Recovery of two stolen paintings restores soul

The big story in the art world was the safe return of the Urewera mural painting by Colin McCahon. Before that, there was the armed robbery: a painting by Tissot was taken from the City Gallery.

Smuggled out of the country for the delectation of a billionaire collector with a passion for patriotic paintings and a taste for exquisitely painted dresses?
No, an opportunist theft by an uninformed vandal.

For all the melodrama associated with its theft and recovery it was a minor matter compared with the disappearance of the McCahon, which I regard as the single most memorable painting I have seen in my 30 years of reviewing art for the New Zealand Herald.

The Urewera mural is ultimately more important than the Tissot because it is ours. It is the work of a man born in Aotearoa and whose art focuses on this land.

Like many fine paintings it was not altogether popular.
There was a feeling that the Urewera National Park Board was not proud of it. The Tuhoe people that McCahon had in mind when it was created feel that it was an intrusion into their territory.

Hence the theft. But it is a great and profound painting.

The key to McCahon's work is that he used our New Zealand landscape for the purposes of spiritual symbolism.

The painting generalises the green and misty hills and the steep declivities of the Ureweras. The work is also about inheritance and the enduring nature of the people, the hills and the forest. Descending in the centre is an enormous column that is at once a mighty tree and a fall of light.

It is the spiritual power of the inheritance of the Tuhoe people. The reference is lettered on the work along with other invocations and the name and star of Te Kooti as prophet and leader.

The charming work by Tissot was damaged almost beyond the power of restoration.

It would have been a great loss. It is mentioned not only in works about the artist but in general histories of 19th century art. Its possession gives the gallery status in the art-political world.

The permanent loss of the McCahon painting would have been a greater loss. It would have been an erosion of soul.
- T. J. McNamara, art critic


Pictured: Detective Sergeant Craig Mobberley and art gallery principal conservator Sarah Hillary with the damaged Tissot painting. HERALD PICTURE / GEOFF DALE