: they take fright before they have begun so never begin, and yet that is something I know so well now: like a bit of Taranaki where I could take new friends and say: when I was at school we came this way every chance we had. Anyway I feel this notion of ‘it doesn’t matter what it’s about’ is spurious just as spurious in fact as the more common notion that ‘what it’s about’ is an important something unrelated to its visual analysis that makes a picture a picture.

The picture (crayon?) of the seated woman is lovely and complete: she is monumentally alone and yet not alone as she is all women that take a burden and go with it without plaint.

And those crayon beach sketches for your people are remarkable because your range has no limits. There is the sea and the island and the slightly fantastic swirl of light in the eddy and it is where we have been before and where we shall go again, and it is calm and peaceful but still expectant.42 There was another I liked but it is now gone. Was it a woman? Cubist and brilliant I think so but my mind is no camera. I fancy now that I thought it slightly derivative (Picasso) but if it was it was an experiment and so that doesn’t matter.43 Now my ‘Ruby Bay’.44 Colin! I took it home before I looked at it properly partly because I wanted to see as much of the others as I could while I could, partly because I wanted to have a more familiar setting. I took it home and looked around and found a frame (one of many I have bought at auction for a bob or so over these last few years,) that was an almost perfect fit and ideal for it. Then I spent an hour or more shifting all my pictures until I found it a home where its smouldering colour could be fanned gently by the light. (Betty in raptures all this time,) and at last I just sat and looked at it for half an hour, (and have gone back again and again, and shall again and again). I now want everyone to come up and see it. Bet however has a month to go and although she is much better and we are told everything should now be all right she is not feeling too much like entertaining. It is not usually a successful thing to do: to bring people to see a picture, unless the very veriest few but I want to show it to everyone and say: Isn’t it beautiful?

Last night was Modern Books Annual meeting. I told your father and he got the children’s pictures in that morning. People are very enthusiastic: I mean the Harrises[,]45 Elsie Oddie[,] Dorothy White46 and that was about all I spoke to (there being none except Geo[rge] Parkyn who weren’t excited about them and I fancy now he was out to get me biting – and if so was quite successful.) I have since put down £1 on the ‘Sound’ for Rachel’s birthday.

Colin I want to thank you and thank you but words are not good tokens for gratitude.

Rona Dyer has done a mural for Modern Books. It was unveiled last night. Excellent.

34

Dear Colin, Dear Ron

I really was pleased and everyone was thrilled about it: no doubt you will read about it and eventually see it. It is simple and clean and adequate: three panels one of a Chinese scene featuring ideogrammatic writing, the central panel showing books in conjunction with a worker, a scientist and a child (with an exquisite blue sky that makes the whole thing,) the other an Egyptian scene with the dawn of writing (I presume) represented by the carving of a bird hieroglyph to correspond with a bird brought in by a hunter. The whole composition is highly successful: as you may guess the line is more decorative than strong and she fails completely in many of the faces particularly that of the worker: nevertheless for the setting and the message and the uniqueness of the occasion it would be carping to draw attention to these points. I have been asked to write it up: I haven[’]t time but am going to try to have it done and also it is intended to try to have colour blocks made for reproduction in ‘Art in N.Z.’47 It is intended to give your work a display in the window in ‘Library Week’ shortly.

I am frantically busy with following 1) a new (or proposed) section of the Royal Society for discussing the history, methods and criteria of science: I should like to interest your brother in this,48 2) a plan for reorganising the O.L.R.C. into working committees49 3) the Wakari Community Centre plans which an architect (with me as critic) has almost completed 4) preparation of exam papers. However busyness is of my own making so no complaints. Love to Catherine Bill Anne and yourself. Ron Customs Department, Dunedin, 3 September 1945 Dear Colin and Anne Could you please settle a dispute over the interpretation of the patch of white in the middle foreground of ‘Ruby Bay’. It is shaped this wise: Argument has crystallised out two views, each however having some difficulties so that probably neither is correct.

1 that it represents a waterfall, the other that it represents portion of a humanly constructed edifice (house or shed).50 If a waterfall the dark green extending from it to the right is water which disappears as so many N.Z. streams do, under a copse or thicket. If not then it is probably an overgrown hedge. The adamancy of the disputants has resulted in the facets of the disputed objects [being] unstable, like the old honeycomb of boxes puzzle picture.

That is necessary to ask but it doesn’t convey the admiration that ‘Ruby Bay’ has evoked among the few lucky enough to have seen it so far. The question is how to get it more publicity? I think, (a little half-heartedly because there is a sorry gap on the walls when it is taken down,) of lending it to Modern Books for a few weeks – Something will have to be done. Secondly it could be submitted on your behalf to the Otago Art Society’s Annual Exhibition. I think that would be a good idea: ‘Ruby Bay’ and a couple of the children’s pictures.51 What do you think?

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Personally I would be quite ruthless in exploiting ‘Ruby Bay’ (and the children’s series too). It is so completely satisfying that it makes most of your other work something different – as if they are part of the perspective but not yet the full scene. They are, or were, all different from one another, or rather each series was, like the Picasso ‘periods’, so that only a few of us could see that they were all by the same hand, and had any glimmering of what you were trying to do. I argued alone for years that your austerity of colour was at once something completely determined for you in coming to terms with something fundamental in NZ country, (a discipline), and also a thing that would transform itself with mastery. And at that time your browns were already softening and carrying light instead of thunder, but then these pictures were not accepted for exhibition. [It strikes me now that the A/S junta here would allow the ‘truculent McCahons’ to be seen so that the old hens could cluck dire warnings to their chicks to grow into good little hens, but it would be terrible scandal to allow a ‘peaceful McCahon’ to be hung because it might allow a few of the brighter chicks to say: ‘Well it can’t be that he does the others merely because he can’t draw’ (I am thinking particularly of one large work of yours on which you worked months which was turned down.)] 52 My arguments then could not be supported by showing the pictures concerned. If therefore we could get ‘Ruby Bay’ exhibited that would be an accomplishment.

With regard to the pictures now in Modern Books here is the current position.

Children’s pictures widely liked but so far no one spurred into paying cash for them. One of the few critics: George Parkyn, confounded by the ecstasy of his 5 year old son. On the other hand the other pictures arouse strong and vocal resistances in the majority.

Rita Harris who is quite keen now, by the way, says it is astounding how few people are unaffected by them, generally adversely. ‘Mt Fishtail’ must be too dazzling – I don’t know.53 The Picassoish woman curiously enough is more acceptable – the sketches execrated. (I am sorry by the way to report that my plans to have them photographed and mounted were not successful. I had copies made and framed a couple for myself but they do not measure up to the ‘Deci Wells’s’ experiment, partly because they were not in indian ink and so not sharp enough in the print, partly because they aren’t as satisfying. I am sorry by the way that you understood this suggestion to apply to the sketch of Catherine. That is definitely too powerful to present to the public. I should like to get another copy of ‘Deci Wells’s Orchard’ mounted and try to sell that.

Talking things over with Rita & Mrs Freeman, the manager[,] we agreed that a better policy in future, would be to display one artist at a time, instead of all simultaneously, with perhaps one picture of each of the other artists also up. For you we plan a dramatic disappearance from the walls, children’s and all, with ‘Ruby Bay’ exhibited instead for a few weeks, and occasionally maybe one other picture. As far as the children’s pictures are concerned this disappearance will I fancy evoke little concern from those habituatedto-admire-but-not-to-buy. Then during Library week (which turns out now to be in

36

Dear Colin, Dear Ron

November,) a window display of the children’s work, when Christmas is in prospect.

