A year to make the art beat

It's been a spectacular year in the Auckland arts scene, as T.J. McNAMARA reports.

Onece art was a frontier; now Auckland is home to a sophisticated scene with all the apparatus of galleries, auctions and scholarly catalogues.

Auckland City Gallery leads the way, with a fine exhibition of its holdings of New Zealand painting from the 1960s. Prominent is the appropriately named Painting No 1 by the late Gordon Walters. Painted in 1965 and acquired by the gallery a year later, it signifies the beginning of a period of tremendous confidence in New Zealand art.

It also marks the appropriation of a Maori motif to a Western art form, a process that is still controversial but then seemed highly desirable.

It marked the beginning of the koru as a symbol of New Zealand as much as the kiwi or the silver fern and it is a painting about polarity, about things co-existing with equal value and power.

This year the artist's life and work was recognised by the inauguration of the Walters Prize, an award to match the British Turner Prize and likely to be as controversial as the light going on and off at the Tate - the identities of the four-person jury and their shortlist of four chosen artists will not be revealed until March. It will have a different format from the long-running Wallace Award and so it is complementary rather than competing.

Painting No 1 is part of a collection that includes what have become the great names in modern New Zealand art: Walters and Don Driver, Milan Mrkusich and Ralph Hotere, Don Peebles and Pat Hanly, Gretchen Albrecht and Jan Nigro, Richard Killeen and Ian Scott, and Gavin Bishop who became famous as an illustrator.

It took courage from the gallery to buy works by these people when they were young, new and controversial. Now it is an exercise in pride and nostalgia to walk through the gallery.

This year has seen unprecedented use of the City Gallery's great treasure trove that is its collection. It began with Tooth and Claw, the display of animal painting that ran on from the previous year.

Since then the main gallery and the New Gallery have mounted 25 important exhibitions, making it the hub around which Auckland's wonderful art scene revolves. As well as the excellent semi-permanent display of the priceless Mackelvie Collection, there has been the triumphant return of the damaged Tissot, Still on Top.

The rich show of work by Frances Hodgkins and the immensely convincing exhibition by Colin McCahon called Jesus the Man make it clear we have a remarkable art history. Among the images of Jesus there is also a beautiful Annunciation.

McCahon was also the subject of Answering Hark, mounted in conjunction with the publication of a book by Peter Simpson. The show had many paintings that threw light on McCahon's development but grandest of all was the huge Wake series, alternating elegiac poems by John Caselberg with the columns of a mystic grove of trees. The original works were painted in the attic of the City Gallery. For the show, they were hung in the circular room on the first floor and they were superb. McCahon, once derided, is our Old Master.

Purangiaho: Seeing Clearly, the lively, big exhibition of recent Maori art, was bright and witty but deeply committed.

And there was the big retrospective of work by Stephen Bambury, an outstanding minimalist painter, and the elaborate study of one subject in photography in Peter Peryer's portraits of Erika. There was also the huge show of photographs by Marti Friedlander.

These shows were admired and drew many visitors. What was unpredictable was the adulatory crowds drawn to the paintings of Grahame Sydney.

The show arrived largely unheralded at the main gallery but soon the crowds streamed in and the shop, with the artist there to sign prints, was never so busy.

What was the great appeal of his work? New Zealanders have always loved open landscapes, the weatherboard shack, the rusty iron water-tank and isolated, or abandoned, buildings. Sydney gave all these in great measure, conveyed by highly skilled draughtsmanship.

The most innovative show was Bright Paradise, the first in a series of Triennial Art Festivals which matched New Zealand artists with overseas artists, linking them to the theme of the brightness of visions of distant lands and how the bait of paradise often had hooks in it.

It spread from the gallery to Artspace and the new Gus Fisher Gallery and set the style for the presence of international artists on the Auckland scene as equals.

The dealer galleries are now confident enough to bring in such internationally established artists as Helmut Federle and George Rickey. The commercial galleries continue to flourish. Those that survive the intense competition find a niche, some by showing established artists, others by taking a punt on the young and the new. The best mix both.

The variety of art on display is genuinely amazing. Among the dozen or more exhibitions that open each week might be found, as in April this year, a creator of myth such as Star Gossage, a romantic, lyric artist such as Cherie Knott, an abstract expressionist from Germany such as Katherina Grosse, a symbolist like Nigel Brown, a confident, amusing Australian like Dale Frank, a minimalist like Ferdele, a newcomer like Russell Dammers and a voice from the past in hugely inventive paintings of galloping bones by Graeme Cornwall.

Some names stand out in the memory: the photographs of Fiona Pardington and Laurence Aberhart, the paintings of Shane Cotton and Tony Lane, the sculpture of Terry Stringer and Leigh Christensen, the little bronzes developed by Marion Fountain, the subtlety of Geoff Thornley's abstractions and the work of Jacqueline Fahey who had her thumb on the pulse of life like no one else.

Auckland has developed a distinct art purlieu around the City Gallery which extends down Lorne St into Vulcan Lane and O'Connell St, with one extreme branch at the bottom of town.

Another little art area is in Karangahape Rd where Artspace and the Ivan Anthony Gallery are resolutely avant-garde, with installations and knitted covers for boats and big tractors in tiny rooms. Newmarket has a couple of distinguished galleries, the Studio of Contemporary Art and the Morgan St Gallery.

Further afield, Devonport and Mairangi Bay are also areas of activity, and the lovely little public gallery in Northcote hosted a retrospective exhibition by Lois McIvor that was one of the most magical shows of the year.

Rather more accessible are Lopdell House, which has a lively programme, and the Fisher Gallery in Pakuranga, splendidly transformed into te tuhi - The Mark. This gallery was the venue for Robert Jahnke's exhibition Alpha/Omega, a lament for the life and employment offered by now-closed freezing works.

Jahnke's powerful combination of realism and symbolism was also seen in Purangiaho.

The year saw the deaths of the Australian painter, Roy Dalgarno, a great humanist who had adopted Auckland and was much admired by artists, and of Greg Whitecliffe, painter and entrepreneur who set up the Whitecliffe School of Arts and Design as a private academy to challenge the public institutions.

Newcomers? Perhaps the future lies with strong, artistic personalities such as Josephine Do and Emma McLellan.

The final exhibition at the New Gallery was Darkness and Light. In New Zealand the viewers of art have moved from darkness into the light of acceptance. Let us hope that the ironic, values-eroding, knee-capping extremes of post-modernism do not extinguish it.