Looking back in anger: Colin McCahon's family portrait

By LINDA HERRICK

William McCahon hesitates as he describes the emotional aftershock of his father's death in 1987.

His widowed mother, Anne, stayed in close contact with her four adult children, he explains, including William, a father himself to two boys.

"This is hard for me to talk about, it is too personal. As she watched me raise my own sons, one day she burst into tears ... and she was unable to be shaken out of it. She apologised to me for my life."

It is a life indelibly defined by his father, Colin McCahon, whose importance in the international art arena is finally being recognised with a 77-work exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, considered one of the top four contemporary art museums in the world.

Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith is the first major New Zealand artistic push into the European arena, and is predicted to considerably enhance McCahon's status. The exhibition will come to Auckland and Wellington next year.

But none of the McCahon family will be at the opening at 5pm today, Amsterdam time, which will be attended by an official party from New Zealand as well as a large number of "unofficial" supporters.

William McCahon - who says he may eventually visit the Amsterdam show - does have a presence. He wrote a chapter for the show's catalogue and had some say in the selection. But he had to fight to be heard above the voices of what he calls the "industry of misinformation and orthodoxy" that has been built around his father's work.

"I wrote to the Stedelijk director [Rudi Fuchs] a very angry six-page letter, so angry it's almost incoherent ... and that was a turning point.

"We were never expected to have a voice or even to be seen as having a valid claim to McCahon as intellectual property. But increasingly, I think we, the family, have the pre-emptive claim because we in a sense were sacrificed to this work and are part-authors of it."

William McCahon's anger towards many of his father's analysts and critics has been ferocious over the past 15 years since his father's death. It is as if the 59-year-old eldest son has inherited the right to express the rage so bitterly repressed by Colin McCahon - who never answered his critics in public but laid it all on the family.

"Colin brought anger home and vented his spleen for a fortnight, months sometimes, about commentators - but never to their face," says William.

"The anger was expressed in the house, not necessarily in violence but certainly in terms of anger and later, he would just get quietly drunk.

"Our interaction was intense in the sense of violence and language. I got the best and the worst. My siblings all have different memories because the social status of the family gradually changed and they were buffered from Colin by me."

He opens a copy of artist-writer Gordon Brown's book Colin McCahon: Artist and points to a 1947 painting called The Family, which shows the artist staring at a little boy huddled fearfully in his mother's arms. Its subtext is child abuse.

"That's him 'reporting' on the family nearly in the process of disintegration. That's something my mother said she really strongly considered because of Colin's treatment of me as a baby.

"By 1947, I'm away from the family [staying with grandparents] - she sent me away to save my life. These days he would have gone to jail. But that painting shows he can't help himself, he knows what's going on, and he reports it in the painting."

Brown, who met the McCahons in 1952 and became a lifetime family friend, says the artist's violence towards young William in particular was known.

"Well, there is the famous story about when Colin was painting Spring, Ruby Bay, in 1945, I think it was," says Brown.

"There is the evidence, which Colin left on the painting, of William helping dad do the painting - there's a strange brush stroke up in the corner. The story is that Colin got so annoyed with the boy he kicked William down the hill.

"I find the relationship between Colin and William sort of ambivalent, almost a love-hate relationship."

William believes Colin's feelings towards him - the artist was 24 when his first child was born - were the result of impossible demands of "middle-class respectability" placed on the young couple by their parents.

Anne's father was Archdeacon W.A. Hamblett of Dunedin, and Colin, from a middle-class Dunedin family, was "the light and love of his mother", says William.

"A family friend said that when he first met Colin, he had never met a more spoiled child. His parents were exceedingly indulgent of him being an artist but they wanted him to take a conventional route. Colin simply didn't understand the need for a middle-class income because the money had flowed so easily."



The real blow to both families was Anne's marriage to Colin in 1942. "They both undertook a promise - this is the key issue - to be responsible. They had me a year later.