With regard to the ‘provocative’ pictures I am not sure yet what to advise but feel that the barnyard should not be assaulted in any wholesale manner by them (unless what you really aim at is their clamour,) but some of your more peaceful work should be displayed until they have become, (or sufficient of them anyway) interested enough to be curious as to what the problems are that the other pictures grapple with. This even if you can’t persuade them to buy. (It might even be a wise move to exhibit some of them n.f.s. just to pique one or two – it would be good for them). One of these days I may attempt an article on your work but at the moment in view of the gaps in my knowledge and other commitments I don’t think I could do it justice[.] All the same I included a write-up of the children’s work in a write-up I did recently of the Modern Books Annual Meeting intended originally as being devoted to the Dyer mural. It is for ‘Art in N.Z.’ and I fancy will see print. The mention is not analytic but just plain enthusiastic.54 Talking about murals. Yes, yes by all means a kindergarten mural. It would be splendid and undoubtedly the building would admit of it. I shall send you a copy of the plan as soon as the kindergarten section is ok’d by the Kindergarten Association so you can decide which wall would be best. As a matter of fact I would like you also to consider an ‘adult’ mural. There is a particular wall in the main room (which is partly canteen, partly lounge) which demands a mural. Wait till I can let you see a copy of the plans and architect’s interior sketch.55 And now I had better post this – sorry that it is so discursive. Love to the family esp.

Anne and Bill and last not least to Catherine and to you. Betty also sends her love – expect some news of her any day now.

Cheerio Colin Ron 19 Greenhill Avenue, Wakari, 15 November 1945 Dear Colin Now my exam marking is finished I can write to you.

The [Otago Art Society] Exhibition is now over and I arranged with your father to see the rejected ‘Women Singing’ – it is very powerful and somewhat disturbing.56 It may be because of the fact that they are not in a ‘talkie’ – I mean they do look as if they are singing – so one is ‘set’ to hear something: the ear strains after silent harmonies. I should like to see them again – it is never sufficient for me to see any picture once and I distrust any impressions I get on such first acquaintanceship. Suffice to say that I was strongly moved by the painting and I am not really surprised, (nor are you?) that the O.A.S. council rejected it.57 Anne’s ‘Park’ was very cool and shady, but I am afraid that, though hung right by the main entrance door (way up high,) its virtues lacked advertising appeal and as far

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as I know excited no chatter. The exhibition was gutless. Cecil Kelly while not escaping a suggestion of listlessness contributed some rather charming scenes, very soft and warm and sunny with a lot of pink and yellow unusually used.58 Ivy Fife59 scored somewhat unexpectedly with a thing called ‘Sunday Springfield’, with a station building end on with high mountains behind, and the railway lines running back on the right hand side of the picture straight back ‘at’ (rather than ‘into’) the mountains, and all very deserted. Strikes a chord that many of the poets in Curnow’s latest anthology of N Z Verse (Caxton, very good job, have you seen it,)60 seem preoccupied with, the contrast of N.Z’s shattering geologic features with their suggestions of unlimited patient and destructive power against the paltry evidence of human effort. I doubt very much as if this was what she had in mind – on the evidence of her other pictures which show no such preoccupations (though on thinking it over such reflections are banal enough.)

Any way such contrast is done without any emphasis in the way of the relative amounts of picture-space devoted to the station and the mountains – the bare wall of the station is near and big and the mountains frame it, catching up in their peaks the double ridge of the roof – (maybe that was all she was after,) I found it satisfying in its colour, and as I said, was surprised at the accuracy and economy with which it described its object.

This is Children’s Book Week and your children’s paintings are displayed in Modern Books’ window. According to Peg Freeman every child in Dunedin has seen them already and exclaimed ‘Look there’s a train, there’s a boat, there’s an airyplane [sic]’. It is true. I have seen the reactions of Rachel and her friends.

Thanks for explaining the white patch in my ‘Ruby Bay’. I think its difficulty came through a doubt as to the limits of the bushes that partly mask the house so that the shape of what was seen described nothing unequivocally – knowledge fills in the gaps and appeases the avid mind.

I am worried too about the demands of art and their conflict with human relationships, altho’ art for me no longer is painting but ‘any important activity raised to its ultimate intensity’. I am not quite sure that saintliness is the only solution, but it clearly is for any who feel the problem as a problem. Or rather it is the only solution but there are many who do right without (seemingly,) finding it a problem to do so. The saint if he were not a saint would be a lost soul. (Also: – a lot who are not lost souls and are not saints are good, and I’m not sure that all who are bad are lost souls.) On the whole I am inclined to think that those who are lost souls are more worthy than the-non-lost-souls-who-are-not-saints. This is getting obscure but perhaps your thoughts have run far enough on similar lines to follow the rest.61 When are you all coming down? I want to see your family, and send them and Anne my greetings.

Regards Colin Ron

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

1946 Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, Upper Hutt, 30 March 1946 [address letters to N.Z. Library School, Sidney [sic for Sydney] St, Wellington] Dear Colin We are at last beginning to breathe more easily and even to feel a little at home in this new place. Our house is just across the railway line from Trentham Camp62 but even its rather dismal display of weak green buildings does not spoil the locality. The hills on either side of the valley are rather lovely and satisfying: the bush not quite so dark and threatening as that of Dunedin hills. However we have been seeing the valley at its best for the weather has been excellent and we have almost forgotten the bite of Wakari winds – later on we are told to look out for a pretty grim winter: the Hutt valley is known for them apparently.

The house is one room smaller than 19 Greenhill Av., and almost everything is reduced a little, but perceptibly, in size. This is not entirely a disadvantage: our meagre possessions are not quite so diluted as before: we have some chance of selection and discrimination so that in spite of plenty rather impromptu effects this house is somewhat more successful than that was. We do miss our little breakfast room though.

The library school is a good place to be, notwithstanding the pressure of work which is terrific. We have lectures 9–12 (3 of them) from Monday to Friday. Then we are ‘free’ to do assignments calculated to take 6 hours a day. The courses are: Book selection, administration[,] cataloguing and children’s. The first is, or has been, the most satisfying.

I say has been because we had Eric McCormick as lecturer till yesterday and will not have him in future. He is not permitted by his employer (army(?) dept.) to do any more. (He is official war archivist.) McCormick63 set himself to give us some smattering of literary judgment, an acquaintanceship particularly with New Zealand literature, but also with contemporary literature in general as well, and finally an introduction to anthropology.

To do this all in six weeks is a revelation to me – the whole being very thorough and the reverse of superficial. The explanation is that the approach is a systematic almost technical affair that librarians (ideally) have to develop if they are not to be swamped by the troubled sea of learning. His prepared notes (largely of a ‘reference’ order) were models and his assignments (in spite of their length,) one did with a feeling one was getting something at once intellectual and practical – something that called into exercise one[’]s discrimination and powers of construction at every step. The Administration course is also interesting – we know now a little of the laws and history of N.Z. libraries and the sorry picture they make and the even ten times sorrier picture they made in 1934 when the Munn-Barr report was issued.64 Cataloguing is of course something hard to [sic, missing word?] and procrustean but not entirely alien to my nature: the classification side

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is rather intriguing to me. I am amazed at the ingenuity and at the same time the rather pathetic pretence of the famous Dewey Decimal system: the modern tower of babel.

And intrigued about how people like the worthy Miss Mincham, (of Auckland varsity library) our tutor can grow up to feel at home in its warped passages, (and wonder if I may yet do so myself.) The children’s course is my second favourite: the woman who takes us was only brought in when they had failed to get anyone else and knows this and is of course sadly lacking in confidence as a result. But she is good nevertheless and if only she could be made to believe it just sufficiently as to be able to deliver her words as if they were true she would be better appreciated. She is a Miss Harvey, children’s librarian of the Country Library service. I of course make Rachel my chief collaborator in the children[’]s book assignments. This is a decided advantage. I have become fascinated by Grimm’s Household [T]ales and made myself an authority on the different editions. There is plenty of room for another edition by the way, if Anne would like to do some illustrating.

