Book review: Vivid - The Paul Hartigan Story

Colony, a neon installation by Paul Hartigan, at the University of Auckland, engineering building.

Although Paul Hartigan's art has roamed from pop-art painting and posters, to Polaroids and beyond, his neon work is the most familiar.

At the interface of art and commerce, his signs in Auckland for the Las Vegas strip club, the Powerstation, Real Groovy and the Martial Arts shop on Queen St are vibrant art in plain sight.

Beyond such commercial work, many of Hartigan's neon installations are akin to calligraphy in light, for example: his abstract Colony inside the engineering building at the University of Auckland.

Paul Hartigan. Photo / Ita Belic

In this handsomely presented overview of Hartigan's career - less a biography than a chronological, conducted tour through the artist's working life by Art New Zealand writer Don Abbott " we are given an insight into work emblematic of a new generation of artists that emerged in the 1970s.

Hartigan was one of the new internationalists who drew from popular culture, American comics (his famous drip-paint portrait of The Phantom in 73), rock music and Warhol with enjoyable impunity and originality.

Much of his playful, witty and spirited work seemed heretical in a milieu that favoured grim McCahons and artists exploring the New Zealand landscape with an almost proselytising fervor. When Hartigan did landscapes in the mid-70s, they owed more to Disney as re-imagined by the artists of Zap and other underground American comics than his local peers and seniors.

Writer Abbott - with insightful reference to specific works through scores of full-colour photos - follows the young Hartigan from a precocious youngster soaking up influences from Leon Narbey, Don Driver and his art teacher Tom Kreisler in New Plymouth, painting remarkable murals in a local club at age 16 (thrown shadows of figures against post-psychedelic colour) and by the following year having his bold, Lichtenstein-influenced work Spring in a provincial competition.

At Elam he sat next to future Split Enz-founder Phil Judd and when, after a year in Melbourne, he returned to start Snake Studios in 74, a parade of musicians (Graham Brazier among them), artists (Billy Apple, Pat Hanly, Dick Frizzell) and fashionistas dropped by.

Snake, a crucible of artistic and commercial activity, ventured into posters and T-shirts for touring international rock acts.

He left the company and country in 1977 for international travel on the back of an art award, and returned in time for the punk revolution and photographed the Scavengers, Suburban Reptiles and Th'Dudes.

But it was the move into neon in the 80s, which brought his art, if not the artist himself, into public recognition.

Vivid doesn't explore the man as much as the work, so Paul Hartigan remains an elusive figure, represented by his art in this engaging, highly readable overview.

• Vivid: The Paul Hartigan Story, by Don Abbott (RF Books $65) is out now.

• The Paul Hartigan Retrospective is at Gus Fisher Gallery until December 19.