Francis Pound writes: “It has long been my experience that when we New Zealanders want to show something of our art to visitors from Europe, we show them McCahon. But what they want to see is Walters.” I myself would prefer to take visitors to see the work of carver Pataromu Tamatea or later Robin White or Gordon Walters of any period, from the Koru series to before and after. And I would feel the more confident in doing so from all I have learned from Pound’s magnificent, magisterial Gordon Walters.
This mighty monograph is an art history master-class, the most in-depth study of an unfolding artistic imagination this country has produced. You can enjoy its 429 illustrations as a vivid record of Walters’ development, achievement and influences, his groping in what would turn out to be “only one direction”, to cite Colin McCahon and the title of Peter Simpson’s first volume in his fine study of McCahon. But you can enjoy the illustrations vastly more, for all the immediate impact of Walters’ best work, early and late – from 1947 to 1995 – by understanding the artist’s context and his continual struggle toward his own private standards of perfection, his inventive and “sumptuous” austerities, his static dynamism.
Pound makes you see Walters’ works and their contexts, international, local and personal, their intense seriousness and intense but calm play. He dives deep, as Walters did, and takes us with him, further than we thought we could go. He wants “to put Walters’ work before the reader in all of its variety and complexity”, and he does. He could have added “and in all of its interconnectedness”.
Only beyond halfway through this long book does Pound focus directly on Walters’ 1956-58 development of the Koru series. He introduces us to almost 20 other subjects of abstraction that Walters explored before, alongside or after the Koru paintings. Some (the Vertical or Horizontal Men, the Spirals, the Bars and Balls, the two Rauponga series) were also inspired in part by Māori art, from the rock drawings he searched out so enthusiastically with Theo Schoon to kōwhaiwhai or moko patterns. Others (the Wandering Rectangles, the Diagonals, the Sign Collections) were inspired in part by modern European, American or Marquesan abstraction or his own re-examination of his past modes and motifs.
![Untitled [Blue, Black, White] (1955). Art / Gordon Walters](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/3UR2QEFITVFF3PG4HIIBQ3TEEU.jpg?auth=528fc92921043c47ccb6a60381520261042bf641febb75eb04f00d8589b4b425&width=16&height=22&quality=70&smart=true)
Yet, from the first the book is a mystery story told by the master detective himself, trying to explain what drove Walters in his “search for perfection”, especially but not only in the Koru paintings. Pound shows that earlier works seemingly remote from the Koru or other later series incorporate discoveries that Walters will deploy in subtly and fertilely transmuted ways in his mature art.
Pound, Auckland University Press and designers Inhouse increase the excitement through multiple cross-references. Flanking the packed type-page in black ink are often extensive and fascinating sidenotes, in smaller grey sans-serif type, and along the inner margins, in matching type and ink, the illustration number of works being discussed, whether the work currently under Pound’s penetrating attention or works that he wants to refer ahead to, because they upcycle, perhaps decades later, the current discoveries. Thanks to two grey ribbons we can both hold our place and jump forward to follow the cross-references, experiencing the illicit pleasure of skipping ahead in the story, the challenge of testing Pound’s insight (I don’t think he ever fails), the thrill of anticipating what Walters himself cannot yet know he will subject to the alchemy of his future imagination.
In Gordon Walters, Pound carries through the aims and emphases of his previous work, especially his widely acclaimed The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National Identity 1930-1970 (2009), his determination, as Len Bell writes in his scene-setting foreword, “to locate New Zealand art in international as well as, sometimes rather than, national(ist) contexts”. He shows Walters’ interest from childhood in non-Western art – that of China, Japan, Africa or Polynesia from the Māori to the Marquesas – and in time in modern Western art that took some of its cues for abstraction from non-Western traditions: not only such famous names as Picasso, Klee and especially Mondrian, but also others like Sophia Taeuber-Arp, Auguste Herbin and Giuseppe Capogrossi, and Americans, from the familiar, like Frank Stella, to the lesser known, like John McLaughlin. He shows Walters settling early on abstraction and determined to remain true to its demands, despite such hostility in the local audience that he did not submit any of his work to galleries between 1949 and 1966, and despite the resulting depression and thoughts of resettling in somewhere less unwelcoming, like Sydney.
Pound shows Walters’ perfectionism even in matters that others might barely appreciate: “For the rest of his painting life, Walters would make his greys from at least two colours, a brown and a blue, mixing the two in varying portions with the necessary white. Walters would go as far as to mix six colours to achieve a grey: cobalt blue, ultra blue, red oxide, yellow oxide, chromium oxide green, and white.” This perfectionism even drove him to destroy half of his work. Pound explains: “The reason Walters almost invariably gives for destroying his works is that they had been accidentally damaged, as if, like a guerrilla army in retreat, he was putting his wounded out of their misery lest they fall into the hands of the government’s torturers.”
Walters assimilates so much and transforms so much. So does Pound: “Of course, many people think that for an artist to be ‘influenced’ is a sign of weakness – the response of a lesser to a larger figure; and that to be influenced by several artists is the mark of a still greater infirmity. But we might better say of Walters what Lawrence Gowing says of Vermeer: “The contrary is more true … it is his strength to stand so often at the meeting of many streams.”
Pound can drop in with perfect aptness a comment Kenneth Clark makes on Piero della Francesca or Ernst Gombrich offers on the psychology of art, or cite the poetry of Blanche Baughan or the prose of Anna Kavan, or draw on the detailed and admirable work of Michael Dunn in his 1983 catalogue essay and his two-volume 1984 PhD thesis on Walters.
But above all, Pound writes with his own deep originality, “ferocious concentration” (a term he applies to Walters) and fine discriminations. He makes us look and see and linger over Walters’ works. I read out his description of an early Walters drawing to my wife, who thought it sounded ridiculously over the top, until I asked her to come and look at the work he was describing, and she saw that every phrase was an illumination.
Pound died in 2017, leaving a massive manuscript without introduction or conclusion. It had to be edited down to fit even this large book, and to be framed and contextualised by the foreword and afterword of his long-time friend and fellow art historian Len Bell.
Let me end where I began, by quoting Pound. In The Invention of New Zealand he declares that he “always sought to act as though New Zealand art and the writing about it was important, as if it bodied forth complex thought, and was worthy of equally complex analysis”. Here, he tightens his focus to one of New Zealand’s greatest painters, and achieves exactly what he sought.