And another field that is crying out for a good children’s artist is Maori folklore.

The principal is Miss Parsons of the U.S. Library of Information – you remember: the one who didn’t like me. I think I have made some progress in the scale of her preferment: for one thing I am chairman of the Students Council and as such have had to do a lot of negotiating with her, (which could of course lead to unpleasant relations.) but in fact has not. She is quite likeable and super American efficiency, but one realises, has all the immaturity of Americans generally. She is to take over McCormick’s lectures: she used [to] sit in on them and I am afraid that her remarks there when literary criticism was the subject rather gave away the limits of her standards.

We have a good crowd of students: all except one are graduates and the one, who outshines us all, was librarian at Tauranga: a most energetic lass who made Tauranga a place to be emulated in about 5 years; she is the secretary of our organisation. Basil Dowling is one of us:65 by no means mature yet but a good type, and a rather attractive personality one [Dennis] McEldowney who had a poem in the latest issue of Book.66 He is another ex Canterbury man – the school is lousy with them to use the vernacular.67 He was apparently editor of Canta and we have made him editor of our future publication.68 There are about 20 women and about 12 men. We work in studies containing 5–10 students (when we aren’t dashing off to the various libraries of the city). I find it the greatest burden to have to do any ‘messages’ (shopping etc.) for the house such is the pressure of the assignments they give us. It was in fact a simple thing to take half an hour off from the Customs in working hours but not a simple thing to fit anything but work into our ‘free’ afternoons. I make the long rail journeys (55 minutes) pay its way too by reserving all my reading assignments for the train. Enough of self.

I saw Pat Hayman69 in the street a couple of weeks ago: Unfortunately I was in process of farewelling Charles Wrigley (ex Otago Philosophy Dept), who has since departed overseas to take up a scholarship at London Univ. As a result I didn’t have time to more

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

than greet Pat, but shall find time to contact him next week. The little periodical for which he is partly responsible: Egress, I suppose you have seen.70 It got quite a good reception in the School, though it is a bit slight I feel. Still what is there here as good?

I haven’t had the photo of the Golden Bay sketch yet:71 I am writing to your father tonight to enquire about it. I did ring him up about it on the morning of departure but no doubt I was a bit too rushed to make clear where to send it and so on. I am now suggesting to him that if he can make good use of the print or prints he has it might be best to let me have the negative which I should then return to you. I also asked him to let me know the cost of the job. I hope it isn’t inconveniencing him.

Colin: the Wgtn Public Library is now making available the walls of the passage outside the reference room (at the head of the stairs) for one man exhibitions, free. Only condition: the artist’s name and address may be displayed but not prices. A person called [James] Coe72 had the first exhibition: quite interesting chap: very clean and simplified work: almost poster. Rather uncertain of himself at times: very proud of and exhibitionistic about his wife. Unfortunately a bit preoccupied with himself but less I should say from a desire to show off as a lack of confidence. He has been followed by a complete non-descript whose name I can[’]t remember – it isn[’]t worth remembering anyway. The wall space is ample for a pretty good display including big pictures. What about availing yourself of it?

(When the Fleischl picture arrives here.)73 Well I am not going to write any more though I would have no difficulty in continuing.

I really must get some rest. Love to the lovely infants: mine also thrive, and to Anne, and the Best wishes to yourself.

Ron PS I have spent today ‘framing’ the red Picasso – put into a sort of box as I suggested. Very pleased with it. c/- New Zealand Library School, National Library Service, 3 May 1946 Dear Colin Thanks for the photos. You haven’t let me know the price and this is very wrong of you because I know that [sic] the expensiveness of big enlargements. They are very fine both large and small. I’m not sure that I don’t like this work even more than Deci Wells’ Orchard. I wouldn’t not like to be [the owner?] of either of them.

Pat Hayman has told me of your (prospective?) return to Dunedin. Pat said Portobello: I know how that would please you. I will await news and hope that this does not take too long to find you.

I am exhausted with the work this week. ...

In a month or so the School’s first effort in literature is due – a periodical (not too periodic)

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ABOVE LEFT Elespie Forsyth, ink and watercolour on plywood, 368 x 304 mm,

c.1937–39, pc, cm001375. (See pages 15, 157, 202, 204, 257 n32, 278.)

ABOVE RIGHT Singing Women, oil on paper on board, 420 x 470 mm, 1945–46, pc, cm001081.

(See pages 21, 23, 37–8, 60, 73, 79, 82, 83, 131 n57, 133 n81, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 216, 232, 264 n252.)

BELOW Otago Peninsula, oil on board, 887 x 2105 mm, 1946, Te Papa, cm001035.

(See pages 41, 52, 108, 132 n73, 135 n145, 139 n285, 505, 506.)

to be called Colophon. I objected strongly to this bit of hollowness in the title: ‘It sounds well, rather modern’. (Colophon means the bit on the last page of a book with information on printing etc.) It is not apposite. It is a piece of would-be virtuosity – plain cleverdickism. I feel more annoyed than the matter probably warrants but I hoped better from my fellow students. The main alternative was much better but it had a weakness – that it probably would not carry over well from this the first class of the school to later ones but to any librarian who has battled with the modern tower of babel the Dewey Decimal classification it is rich in associations: ‘Dewey Morn’. Don’t you like that? The comment on the high hopes of the founders of the school. But it was too much for our philistines.

There was another choice which though more humdrum would probably weather well: COLLATION which has the desired technical allusion and is appropriate for the nontechnical reader too, but it didn’t ‘sound’ as well as Colophon. No, no, I see that I am more perturbed than I should be. The sound of a title is something.

What a shame the photo of the Peninsula work failed to get the whole thing in. If you ever bother to get a good photo of it I should appreciate a snap. It is a wonderful piece of work that painting Colin – strong and uncompromising like most of your work but more sure of its own strength and less concerned, as a result, with the possible effects of this refusal to compromise on those who demand conformity to their own outlook. You will smash down the barriers they have erected around popular taste with works like that. Yes it is strong: it is a veritable battering ram.

I am still interested in getting you and Anne onto illustrating some of the children[’]s classics, like Grimm, or a Maori folk collection. I hope that your failure to reply on this point is simply the pressure of present work, and not any antipathy to this idea. And I would also if poss. like to get hold of your own projected work, as soon as it is in a provisionally adequate state, so as to test it on Miss Harvey (the CLS school librarian: a good person) and on some children.74 You will of course get Dorothy White’s opinion on it if you are in Dunedin won’t you? She is not above affectation in her comments on children’s books but she is probably the best person in the country all the same. There are one or two at the School too who are pretty competent in the children’s field, to which I am personally more and more attracted. ...

I told you I think that Basil Dowling is at the school. He was telling me that his wife [Margaret] is an old friend of Anne’s. (I don’t know her of course: she is still in the South Island.) But Basil I like very much. I still haven’t got round to studying his verse: do you know it[?] What do you think of it? I am inviting him out with Pat Hayman next week end.

Well Colin I am glad to have got this letter written at last and sorry it has hung fire so long, and that I am not in the best frame of mind to write it. When you can find half an hour let me know what has happened to the McCahon family. Mine thrives. Bet is taking the children to Palmerston North for the school holidays. I’m not sure how I will cope but

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it will be a good break for her and Rachel will like it.

Regards Ron Pomona Road, Upper Moutere, R.D. Nelson, c.7 May 194675 Dear Ron Thanks now for two letters. Nothing has happened to us yet but it is about to as from tomorrow when Anne & the children leave here on the first stage of a Dunedinwards trip.

