Peter Simpson: Answering Hark

By T.J. McNAMARA

The history of European art in New Zealand is short, but there are still gaps to be filled in its story. Answering Hark is solid bricks of scholarship and mortar of sensitivity and good writing, filling a space that was a gaping hole.

It is well-known that Colin McCahon in some of his greatest paintings used text by his friend the poet John Caselberg. The nature of their collaboration has been obscured by the undeserved decline in the reputation of Caselberg's poetry, which belongs more to the chanting, exalted holy word-conscious era of Dylan Thomas than to recent conversational styles.

Peter Simpson, in this excellent book based on his own research, tells in words and images the story of this unique collaboration. It complements Answering Hark, the exhibition he curated, which has completed a two-year tour of New Zealand galleries. The book is not a detailed biography, but addresses and illuminates the nature of the collaboration and shows just how suitable Caselberg's words were to McCahon at a crucial stage in the development of his artistic thought.

Both men were very serious-minded and they saw themselves as prophets in a new land, although their joint manifesto, On the Nature of Art - discovered by Simpson in the Hocken Library and published here for the first time - smacks more of the WEA than of practical goals and a detailed programme.

Answering Hark is particularly good on The Wake panels, 16 paintings of incomparable grandeur in which Caselberg's very personal lament for his dog is transformed in a rich and strange vision of mortality and the greatness of spirit possible among the kauri trees of this country. The book does as much justice to these huge paintings as colour reproduction can.

There is also an excellent fold-out that enables the reader to see the profound Second Gate Series as a complete sequence. It is less satisfactory when the reproduction of John in Canterbury runs across two pages.

Such quibbles aside, the book is informed, forceful and energetically written.

It is a grand contribution to the history of both art and poetry in New Zealand.

Craig Potton Publishing

$49.95

* T.J. McNamara is the Herald art reviewer.