A fish in a golden cage

By PETER WELLS

There's a haunting image in the Frank Carpay exhibition at the Auckland Museum. A trim, smartly dressed Frank Carpay is at the 1953 Easter Show. He is behind a barrier and a lot of overdressed New Zealanders are gawping at him as he paints pottery blanks.

I can only imagine the way his brush worked. He would have been producing those marvellous, almost acrobatic lines which so define his work. There's something a little Len Lye about them - taking a line for a dance.

Before the astonished eyes of New Zealanders, Carpay would have been creating magical creatures - the bulls, the doves beloved by Picasso - but he would also have been producing his own language of signs and symbols - the wonderful black lips, for example, which run up and down a lamp base, surreal and suggestive of a cool, sexy 1950s, the one we in New Zealand didn't have.

Carpay is caught beast and performing seal. He is also trying to earn a living. He wants to be professional and it is heartbreakingly difficult.

Carpay was one of the refugees blown into New Zealand by the after-gusts of World War II. He had managed to survive the mayhem and death which littered Europe by 1945. And as well as his hope for a better life he brought his skills as a trained ceramics designer.

What brought him to Auckland was a postcard of a palmy-looking, subtropical city, one we would recognise today as a reality.

But in those cold, postwar days, when hotels closed at 6pm and puddings were stolid and flesh was suet-white, he was anticipating a future which didn't really exist then.

We cannot underestimate the enormous influence a small number of European migrants - in this case Dutch - made to ferment our culture, to bring in espresso and a way of life we eagerly embrace now as characteristically New Zealand: indoor/outdoor living, good coffee, beautiful things to eat, and eat from.

Frank Carpay came when New Zealand had just had a short, sharp shock. War-time shortages made us realise what it would be like to live here stranded without the English products we had received in return for our butter, meat and cheese.

This meant things as basic as plates, cups and saucers. Into the breach stepped a company more used to producing sewer pipes and roof tiles. The story of Crown Lynn is a large one but this was a remarkable moment of experimentation in its history.

Tom Clark, the director of Crown Lynn, allowed and encouraged experimentation from the factory floor. This meant people like Carpay could flower.

He did his beautiful, sinuous paintings on Crown Lynn pottery forms, then created his own pottery shapes to decorate.

He created cool in the form of pottery. He was allowed to go along with his gift. In a way, it was like a glimpse into a future. It was creativity contributing to industry, giving it a special edge.

The slight problem was the market. As curator Douglas lloyd-Jenkins demonstrates in the beautifully designed catalogue, the local market resented being told what was cool by someone Dutch (read foreign).

Besides, the affluent in New Zealand in those days much preferred something in porcelain from Europe. Handwerk, the brilliant Crown Lynn experiments of the Dutch modernist Carpay, failed to find a market. The series was withdrawn because it just didn't work.

We can now only imagine what faced Carpay and his wife in 1959, a time when there was little arts support from the Government. People like Carpay were meant to "go and get a proper job".

If there is a hidden tragedy in Carpay's story it is the way he tried to find his feet in this primal situation. He extended himself to murals for shops and cafes. He tried advertising, then he hit on the scheme of getting round the puddingy tastes of New Zealand's British-obsessed middle class. He would appeal to the youth market. He and his wife began to do beachware with names like Capri, Taupo, Monaco, Waihi. They travelled round New Zealand with their wares in the boot of their car. They produced fabric designs startling even to today's jaded eyes. Just when things seemed about to take off, a bad shipment of cloth ruined everything.

Carpay taught most unhappily, then worked at a printing firm churning out flag designs, part of the reality of being creative in 1950s and 60s New Zealand.

Where Frank Carpay went before, now so many people follow. The Carpay exhibition is the third exhibition in a series emanating from the innovative Napier Museum.

Lloyd-Jenkins has reintroduced to us forgotten mavericks, such as fabric designer Avis Higgs, wallpaper designer William Mason, and now Carpay - three people who were ahead of their time, who suffered through long periods of neglect but whom lloyd-Jenkins has dusted down for our eyes, yodelled the joy of their creativity and brought back to us.

Carpay died in 1985, aged 68, and I can only think of him saying to an earnest arts reporter questioning him about his strange symbols, "In Holland we put a fish in a golden cage and teach it to sing."

Carpay was our fish in a golden cage.

* What: The Design of Frank Carpay

* Where and when: Auckland Museum, to Jan 18