We have a house at Portobello with views on one side of Hoopers Inlet on the other of Harbour Cone – ‘looking so near you could touch it’. An old farmhouse with land enough for a cow with four bedrooms one large living room a kitchen a scullery & a half glassed verandah all for 5/- a week. At last it sounds as if we have a place with room to paint in without upsetting the life of the family too much and without having to watch all the time for W[illiam] squeezing tubes. I plan an assault on the Peninsula landscape – my usual from Peggie’s [sic for Peggy’s] hill & others. I now see people in these landscapes.76 Out of this grew an idea for a mural and I believe I have obtained, through writing, a wall I knew of in the University library. John H[arris] seems keen enough – but I must arrange my working times so as not to be a disturbance to readers which means in holiday times for the work. I am rather hazy as to just what to do. The idea of every mural telling a story does not really appeal – but given the story who knows. I have thought of an equivalent to a crucfiction [sic for crucifixion]77 – or if you like the erection of a transformer at McKee[’]s works Mapua.78 Re the children’s books, we are still keen & intend finishing our nearly ready ‘William & his home by the Sea’ book when we settle again. I looked at it recently & it is not bad at all.79 As for others – any interest us.

The enlargements I don’t know the price of at all, the cost was I think just deducted from our Dunedin account. Will know eventually.

I will be in Wellington on Thursday week May 16 until Monday May 20. So will see you even for moments between your rushing then.

Myself have been & still am most exceedingly busy, Anne also. Have had a border [sic for boarder] for the season80 & have been packing and ‘selling up’ and planning & so on.

I have plans in Dunedin for door to door selling of such things as crêpe paper roses bath cleaner & floor polish. I can’t abide the idea of a settled job. I broke through into a new & rich ground at Xmas time & must have time for exploration.81 Anne if it can be arranged will do some illustrating for the school journal. (Did you notice in a recent Listener Russell Clark82 had taken Anne’s 3 bears house ironwork decoration83 for use in an illustration only very neatly done indeed) – I. I. I. all through.

Recently we read ‘The Trial’.84 I don’t know what to make of it at all. It is a horrifying

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

book, quite without end and even the end of K is no end at all but it (the story) is ready to begin all over again – such is his immortality & so even K’s end is no end. A most confused sentence but not of great consequence.

‘Colophon’ I understand so well – as standing for all we fight against.85 The wise owl is such a very blind bird in the full light. May you be preserved from being an owl. ‘Dewy Morn’ I find much more to my taste. (I am reminded of such humble & [funny? illegible] houses as Dew Drop Inn and ‘Seldom Inn’ we lived in here at first.)

Must get to bed. This disjointed epistle is a sign given to let me know it[’]s late.

Regards to you all. Colin 85 Stafford Street,86 Dunedin, 28 July 1946 Dear Ron A long overdue letter but our coming back87 has been much more difficult than I expected and I have been doing very little letter writing at all.

The Portobello house we expected to go to is too remote.88 The house & the position of it are both what I dreamed of – but the distance from the road & the condition of the track for that distance and the distance from Portobello too make it quite unpractical.

And so we have nowhere yet.

I spent the first month in a really intensive house hunt; city peninsula Pt Chalmers – but only followed impossible ways leading nowhere. And can still see no improvement in the position. The great lack is a place to paint in. But that I will solve with getting a room in town.

Worked in the National Mortgage Bag Factory for a spin.89 And now at the [Otago] Museum for about 6 months. At present doing work a house painter could do better than I can but have more interesting jobs to follow.

Also have been spending a lot of time making a stage, permanent setting, lighting & so on for the W.E.A. Drama Class. It has been a huge job but worth £25 – my first paid job in this line. The effect is quite magnificent – walls & roof all very dark blue – white curtains to be hung in endless ways[;] 690 foot screens for small internal sets & so on. I am very pleased with the result, and only hope it gets intelligent use.

The big harbour cone picture has left for Wellington – have done a very little more work on it and varnished it with wax – have had it at Modern Books for a week, it looked pretty good there.91 I hope you can see it in Wellington.92 Pat [Hayman] could probably arrange for you to do so. But if not I can get in touch with the Fleischls for you.

Am working very slowly on a development on the same landscape now – the same size, it should be much better than the other93 – there seems some uncertainty about this Wellington one.94 We shall see.

There is a great lot of noise here for letter writing. So many people in one house make

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an awful lot of noise.

This town seems so friendless now, there are very few people we know now. And nobody seems to be doing anything much – at least we have so far not managed to find any very interesting things happening.

Forgive the briefness of this & its lack of interest. I can’t manage anything better. Am unsettled & feel quite lost – but know I can work here – so we stay.

Anne & the children are all well.

Love from us all here to yourself, Betty & your two.95 Colin I feel miserable posting you this but can’t promise anything better tomorrow or next week so will let it go.

This a drawing to scale from the first drawing for the big picture. I thought you might like to have it. The new version is not this. Will send you drawings for it later when I have finished with them.

Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 9 November 1946 Dear Colin I have not been to the Fleischls and so far made no definite decision to go, because it is very hard to fit in. I almost never stay in town of an evening because with the train journey it is too exhausting and one works at home most evenings anyway: still, when the term is over we shall see what can be managed. I am glad though that the matter no longer has the urgency it had when you first wrote because I was worried about not having managed to do anything. Am at the moment bringing to a close my Philosophy bibliography and have delivered 3 out of 5 lectures on the subject to my fellow students with some success I think. ...

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

[Pat Hayman] brought me round one of your pictures: the ‘ghost’ picture of Wellington and Mt Victoria (at least that is what I believe it is) but I wasn’t there when he arrived and I haven’t got in touch with him either. Really it is a bit too casual . . . ...

I am very fond of the picture though: it is a clinical achievement for which operation the local citizenry should pay a sum appropriate to a patient saved from malignancy. But of course it is only in the picture that the patient is saved.96 I am in another stew as to the future: this time the fork prongs between a return to university teaching and a regional library job. There are 3 intermediate philosophy lectureships advertised (starting £600), one at Auckland for which I am applying; the others at Canta. and Otago. Findlay is supporting my application so that it will not be overlooked. [Geoff] Alley97 (Director National Library Service) told me to apply, and then the next day added: ‘Of course we don’t want to lose you. I had in mind that if you had such a position offered to you we might use it as a lever to get you a bigger starting salary in the Library Service’. Now of course we have signed an undertaking when we came to the Library School to do three years in library work and it remains to be seen how far Alley would go to hold a student to this understanding. Quite a way, I should think, because library work is meat & drink to him, and the staffing position is desperate. Also I should much prefer, other things being approximately equal, to stay in library service rather than to go lecturing. ...

Very happy to know you can paint again. Sometimes I can write and sometimes I cannot: how to control the conditions under which I can?

The radio is broadcasting Catholic high-mass: very hypnotic. The weather is frightful.

I have a big suitcase full of recent metaphysics, books of every possible point of view on which I lecture Tuesday. I’d better finish this. Betty sends her love with mine to all your family.

Ron Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 3 December 1946 Dear Colin I have just been making a series of difficult and probably wrong decisions: one of which unfortunately is that we can’t come to Nelson yet a while but must go to New Plymouth where my mother needs my help straightening out some of her affairs.98 We go up on 14th and return New Year’s Day – and that will be all the leave I get until next November. Or rather: there is Easter. It is conceivable that one or two of us could see you then. Rachel we have been told by the district Health Officer should be admitted to Health Camp: but not till February. Naturally we don’t want to be without her longer than that necessitates and

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so you can’t get her either, but we are gratified you are so keen to do so. Thanks very much Colin: if the offer stays open we shall surely avail ourselves of it before long.

