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Book takes: Dear Colin, Dear Ron, as the title suggests, is a book of letters between two friends, one, Colin McCahon, a famous artist, the other, Ron O’Reilly, an art collector and librarian, among other things, who was less well-known by the wider public. Their letters – close to 400 – were spread over nearly 40 years, from 1944 to 1981.
Peter Simpson, one of New Zealand’s most experienced and prolific writers on art, has gathered together the transcribed letters with contributions from O’Reilly’s son, Matthew, and McCahon’s grandson, Finn McCahon Jones.
The result is a book, illustrated with images discussed in the letters, that adds new insights to McCahon’s life and work as well as tracking a unique friendship. Here, Simpson writes about three aspects of the book and a discovery he made while putting it together.
The two men who wrote the letters
Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly met in Dunedin in 1938 while working on a play; McCahon was 19 and designed the sets, O’Reilly was 24 and in the cast. They became firm friends but their surviving correspondence dates from later when McCahon was living in Nelson, then Christchurch and O’Reilly in Dunedin, then Wellington. Later still, O’Reilly was in Christchurch, then Wellington again, then New Plymouth, while McCahon had moved to Auckland.
Because they seldom coincided in the same city, their friendship was sustained mainly by letters and occasional visits. From the start, O’Reilly was fascinated with McCahon’s painting and began steadily collecting it, which continued for decades. Eventually, he assembled the largest and best collection of McCahon’s work in private hands.
Beyond collecting, he actively involved himself in McCahon’s career as a kind of informal agent, arranging several of McCahon’s exhibitions in Dunedin, Wellington, Christchurch, Auckland and New Plymouth, some of them in libraries where he worked, such as Canterbury Public Library.
Though lacking the public profile of New Zealand’s best-known 20th-century painter, O’Reilly was distinguished as a trained philosopher, librarian, writer, educationalist and gallery director. Though they were very different personalities – McCahon was an active Christian, O’Reilly a Marxist-inclined atheist – theirs was a relationship of intellectual equals, sustained throughout their lifetimes by trust and affection and their mutual love of art.
The book affords a more intimate and personal insight into McCahon the man than has previously been available. At the same time, it introduces readers to O’Reilly, a lesser-known but highly significant figure in the country’s cultural history.
Before there was texting, there was letter writing
In an era of texting and emails, letter writing – for centuries the main mode of communicating between individuals living in different places – is a dying art. From today’s perspective, it seems almost incredible that McCahon and O’Reilly preserved hundreds of each other’s hand-written letters for up to four decades.
Though it’s clear that not all their letters survived, most of them probably did. It speaks to how highly each man valued the other’s communications and how they must have shared a sense of the importance of preserving their exchanges for posterity.
As a librarian by profession for much of his life, O’Reilly had a vocational sense of the value of preserving archives for future generations. He was also convinced from early on that his friend was “one of the immortals” whose importance would long outlast his life. McCahon, too, ensured during his lifetime that his inward correspondence (not only O’Reilly’s) and other documents were deposited in Dunedin’s Hocken Collections, a practice continued by his family after his death.
The Colin and Anne McCahon Papers are now included in the Unesco Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Register in recognition of their cultural value. The O’Reilly papers (including McCahon’s letters) have now also been deposited in Hocken Collections, one of the most important depositories of such material in the country. In an exercise unique in New Zealand publishing, Dear Colin, Dear Ron, reconstitutes their written dialogue over almost four decades, a momentous record of a rich and special friendship.
Art as a vocation and career
Although the letters ranged over many topics – family affairs, friendships, jobs, home renovations, holidays, travel: the usual subjects of exchanges between old friends – art was always front and centre, and more specifically (though far from exclusively) McCahon’s painting.
McCahon recognised that painting was his inescapable vocation from a very young age and in O’Reilly he found a friend and mentor who believed in his remarkable talent and did everything in his power to support it.
While McCahon was still a teenager, O’Reilly began collecting his work and never stopped acquiring new paintings until the end of his life. In addition, McCahon often gifted works to his friend in gratitude for his support and practical assistance.
As the letters reveal, this assistance came in many forms: organising exhibitions throughout the country, persuading friends and institutions to buy works, writing supporting articles and letters in newspapers, magazines and catalogues, defending McCahon against hostile criticism (there was always plenty of that), writing testimonials and offering constructive criticism and analysis in regular long letters (some more than 30 pages).
McCahon called O’Reilly “my oldest supporter” and trusted him implicitly, even to the extent of asking advice when he struck difficulties with a painting, as for example with a huge Waterfalls mural at Otago University in the 1960s.
As a consequence of this trust, McCahon wrote more intimately and revealingly about his work to O’Reilly than to anyone else. But O’Reilly was no “yes man”; if he didn’t like a painting he said so, bluntly and honestly. At the same time, he was remarkably receptive to the radical changes that were constant in McCahon’s development.
Whereas other supportive friends sometimes blenched at McCahon’s startling innovations – for example, his moving to abstraction from realism, introducing words into paintings (sometimes in Latin or Māori), abandoning frames, utilising commercial house paints, etc – O’Reilly stayed staunch, rising to every challenge. All this rich history is recorded in their letters, in real time, as it happened.
What I learned
One of the best discoveries for me in putting this book together was how much I learned about the personalities and interactions of the two principals and about the New Zealand art world in general from the 1940s to the 1970s, the period in which New Zealand art “came of age”. McCahon and O’Reilly were immersed in the art life of their time and place. They knew most of the leading artists – Toss Woollaston, Doris Lusk, Louise Henderson, Bill Sutton, Olivia Spencer Bower, Pat Hanly, Ralph Hotere, Gordon Walters, Tony Fomison, Richard Killeen, Alison Duff, Gretchen Albrecht, and many others – and often discussed them.
We also learn much about struggles with conservative institutions, the search for venues sympathetic to modern art in the era before dealer galleries, the changing role of organisations like Christchurch’s The Group and the arts societies, the emergence of gallerists such as Don Wood, Barry Lett and Peter McLeavey, the activities of Auckland Art Gallery, and Elam School of Art (for both of which McCahon worked), and much more. Beyond its insights into one of New Zealand’s greatest artists, Dear Colin Dear Ron affords innumerable revealing glimpses into a significant swathe of the country’s cultural history.
Dear Colin Dear Ron by Peter Simpson (Te Papa Press, $65) is out now.
