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Art

The Kelliheritage

Jan Walker

"The greater number of exhibits, even when they showed some degree of technical skill, were lacking in taste. A dozen or so were downright vulgar. One felt the only possible place to hang than would be in one of those sumptuous drawing-rooms with wall-to-wall flowered carpet, vitrolite smoker's stands, chromium-plated model yachts, beaten-topper fire-screens, family mirrors and so forth ... I feel it is mostly due to a radical cause—to the inherent tendency to vulgarity in any society that accepts the standards of plutocracy."

The above satement was part of a broadside A. R. D. Fairburn delivered against the first of the Kelliher Art competitions in 1956, and seeing the 1969 Kelliher exhibition, so much of what Fairburn said remains true. But while the critical insight of Fairburn is to be admired I am sure he would be the last to wish that it should remain to be so year after year.

What has changed? The distribution of prizes has been changed—now a Landscape, Portrait and Figure Studies section. The price monies now total $3,450. But it is still the same bum rush. Fairburn said:

"The reaction of some people to competitions of any kind in the arts is one of distaste. I share the feeling. To treat works of art as if they were racehorses or competitors in what the Americans call a breast lottery' (i.e. a bathing beauty competition) is, I feel, a vulgar proceeding, likely to do harm to the diversity and the uniqueness that are the essence of art."

The recently introduced Manawatu contemporary Art Competition shows that a competition need not be a fiasco but this competition unlike the Kelliher does not exclusively encourage the representational painting Fairburn so deplored.

"Since this is an occasion that calls for frankness, it must be said in the first place that the particular intention behind Mr. Kelliher's patronage appears to be very simple. He wishes to encourage representational painting; and at the same time he wishes to avoid encouragement to what he and many others no doubt think of as "modern art". From this point of view the recent exhibition succeeded very well in sorting out the goats from the sheep. It was therefore received by a large section of the public with gratitude and pleasure and by a smaller section of people with amused contempt, with hostility."

What then of the three sections represented in 1969 In the figure studies section the prize was announced to J. Clifford for his "Surf Fishing Contest." The lew entries in this section were unbelievably stilted and poor and Clifford's was the only one with any vitality at all, alhough not particularly notable in any other respect.

The lesson Fairburn reads us on landscapes still holds in 1969. ". . . our landscape has not yet been painted, except by a very few artists. Hundreds—possibly thousands, if the tally could be made—of people have sat down in front of mountain, bush or streams and covered canvas with paint. But only a handful of them have made any real contributions to the work of translating our landscapes into the language of art."

So in 1969 we have Harrison's "Totara Flat", as interesting. I feel, as a foot and mouth artists' Christmas card, Austin Deans in a well-balanced landscape dealing with rocks and form, and another mainstay, Colin Wheeler, with a well-proportioned and competently executed "Cuttle Muster on Lake Hawea", One occasionally wonders if these artists have really been reaching form for many years without youthful challenge or is it because the real innovators of New Zealand landscape, like Woollaston and others, can so easily allow the genius to comfortably flourish as a sort of sub substrata of Landscape.

The portrait section contains most of the interest. Joan Farming's "Angela" is exquisitely drawn. R. E. Jackson's and Gaston de Vel's portraits are both sensitive and skilful. Helen Sutherland's two portraits are full of energy and remarkable clarity, while Buck Uin's "Kauinatua" is a rather unusual stylised portrait of a modern Maori face showing artistic intelligence and humour.

However, I must find, similar to Fairburn, that a few paintings do not save an exhibition. It is unhappily only possible to sum up the 1969 competition as Fairburn did in 1956. "Reluctantly, then, one comes to the conclusion that patronage of this kind, however general the intention behind it, is more likely to do harm than good, it only by fortifying certain misconceptions about art that are already too deeply implanted in untutored minds. The competition was hardly justified by the six or eight paintings that had merit of one sort or another."