The other decision concerns my future profession. I think I told you that I applied for the Philosophy lectureship at Auckland and that Findlay was supporting my application.

Well of course after the excitement of this year’s work and the sort of challenge that the whole library situation in N.Z. now presents I have been in two minds as to what I should do were I offered the lectureship, and this was not merely personally a difficulty but also one for Alley and others concerned with my future as librarian. Finally I decided that I should not accept the Auckland job (if it is ever offered me!) and I made a special trip on Sunday to Upper Hutt to Geoff. Alley’s new place up there to tell him. He seemed very glad to hear it. I really couldn’t face a further period of personal and intellectual adjustment and feel that the friends and even, I think, the esteem, I got at the School should not be lightly jettisoned. I also fancy that I am a better administrator than a teacher, in fact I find teaching an enormous emotional drain (if I do the job thoroughly – and I am hopeless unless I do) and I fancy that I have much better prospects of administrative work in the library system than in the academies. However when I wrote tonight to convey to Findlay this decision and to thank him for his generous support, no longer wanted although really it has been the most pleasant part of the affair for me, I felt much more like revoking the decision and once more pursuing that holiday-bestrewn and quiet life which I reluctantly and holiday-less pursued so long. ...

I shall be seeing Pat [Hayman] this Sunday.

Thanks again for the offer Colin: you make it so that it is particularly painful to refuse but I’m afraid we can’t avoid going to New Plymouth. Love to everybody. Good show the carpentry.

Ron

1947 Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 2 February 1947 Dear Colin Bett has just suggested I enclose a note with her: this will be it. I am slowly getting to grips with my new job99 but this is a process with no palpable limit, all that I can say in the meantime is I begin to enjoy it a little more, to be a little more sure of myself with the rest of the staff and the public, but by no means satisfied by all the relationships involved, particularly that with the librarian herself. I want to make all sorts of changes . . . ...

Pat [Hayman] has let me have three small things, perhaps you remember them. One, very

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clean and decorative, of two white houses with blue hills, (very horizontally arranged brown, green, deep blue hills, lighter sky[)]. The next is a red boat with yellow hills and tree in the foreground. The best is one of Pat’s very enigmatic females advancing in the foreground with a red church with white steeple behind her on the right, a whole building with red roof on the left and on the extreme left a dark tree-like object, all reds and greens otherwise save her yellow tunic and blue face. I enjoy having these very much.

Hope to see you at Easter but have not yet made any bookings.

Regards to Anne and family Ron Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 6 March 1947 Dear Colin At last I have done it: got my berth and now to hope you still can have me – from April 3rd morning (Thursday) till Wednesday night 9th. I have been a long time about this because I could not be completely settled as to whether I should come . . . ...

Well I desperately want to come and so it is to be. I have the berths and shall come back on a week later and survey the ruins.

We had a little party last weekend principally for Patrick [Hayman],100 but also to get a few of our friends generally together. People of course had to come early and then stop the night, owing to primitive transport arrangements, but that was successfully organised, and on Sunday the whole transformed itself to a picnic at Maoribank.101 I remember how you and Patrick came up the valley one day last winter and were disappointed by it: it must have been a poor sort of a day for few places are as full of colour and charm in the sun, and Patrick acknowledges this I know. ...

Give my regards to Anne and your family, I look forward to seeing you all soon.

Yours Ron Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 20 April 1947 Dear Colin and Anne Nelson is really lovely and I wish I were still there, but we’re in the thick of things again, almost as if we had never been away. Almost, but there is still a residue that is more substantial than such memories usually are. ...

I haven[’]t made up my mind about Toss [Woollaston’s] paintings yet:102 very interesting

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the difference seeing them by lamplight (during our blackouts) and then by electricity which spoils some of them. Very fond of the sketches. I should dearly like to have one of his larger works – perhaps I shall try putting a bit aside for a fund to buy pictures: but if I attempt these projects I am always reminded of household necessities we are doing without. Still something will be achieved yet. When is his Auckland exhibition to be?

I haven’t forgotten the prospect of acting as custodian for pictures for a Wellington McCahon exhibition. And I think that something will eventually be done about buying up originals in libraries.103 If this was done, I fully believe now, though I’m open to conversion, that the [Howard] Wadman104 ‘evasion’ technique is quite appropriate to a public institution where the avoidance of rows is a matter of principle: provided one includes the good one must be excused for also including the poor but popular. Am convinced this is correct for books and think it would also apply to pictures. The only thing is that, with pictures, since it would be a new service, one would have a free hand and could have minimum standards higher than one can have with books. And I do feel that it is not immoral to give popular taste whatever will keep it appeased while one builds up one[’]s better collections – for one thing the public will accustom themselves to the latter if they are not jostled, for another I don’t think it is good for artists of originality to be exposed to the personalities that result from the provocation of the public by wholesale methods. Thirdly, I think as many pictures as possible should be given the chance to prove their wearing qualities – how many masterpieces have been lost through neglect of this one need not know or grow sentimental about, but it is reasonable to believe the number must be considerable. If one had a deliberate weeding policy it would be, I should think, perfectly in order for an institution such as a library to buy and keep pictures on continuous exhibition (and issue to borrowers) taking both what the public liked and what one believed in time they would learn to like, over the years getting rid of the favourites of yesterday. If this is wrong can you suggest an alternative?

Well you lucky people I am going to turn in. Have been marking Statistics papers from young library assistants all over the country – a sordid business.

Many many thanks for such a pleasant week – and in regards to Rachel – everyone is commenting on how well she looks and how remarkable the speed of the improvement.

Yours Ron Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 8 June 1947 Dear Colin This is traffic instruction. You will recall that the first train leaves at 7.3am, the next at 10.31 (on Saturdays). Also that the 7.3 stops at the Trentham crossing which is only 50 yards from here, to let out P.W.D. men who work in the camp. It only stops the shortest

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possible time. Therefore if you make that train sit in the back carriage and be organised to get out straight after leaving Heretaunga. We’ll be there to meet you. ...

[Library] Conference went off very well. My fears were not realised and Dunningham105 and Alley by sheer diplomacy of a superb kind avoided a shambles. There is now a chance of a pretty steady and relatively smooth development. All quite exciting though.

Have some more Picasso (and Cezanne and Matisse) in new editions at the library you’ll want to see. (ed. Lindsay Drummond).106 Looking forward to your coming.

Ron Muritai Street, Tahunanui, Nelson, 3 August 1947107 Dear Ron & Betty We are all safely home after a magnificent crossing.108 Cat[herine] was somewhat shy of Anne. W[illiam] most enthusiastic oooh–hooing in from the gate. He is a proper old woman about the baby, noticing colour of hair and so on and finding it warm to stroke. The baby cried before its morning feed and poor W. wept with it, told Anne it was hurt.

Cat. is more slowly becoming interested. ...

Have finished with such speed two pictures that have been on the go for long enough & were not working out at all well. I feel it has been a Sunday not wasted. The one a portrait of Diana Drummond109 started just before the portrait of Anne you have and using the same football head but with eyes & so on as well.110 No, it was started long before that other was done, it must have been about May sometime because I saw Diana again in May. A most lovely girl. The other a largeish 36 x 30 crucifixion with the sky at the ninth hour and a lamp on a table & Nelson landscape.111 I am quite pleased. The colour is coming on much better. I am trying to paint pictures to be read colour by colour and form by form, not only one sudden shock. Modern art goes in so much for Shock tactics (a lot of Picasso but not by any means all – not the latest ones) but for comparison & perhaps to point to my meaning – on one hand a Picasso of the blue period & a Bruegel peasants[’] wedding.

In the Picasso the colour is there as a harmony, all at once, in the other you read say from left to right, then from the right hand bottom corner to the left hand top – and so on – etc.

