Illingworth - an outsider at the centre

By T.J. McNAMARA

The way we were is powerfully evoked by the exhibition of work by the late Michael Illingworth at the New Gallery. It is called A Tourist in Paradise Lost, which, following Milton, suggests it is about the fall of a rebel angel.

It also reminds us of the time when we had the Herald in the morning and the Auckland Star at night, the time in the 1960s when there were only a couple of dealer galleries in Auckland and one exhibition a week.

The 60s and into the 70s were a time of great ferment for art here. An exhibition, which would open on a Monday, was a hectic gathering of poets, painters, writers - all getting drunk on the free wine.

Most vehement of all the artists was Illingworth and his vehemence was directed at everything he was not: well-fed, suburban, tidy, well-clothed and well-shod. The legend of his being admitted to hospital, starving because he refused to work at anything but his art, was the ripest legend around.

Then he chose to abandon the city. His attitudes were hugely admired. Disciples wanted to hear his eloquent doctrines damning the city, the suburbs, the tidy, the rich and the employed.

But time has its ironies. There were always contradictions in Illingworth's attitudes. A critic of society, he was upset by the slightest public criticism of his art. One critic, close to home, was always greeted with the same phrase, "Where's your white stick?"

The prices for his paintings were, for the time, astoundingly high. He wanted the suburban society he attacked to pay a lot of money for his painting and attacked them if they didn't. "They pay more for a car than they'd pay for my painting and my painting will last longer," was his cry and, in a measure, he was right.

Now, out of all that distant rebellion comes the first big retrospective show of Illingworth's work, organised by Wellington's City Gallery, and, irony of ironies, it now reads as an exhibition of beguiling charm, wit and colour. This is despite all the interpretive text on the wall that endeavours to talk it up as bitter satire.

Illingworth brought back from a stay in London a lot of ideas about contemporary art, particularly the theories and practice of Jean Dubuffet about untrained spontaneity, the incorporation of sand and plaster into paintings and the value of naive art.

Illingworth seized on these ideas because he could not draw - but he could paint.

This is abundantly clear as early as 1961 when he painted the marvellously expressive work, The Poet Explodes. It involves the doll-like head he made peculiarly his own. This oval shape which served him elsewhere for deity and suburbanite alike is splendidly placed in a dark atmosphere of drip painting and incorporates a grand explosion of red, signifying inspiration, enlivening its forehead.

By 1963 he was into his vehement stage with paintings such as A New Lord Demands Attention, where his doll figure has become self-important and makes little futile gestures.

The text on the gallery wall quotes Illingworth dramatising himself as a colonial van Gogh. He says, "I completely indulge myself. I paint with wild frenzy. I am angry. I throw things. I vomit." Contrary to what the movies depict, van Gogh placed every stroke with great care to give the effect of passion; truth to tell, Illingworth did the same but his works are calm and his surface smooth and very reproducible.

Yet the painterly qualities are there when he chose to make use of them. Deity and Bushscape, one of the most unphotographable paintings in the show, is also one of the most luminous and expressive and full of the mana of Aotearoa.

As social critic Illingworth invented the characters Mr and Mrs Thomas Piss-Quick, presumably people who went to the lavatory quickly because it involved their genitals.

These characters appear in a number of paintings besides the one with that specific title.

These works must be seen in light of the 60s and 70s theory about "the bright New Zealand light" which said that anything painted in this light should be bright and sharp-edged.

So by 1968 we have figures like Mr and Mrs Thomas P-Q as the epitome of repressed suburbia, narrow-shouldered, with the man in a tight-necked shirt and tie, and the woman with an absurd hat and dim, almost negligible, sexual characteristics making little absurd gestures in the bright light. They wave their truncated arms or hold a balloon in a feeble effort at gaiety and consequence. They have no mouths because they are not articulate.

Sexuality was important to Illingworth and he painted figures with prominent genitals in a typically 60s effort to shock the conventional mind. And he succeeded.

He got some mild protests about the genitalia but really life went on much as before and the painter himself came to recognise that painting changes nothing in a political sense, only in an individual sensibility.

In many of his last works he painted still-life, bright, glowing studies of oranges and lemons. His drawing was still not up to much, the fruits do not sit securely in a bowl, but it doesn't matter. The colours and his careful, intent painting make the pictures, often small-scale, luminous, sweet and lovely.

Nevertheless, the late still-lifes are not his most memorable work. The most fascinating things in the show combine the figures and the still-life. A painting such as Man and Woman with Still-life and Flowers, which now has an honoured place in the Auckland City Gallery collection, incorporates both wit and delight and brings Michael Illingworth, the Outsider, right to the centre of the development of art in New Zealand both by personal example and achievement.