"Anne was found wanting by her family and forced to take part in a 'churching' or cleansing by her father, cleansed of what he called the sin of childbirth. Anne was dragged away from her happy marriage and Colin late in her pregnancy and taken back to Dunedin for some time.

"I believe that was when Colin committed himself to poverty in defiance of his family and so we were brought up in a poverty that wasn't necessary. It was self-imposed - I call it class-suicide.

"Colin suicided his family because it was the only way he could get back at his own family. We were the children of an elite in the middle-class and we lived on £5 a week housekeeping money for 10 years."

Says Gordon Brown: "Colin was very much disapproved of by Anne's father. The approach was, why is this young man who hasn't got two pennies to rub together taking on this responsibility when he can't cope with it?"

William McCahon says if it had not been for the strength of their mother, who died in 1993, the family would not have survived - and neither would have McCahon as an artist.

"My mother gave up her career [Anne was an artist in her own right] to support Colin in his, and everyone in Colin's close life was a co-author of the work - our experiences are contained in it.

"Colin could never have been the artist he was without my mother's eye - everything that went out into the world passed her criticism."

But he still finds it distressing that his mother had to live most of her adult life in extreme poverty, relieved slightly only when she turned 60 and received national superannuation.

"My mother was given a tiny amount of money and she was expected to entertain at the drop of a hat. But we weren't in rags, Mother would make what she couldn't buy. She loved it when we moved to Titirangi [in 1953] because it was warm and we could go without shoes."



The McCahon family suffered what William recalls as "taunts and violence" in Titirangi because of unfounded rumours about the Saturday night parties Colin and Anne hosted, attended by "so many people in rich cars" from Auckland's art elite.

In an email, he later explained: "One of the local sophisticates made a throw-away comment that Coptic sex rites went on at these events, which were actually serious and happy cultural discussions.

"This witty lie coupled with the negativity about his work in the press meant Colin was jostled and jeered at on the local workers' bus ... he bought a scooter to avoid the buses as the criticism never ceased and spread out to include my mother and we children in terms of shouted innuendo, taunt and violence.

"The family moved to the slums of uncritical Newton Gully ... this episode reflects one of many where injustice and ill-will were heaped on Colin through misunderstanding."



William says that as he and his father grew older, their relationship became much stronger. He left home to join the Forestry Service at 17, then went on to lead an itinerant life travelling around New Zealand.

"I had conversations with Colin by mail and there were times when I was in odd places and he would turn up and talk for an hour or so then be off again.

"But towards the end of Colin's life he was very dependent on me - for the last 15 years or even earlier than that.

"I'm involved in so many paintings through the 60s and 70s in quite practical ways. Myself, my mother and Gordon Brown would talk through issues in his painting which were troubling him, and the final say was always given to her. If she had gone before him, it would have been a devastating blow."

Colin McCahon became ill in the early 1980s after suffering a stroke and Korsakov's psychosis, the result of years of heavy drinking.

"I think he knew what was happening to him," says Brown, "even if he didn't realise the full consequences, based on too much alcohol. Part of the time he was still going out to Muriwai [where he had a studio] but when he could no longer drive, he kept on painting in the studio at the back of the house in Crummer Rd."

When McCahon and Anne went to Sydney in 1984 to attend the opening of an exhibition at the University of Sydney, the artist - suffering acute memory loss - went missing for 24 hours.

He fell into a coma in 1987, and languished on a life support system in Auckland Hospital. William says that when he went to the hospital under his mother's instructions to take him off life support, Colin had just died. "I had never seen him so peaceful."

The next day, when he went to see his father's body in the morgue, he found an eye specialist looking at Colin's eyes, with the comment that the corneas were "as good as a young man's".

Although Colin was strongly opposed to organ donations, William gave permission for his eyes to be taken.

Despite the material poverty and physical abuse he suffered from his father, William does not believe he had a deprived childhood.

"For all I feel we had a hard time as children, the net outcome of Colin's demonstration of faith and responsibility of self was a very important lesson.

"We had a richness that took in the breadth of the world ... and so it was a gift."