Get it. Among the moderns who did this. Seurat, Rousseau, Léger – I can now think of so many my idea that in Modern Art this thing does not exist seems wiped out. So shall say it is requisite of the best art. So much rubbish. ...

Ron, could you arrange for me the use of the Public Library gallery for an exhibition in

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October sometime preferably. And also if this can be managed about how many paintings will be needed always including the big Harbour Cone as one.112 Mario & Hilda [Fleischl] have plans for invitations & such doings. All that part I shall have very little to do with but would appoint you & Mario as exhibition hanging committee if you can do so.

All such details hardly apply just now at any rate. They will be seen about later on.

Re. the Anne portrait.113 I am in absolute agreement with you about painting out the black line you have covered on the face. Would you do it for me[?]

And how does the other painting [Crucifixion with Virgin] wear114– I couldn’t see it on Sat the sun had divided it quite in halves, but I feel the head of the crucified is rather over worked. It needs eventually a good coat of varnish to bring all the bits of painting done with different amounts of oil & at very different times together again as I see the[m] – or saw them during the work. (Almost all my [big?] paintings need that treatment.).

Again our thanks for looking after W. & Cat. The things I was to bring out but didn’t will get posted on Tuesday[.] love from us all Colin Your valley looked magnificent on Sat. the gorse is a real blessing on those hills.

A land where cubes oppose triangles. (How really suitable for N.Z. a Gothic spire is – and Gothic windows.) Shall we be builders & planners of the N.Z. gothic[?]

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

This example is not at all as it should be & don’t let any of our good taste painters (A.R.D.F.)115 hear of this plan for architectural revolution. How nasty to have bad taste.

––– We do have our N.Z. gothic but it is so humble – only in wood – there is one example at least seen from the bus just your side of Lower Hutt. I plan hugely. The cubes really slicing the [triangles, sketch] & the [triangles, sketch] of the gothic demolishing the cubes.

––– Art I love & after art love nature Unlike the original poet116 I prefer My raupo heads done over with barbola117 And not as was intended.

––– Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 9 August 1947 Dear Colin What a stimulating letter you write. I think it is about time someone tried tripping up the [A.R.D.] Fairburn run. N[gaio] Marsh also.118 What is taste? Webster says: ‘TASTE, n. The power of discerning and appreciating beauty, order, congruity, proportion, symmetry or whatever constitutes excellence, esp. in the fine arts and belles letttres; critical judgement; discernment, as a man of taste’. If this is all then taste is part and parcel of aesthetic judgement, but it is clear that Fairburn and the gang would only accept this if ‘beauty’ in its turn were capable of a social analysis.

Taste I think as used refers not so much [to] what is beautiful, as what is accepted as such: something congruous with a stable and elevated social order. Fairburn is now completing the circle of his bohemian excursion and analysing all sorts of things that are disagreeable to him in terms of a protest against society, which is going to make for a sort of literary or aesthetic fascism. I used to get myself unpopular at Library School at times by asserting ‘Taste is not enough’.

The N.Z. Gothic intrigues not only in relation to a hill back-cloth either. Taranaki is not a plane but a top-side landscape, more or less level sweep gashed by gullies and swift mountain streams – the roads and rails go over bridge after bridge but, apart from Egmont which is of course a most disturbing and unique phenomenon there are few hills or lands which are emphatically higher than one is most of the time. Yet there are most intriguing little steeples [diagram] which made me recall that the original Gothic swept up out of the plains of northern Europe, and these modestly crowned the plain-lots of a pleasant and unimmense countryside. But set amongst the hills that gives much bigger possibilities.

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Have painted out that line on the head – on your own head be it.119 I have done about as much as I dared, not at all satisfied but a point reached from which you could decide what else you can do yourself to it. I was not a little astonished at your instructions, nor at myself for attempting to follow them – as if a line in a picture can be painted out as simply as one erases a typing mistake. (All right if its one[’]s own line.)

This little touch of brushwork however prompted me to have another go at that flower piece of mine – Cineraria etc. – the one which had the ugly negative background. I painted it all over again and have at least made something new out of it, though still unsatisfied. At times, and in certain lights I think it good, but there is a touch of corruption about it – a palette like oil on a wet street if you know what I mean.

Should have the opportunity to get [Stuart] Perry’s120 ear on your behalf in a week or so – shall have some dealings with him about the 20th. No particular reason though why I should not make a special call of it, except he’s a good Tory and a little bit wearing. Have you brought any more paintings to Wellington and the Fleischls? And did you intend to get up from Dunedin those at Modern Books? This may be something pretty big if we can work it right.

Did you see the Woollaston picture I was telling you about? The frame disappointed me – the colour of the wood was so putty-like and nondescript it spoiled the picture, but I have now rubbed linseed oil into the wood and that’s now about as right as it can be.

We both love the lino cut. It floats so lightly, that rose. Has Anne done many of these?

Very lovely indeed. Betty will be writing I think. In the meantime she sends her thanks. ...

Looks like another busy stretch in front. Thanks for Pat’s letter – must write him. Regards Ron Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 21 August 1947 Dear Colin Saw Perry last night – he said he would write to you today so maybe you will already have had his letter when you get this. But in case you haven’t he seemed quite willing to oblige, and even of[f] his own bat recalled that you had had an exhibition at the French Maid, which he professed to have admired.121 I ‘prepared’ the ground by saying that your work would undoubtedly cause strong resistances in certain sections of the community, and when he asked in what sense, I said – ‘Like Cairncross did’,122 which covers the position, I think, and to this he responded ‘Oh, all the better’, and made some remarks about the people the Academy didn’t dare to hang.123 Altogether made me wonder if it was Perry I was talking to, but I must admit he has not been afraid to exhibit ‘eccentrics’ (though not many of them have been much good.) The only catch is the date. Nothing can be done till next year. The matter waits on the file he says till January before the date can be settled.

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

It also depends on the decision of his Committee to continue this ‘feature’, but, he says, at the moment he can see no alternative way of using the space. So I hope it all turns out. ...

Auckland is offering a job at the moment, incidentally, which is quite attractive – could even lead, within a few years, to the highest paid library job in N.Z. – [John] Barr’s!124 (It also includes directorship of the Art Gallery.) I have more than half a mind to apply for it, though, as Alley says, Barr wouldn’t allow a strong personality on that job. Hmmm.

Wouldn’t it be good though – a library of one[’]s own. At Lower Hutt the position gets daily more interesting, but I’m just a sort of anomaly, who can only get anything done by pretending all the time that someone else is doing it.

Well that’s about all I’d better write now. We want to know how Victoria is, and how are the two young McCahon-O’Reillys. Love to all, Ron. P.S. I have just found this card in my pocket file. It intrigues me. It was done as a map of the Lower and Upper Hutt Valleys, in the course of a conversation I had with the New Plymouth librarian last month to explain to him some of our coverage problems[,] the dark patch at the bottom left being Petone, the two railway lines, river and main roads, plus the localities I was talking about being the little circular squiggles, all enclosed by lines representing the hills. But it has become a person – this is a way maps have I know, but this is a queer example – reminds me of Picasso’s case of the ambiguous handlebars.125 Muritai Street, Tahunanui, 14 September 1947126 Dear Ron I look forward to letters from you & hardly do anything to keep up my share.

Have been very busy since you last came. The map started off a painting which I think is now finished, (about an hour ago).127 Not that you would see any connection but the map summed up the valley very beautifully & from that I went on remembering the Petone hills and now have a work most unlike & odd – but if not of Petone, very definitely of N.Z. landscape[.] (Possibly I will now be included in the ‘Waiting Hills & Surrounding Seas’ movement.128 Did you read Douglas Lilburn on this in the Listener a few weeks back (re ‘Aotearoa’).129 The picture is so –

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more or less. The oval in the sky is the famous ‘Taieri Pet’ as seen in the Middlemarch district130 but enclosed in it there is a Collingwood landscape.131 The hills are a great yellow & green caterpillar. The church white red & black. The flat land in front of the hills blue & spring green. The spring colours here have affected me. Have taken snaps today of recent work & if at all good will send prints.

