Learn and marvel at the master's hand

This column appears 40 years to the day after I wrote my first piece for the Herald during the Festival of 1966. Auckland Art Gallery has been central to art activity in the city and now, with big changes coming at the gallery, it is appropriate to be mounting a splendid exhibition drawn from its own collection.

The show is called Masters of the Bitten Line: Etching in the Age of Rembrandt. The biting is done with acid. In etching the copper plate is covered with a ground, the artist draws on the ground with a sharp needle and exposes the copper.

The plate is exposed to acid which bites into the copper where the needle has passed. The ground is washed off, the plate is inked, the ink stays in the etched lines and a number of prints can be made from the plate.

The great advantage of etching, especially the soft ground etching used by Rembrandt, is that we can follow every movement of the master's hand, and marvel. This exhibition enables us to come close to the personality, ideas and achievement of Rembrandt and other great Western artists: Albrecht Durer, Anthony van Dyke, Annibale Carracci and Jacques Callot, the great master who did nothing but etching.

No other master has made so many self-portraits as Rembrandt. In the little etching that is featured we see him in his confident maturity depicting himself with authority yet absolutely unsentimentally.

Rembrandt did not idealise, he insisted on his own view of reality. The first work in this show is by him. It is a picture of strolling musicians seen in the harsh reality of their lives. They emerge out of the dark with their hurdy-gurdy and their pipes and are watched by a couple and their child from the warmth and light of their secure house.

This and other works by contemporaries of Rembrandt, such as Adriaen van Ostade, give fascinating glimpses into 17th-century life.

Rembrandt was famous for his biblical subjects, and his Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple is full of drama, power and marvellous detail. His unsentimental realism is particularly evident in a little print from 1658 of a woman bathing her feet in a stream. This is truth and it is very touching.

By contrast, when Carracci etches the subject of Susanna spied on by the Elders, the nude is idealised, and monumental but the draftsmanship of the Peeping Toms is as impressive as the Dutch master, though flooded with the clearer, brighter light of Italy.

Splendidly, there is a portrait of Pieter Brueghel by one of the great portraitists, Anthony van Dyck. This Pieter was the son of the famous Pieter Brueghel of the much-reproduced Peasant's Wedding. It is a tribute to the collection that one of the great treasures of the gallery on show in the Wellesley Wing is a painting of a Flemish fair by Pieter the Younger that gives a wonderful sense of his father's manner.

One of the earliest etchings is by Durer, which shows a superb landscape and in the foreground one of the cannons that his home city of Nuremberg was so good at making.

The exhibition includes illustrative material on etching, a small scholarly catalogue and an approachable computer program. And it is free.

The other institution that has played a consistent part in the artistic life of the city over the past 40 years has been the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. On display at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Shortland St is an exhibition of work by Elam lecturers.

It features some painting, a lot of photography, a light box and a heart of pink, plastic shopping bags. An installation by Daniel Malone is called Rising Up/Rising Down. It uses toilet rolls soaked in intense colour.

Forty years ago one exhibition opened each week. Now there may be up to 20 in more than 100 galleries. The variety is extraordinary: Jacqueline Fahey saves the reputation of painting in a show in the back room of the Gus Fisher. Celebrated expatriate artist Boyd Webb plays brilliant games with truth and artifice in his photographs of artificial flowers at the Sue Crockford Gallery.

Nigel Brown parades symbols of our iconography from the black singlet through James K. Baxter to McCahon's I AM at an exhibition at the Warwick Henderson Gallery.

Tom Mutch, who has been part of the New Plymouth and Coromandel scene, brings his talents to town at 161 Karangahape Rd, near the Disrupt Gallery, which specialises in graffiti. Age cannot stale the variety.

* Forty years of art with TJ McNamara, Weekend Review.