.jpg)
Sport 23: Spring 1999
Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses
While goodwill towards Victoria University certainly prompted the Storm Warning gift, other factors came into it.7 According to Alexa Johnston, McCahon consciously placed the painting in a university that had an active religious studies department—and a Continuing Education programme involving the likes of Lloyd Geering, which provided a dynamic spiritual environment beyond, as well as within, the university proper. Geering's beliefs and non-conformist religious stance had greatly impressed McCahon over many years. A case could certainly be argued that the fate of Storm Warning should in fact have been placed in the hands of the Department of Religious Studies rather than the Art History Department which—as a number of comment-ators have reminded us—didn't even exist at the time of the gift.
page 25If McCahon had wanted to hand the painting over to an art history department (and a university with a well-organised collection) he might well have gifted the work to Auckland University. However, as it happened, Auckland in 1982 had no religious studies department and attempts around that time to found one had apparently been scuttled by an ardently secular university council. This was a state of affairs that deeply troubled McCahon, Johnston recalls.8 Despite the fact he taught at Auckland between 1964 and 1970, McCahon never, to my knowledge, gifted any of his own works to that university's collection.
The recent metamorphosis of Storm Warning into capital would certainly never have been a possibility McCahon would have enter-tained. To add to the absurdity of the whole business, it looked for a time as if the painting might well continue to metamorphose into even stranger forms. The Evening Post (24 June 1999) quoted some university staff members who thought some of the funds should go towards a McCahon Swimming Pool—a fittingly surreal conclusion to a course of events which tests the bounds of credibility anyway.9