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Sport 23: Spring 1999
Colin McCahon's Storm Warning, Wellington, 1999 — a scrapbook
Colin McCahon's Storm Warning, Wellington, 1999
a scrapbook
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McCahon back for opening
By TOM CARDY, Arts reporter
A Colin McCahon painting sold by Victoria University amid controversy earlier this year is back on show in the new art gallery its sale helped fund.
The $2.2 million Adam Art Gallery on the university campus was to be officially opened today and be open to the public from tomorrow.
On display is McCahon's Storm Warning, which the university sold to an Auckland couple for between $1.2 million and $1.5 million in April.
It is being displayed above a piece by Maori protester Te Kaha, convicted of stealing a McCahon painting from the DOC centre at Lake Waikaremoana in 1997. It was recovered, damaged, 14 months later.
University Vice-Chancellor Professor Michael Irving Yesterday again defended the sale of the painting. “We had a lot of controversy about selling that painting. Interest from money [from the sale] will be used to buy new [art] works.”
Its owners allowed the painting to be displayed during the gallery opening.
Another university-owned McCahon, Gate III, was one of 10 artworks in the gallery's opening exhibition Manufacturing Meaning. It will be the only artwork to be housed permanently in the gallery.
Professor Jenny Harper, head of art history, said more than $2 million of the cost of the gallery had come from private donations, including $1 million from art patrons Denis and Verna Adam. About $150,000 came from the Wellington Community Trust.
The university has 240 artworks, most on display around the campus. Ms Harper said the gallery meant the public, students and staff could, for the first time, view a selection of its collection in one place. It would also be used as a teaching and research facility, with some students working as volunteers or as interns.
RETURN SHOW - Colin McCahon's painting Storm Warning, displayed, top left, above a place by Te Kaha at the new Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University. Picture: PHIL REID
On 19 April 1999, the day after Victoria University made public the ‘intended’ sale of Colin McCahon's Storm Warning, a painting the artist had gifted to the institution in 1981, I wandered into the Art History Department. Like everyone I had encountered that morning at the university, I felt certain the proposed sale of the painting was a mistake which would, in due course, be rectified. The Sunday Star Times had reported the previous day that the work was being sold ‘to plug an $80,000 shortfall in funds for the construction of a new on-campus gallery’, with the additional funds being used to buy new artworks. Some bottom-lip biting went on when I cast around for comments from members of the Department. Even at this stage there was a palpable unease at the sale of the work for between 1.2 and 1.5 million dollars.
Just over a week later the University announced the ‘discovery’ of a letter from Colin McCahon stating that the painting was ‘a public work’ and that he didn't want it to disappear into a private collection. By that time, a deluge of letters and e-mails objecting to the sale had descended on the Wellington daily newspapers as well as the vice-chancellor's office. It was subsequently announced that the painting had effectively been sold by the time the ‘intended’ sale was made public. Some members of the university staff were in teärs over the sale. It is a rare painting that can have this effect.