At last we have our building permit and can go ahead with the job,132 such of it as we can do on our very limited finance, Which reminds me – should anyone with capital visit you & appear interested in Anne[’]s rose further prints are available at £2.2. This sounds pretty nasty to make a gift & then use it as advertising material.

(Anne has asked me to enquire did William leave his sandals & Cat her ankle strap shoes with you.)

The time with you & family has been the brightest spot yet in William’s career, he poor child, is lonely here not being considered select enough company for the next door people[’]s children. (We are now, the old lady, one of our neighbours, having very definitely condemned my painting to me & to all the district, are in the odd position of being talked about and being condemned in other ways as well.) And this is no help + W’s talent for noise. He often talks of Rachel [O’Reilly] & Jeffiner133 Shirley as well! ...

Well what are you doing about the Auckland job[?] It doesn’t sound too bad. In fact could you find yourself a better combination of jobs – the library and the Art Gallery.134 As I remember it the library is much like the Nelson Institute – The gallery, I am told, the worst in the country, so what an opportunity for doing things – but of course where such horror exists – the horrors on boards & committees are so much in the way & so firmly rooted.

––– Dunedin has purchased a Derain landscape (have seen a photograph in the paper[)] – not very magnificent at all but it’s a start.135 ––– Could you find me the address of Jack Bilbo (he did a book on recent Picasso about a year ago), it may be in the library, a slim volume about 40 reproductions in black & white.136 The exhibition at Mod. Books in Dunedin has closed down.137 Have had very little news of what was said or any such. There may be reproductions in the next ‘Landfall’[.]138 It all depends on the way things photograph I imagine.

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

ABOVE Crucifixion with lamp, oil on hardboard, 765 x 915 mm,

1947, HC, cm000837. (See pages 24, 51, 140 n286.)

BELOW Caterpillar landscape, oil on paper on canvas, 740 x 1085 mm, 1947, The Dowse

Art Museum, cm000901. (See pages 24, 55, 56, 65, 82, 111, 118, 134 n125 & 127, 295.)

Had a letter from the Wellington Public Library – an exhibition there won’t be until about Feb. & possibly the room won’t be available for such things next year.139 Which will be too bad. Pat [Hayman] & I spent so long urging this idea & were refused at the last minute – we had assembled a collection of our own, [R.N.] Field & Woollaston.

Must get to bed. Greetings from us all.

Colin Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 28 September 1947 Dear Colin Well I’m not going to Auckland and I’m quite glad I’m not, though for a while the temptation was strong enough. That’s that bit of news and now your letter which is fun, or at least the analysis of the H[utt] Valley hills is fun. Hope the photographs turn out well: keen to see that picture.

Here’s a couple of snaps including ones of your two pictures here. Quite successful as snaps. How does ‘Anne’ look to you now?140 I am not content with the crucifixion Colin.141 It appeals immediately to most people, even those who look sideways at your other work, but I see no more in it than I did when I first looked at it, and that was not quite enough. The Mater Dolorosa, I think she’s the trouble and arms of Christ, they brood like wings but no tragedy there. Probably I’m looking for something quite illegitimate like the appearance of wrench and downdragging on those arms (which are quite horizontal) like some quite wooden crucifixions I know where the drag is evident. No, I’m not sure what I want, but something more than the indifferent strength of those shoulders.

Colin I think there is something in Pat’s theory of quick painting after all. Don’t know how long you took to do those early watercolours – peninsula scenes [–] but they have something that most of your later work lacks (as you said yourself.) Wonder if it is like the position one gets in in other jobs, where, if one may correct, scrub out certain work, one never really gets that sureness and directness that one’s training should be giving. I’m not talking of painting now but of certain library routines. There is a certain discipline necessary for all good work part of which depends on the prohibition of any ‘mucking about’ with original work. If there is a mistake the whole is simply scrapped. After a while one simply does not make mistakes. Of course when one has mastered the thing that is different: Picasso can paint and overpaint and overpaint again, but each overpainting is a new venture completely replacing the old not just improving it (is this all quite hopeless?)

Have been lecturing to the School in Philosophy. The lectures were I think successful by ordinary canons, but I have a feeling, that, in an accession of confidence in my final lecture[,] I managed to say one or two things about individuals[’] work which need not have been said at all. Not that the class as a whole realised I was breaking off a bud, but I

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

knew it a fraction of a second after the act was done. ...

What you have to say about your neighbours[’] attitudes angers me. I don’t know what to suggest you do about it: perhaps Richmond will be better. Otherwise: join some form of organisation: make some of the gestures. I don’t know. It’s a terrible thing.

Bet is in bed with an inflamed throat and a fever. First Rachel then Matt then Bet. Love to all from us all.

Ron Muritai Street, Tahunanui, 4 December 1947142 Dear Ron A very long time since your letter. But have been very busy achieving nothing much as yet. Am hoping for wonderful results from the garden. It has become an awful drag on my time. One I feel disinclined to fight. It shows great promise. We are eating our silver beet planted when you were over. I made a quite difficult gate – today W[illiam], much to his surprise, opened it, it was rather more luck than anything else. He was very surprised. But must make further complications.

Have had word from the Wellington library, an exhibition in the Magazine Room from Feb 2 to 21st. Will write at once to Christchurch & have all the ex Group Exhibition things posted on to you.143 There is only one new painting here since Labour Day.144 Several others but I’m not pleased with them. (Re the Group, Charles Brasch did a write up in the Chch paper, with praise for the not exhibited Peninsula picture such as may make the Fleischls more pleased with it.)145 Anne and I might get over for Feb. 2.146 Anne’s most efficient cousin Florrie Pond will be here & probably would mind the kids. That is maybe.

Rodney [Kennedy] will be here after Xmas & crossing to Wellington mid Jan, he can bring over any new work with him then.

Myself am going over for a few days to Takaka to paint there[,] or rather to gather material I’ve been thinking over since last Xmas into some shape for working on.147 Will be sending a collection of drawings to Hilda & Mario later on[,] these to be sorted out between you, what to be exhibit & what not.148 Am very tired, & always end on a tired word.

Greetings to you all Colin

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1948 Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 5 January 1948 Dear Colin Quite unforgivable – have just turned up your previous letter and it is dated 4/12/47. I have allowed a sort of lump of indecision to keep it neither absent from my thoughts nor yet answered as it should have been. ...

But just about – the exhibition.

No: no pictures have arrived so far from the South – at least I shall have to check with Hilda [Fleischl] over that – but nothing to my knowledge, nor word from Rodney. Has he stayed with you as intended? If there is anything I can do at this end to expedite the transport let me know – I am friends with a bloke in the shipping and carrying business if that’s any use. At any events will contact Hilda immediately to decide on interim storage plans and to arrange an expedition to get the odd pictures about Wellington – think I still have a record.

Needless to say you are both, or if necessary, all, welcome to stay here in February, or any other time for that matter. We are looking forward to this.

Have heard no comments on the Landfall photos149 and don’t trust my own reactions much because of familiarity with the pictures, but I feel that they were probably not the best for the purposes of an introductory batch without colour, quite apart from being a little blurry in reproduction. What I mean is that your deliberate use of the heavy sagging line for these pictures, which I am slowly beginning to like, is going to take a fair bit of getting used to. Still in the long run it will be a good thing. The things to do, perhaps we could work it into the article if that is ever written,150 is to contrast the line in these pictures with the tautness of the line in some of your earlier material, or find a transition, if there is one. (The Singing Women?) What shall we call it? The Masaccio phase?151 It certainly grows. The very uncouthness of the Ecce Homo bubble picture has a rightness of its own – no more along the velvet carpet this it was and is.152 Like grabbing the scruff of one[’]s neck, which has now become necessary.

Have snapped the pictures we have but fear that light may have got in to spoil the film.

Not developed yet but will send any that turn out. ...

Quiet Christmas here. That seems all the loose ends lying about the old memory living-room.

How[’]s the garden gate.

Love to Anne and the brats.

Ron

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

Muritai Street, Tahunanui, 13 January 1948 Dear Ron Only a time for a note & I don’t know when I will get anything better written.

Thanks for yours.

By now you should have a collection of work from Doris H[olland] (ex Chch [G]roup [S]how) & possibly others from Dunedin.

Would you let me know what arrives – when it arrives[?] This assembly of work by letter is most trying.

Also am doing quite some work which will come over later on.

Also we have 2 children[’]s pictures one done & another on the way . . .153 [no sign off, page missing?]

Muritai Street, Tahunanui, 27 January 1948[?]

Dear Ron Your letter here today when I got home.

The suggestion about coming out for Sunday night pleases me immensely. I would much sooner. So will be out Sunday afternoon as early as I possibly can be.

The library space sounds most cramped. Have 5 new paintings here – 4 of them 3' x 3' and 1 3' by 5'.154 Also 2 from Dunedin 1 3' x 3' and one 3' x 4' 6.

So on Sunday we will have to do some selecting.

Am bringing over a collection of watercolours etc. I thought to fill the empty spaces.

But apparently they won’t be needed. I’ll bring them in case the rejection process leaves a lot of spares to fill.

Anne will be left here. Our arrangements have gone wrong in a most unfortunate way.

Mother & Father were to come up for a holiday & we were taking advantage of their being here to both get away.155 Mother has been in hospital for an op. & is not fit to travel so that is off. Nobody here loves our kids well enough to look after them while we amuse ourselves.

This is being written in a hurry before tea, after I’ll get it down to the boat to cross tonight.

Also one to Hilda re this new arrangement.

I agree the mother & child is the best of those you took over.156 Will see you Sunday then & thanks. Colin

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Muritai Street, Tahunanui, 8 February 1948 Dear Ron I was going to write you much sooner than this but have been so very tired since Wellington157 all I’ve done is a letter to Prestwick St158 & I hadn’t written them for very many weeks.

Today we are in town for tea to make a change from the usual routine[;] at present near the bridge over the Maitai on the sea side of the Post Office.

This is near the place of the Nelson City landscape.159 I heard someone in Wellington saying ‘Where’s the city’. From here, and this is right in the middle of the town there are 2 roofs and a bit of a wall showing in the direction of the landscape painted, 3 houses a shed & half the bridge in the opposite direction.

I hope you haven’t been too exhausted after all your work for the exhibition. For me this past year has been very busy & I feel now I can let myself be tired for a few days before starting again.

There seems to be no possible end to our housing problems here.160 So, & quite gladly, we are planning to leave Nelson. I am writing to landagents [sic] in the Hutt Valley & such places also enquiries about Cromwell & Alexandra. The where is really not so important as when. But I rather hope for the Wellington area.

Could you let me know the name of the Otaki paper, I’ll try an ad. there[.] Otaki is a lovely place & not too close to and not too far from people & the big city.

––– The painting Monday morning near Takaka apparently causes some confusion.161 2 remarks made [to] me have only yesterday sorted themselves out. Both talked of the lake or the hills beyond the lake. The lake is the sky – there is no lake. The landscape is continued again at the top of the picture.

It apparently is a difficulty. It had never seemed to me to be so.

Had a very nice letter from Hubert [Witheford] on Saturday.162 The crucifixions entombments & such seem to appeal.

Our house looks so bare with hardly a picture up, yours, Pat[’]s, & 2 of Anne’s & a couple of my drawings some photos & the half face & bride & groom from your place.

Nothing yet in the paper Hubert tells me.163 If there is let me know please.

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Dear Colin, Dear Ron

work a week to find in town or Portobello. Would have to stay in town 2 nights to do 3 days work but would have excellent time for painting. I feel a strong need for more time.

This constant working night & day as last year is very exhausting (as you know yourself).

And while on the subject you yourself, slow down a bit – you try too much – to be one driven gives no rest.

Am most pleased you like the St Mark’s Crucifixion.186 It is the sum of all the others without their academic residues. It has there come clean. The words ‘My God why has thou forsaken me’ seem to me to show a despair quite unlike the interpretations of Churchmen. The thought of resurrection & redemption is quite gone – not quite gone, it is there turned towards the people round the cross. It is a terrible moment. St Mark[’]s version is the most stark & cruel I think, right from the betrayal to the end.

Rather a jumble of a letter. Am myself so confused I write confusion.

Yours Colin Palmer Crescent, Heretaunga, 3 March 1948 Dear Colin Your parcel of shells and stones for Rachel arrived – not intact but with plenty to satisfy her – and us. The major casualty was the bit of ‘moa’s egg shell’ – that big concave bit of sandstone? with the incised lines that was in about five pieces. I glued them together but the glue lines disturb the pattern a little. The other stones though are magnificent.

Hilde has heard from Brasch – he is sorry he missed the exhibition and will soon be in Wellington. I think I shall try to get him out here – we can’t properly display the big canvases but it will give him an idea of them. If I knew definitely that he was coming, say, next week I would keep them at Lower Hutt for him to see there, but I had planned to take them down this weekend.

The pictures really look rather magnificent in our library. However we had a bit of a storm about certain of the pictures – it pretty well boiled down to one – ‘This is Jesus . . .’187 We have a collection of religious books in the window and I put the main biblical pictures on the walls of the window[.] They were perfect and caused immediate interest, but that particular picture was so upsetting to certain worthy citizens I decided to make discretion the better part of valour and took it out. This seems to have been enough to still the uproar but the window is much the poorer.

I told you how much I liked the Crucifixion according to St. Mark. The more I see however of all that lot of pictures the more satisfying do I find them. Incidentally Dorothy White came out to Lower Hutt yesterday to see the library (she is having a week in Wellington) and was most impressed with the McCahons. She said that at Modern Books, Dunedin, she hadn’t ‘taken’ at all, but now thought it was simply that they were

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ABOVE Crucifixion according to St Mark, oil on canvas on board, 800 x 1095 mm, 1947, CAG, cm001062. (See pages 23–4, 65, 67, 71, 72, 74, 77, 79, 81, 82, 111, 118, 125, 193, 216, 220, 221, 241, 246–47, 248, 250, 266 n319, 281, 295, 400, 401.)

BELOW The Valley of Dry Bones, oil on canvas, 885 x 868 mm, 1947,

Te Papa, cm001044. (See pages 24, 71–2, 82, 135 n144, 137 n210.)

ABOVE Entombment (after Titian), oil on cardboard on hardboard, 517 x 644 mm,

1947, Te Papa, cm001034. (See pages 72, 79, 90, 135 n138, 136 n196, 230.)

BELOW Dear Wee June, oil on canvas, 910 x 910 mm, 1948, HC, cm000826.

(See pages 61, 81, 82, 137 n210, 138 n230, 140 n288.)

DEAR COLIN, DEAR RON: THE SELECTED LETTERS OF COLIN MCCAHON AND RON O’REILLY RRP: $65 ISBN: 978-1-99-116552-7 PUBLISHED: April 2024 PAGE EXTENT: 528 pages FORMAT: Hardback SIZE: 230 x 163 mm

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