McCahon, like Nolan, is sometimes said to have been a self-taught artist but this is true only in the sense that all artists are ultimately responsible for their own instruction, wheresoever it might be found. From 1932 to 1934 McCahon attended Saturday morning classes run by Russell Clark on the premises of publishers and printers John McIndoe Ltd, where Clark worked. McCahon said he was a splendid teacher; Clark later remembered his pupil’s first water-colours: very unusual in approach and extremely interesting. In the later 1930s, after leaving Otago Boys’ High School, which he hated, McCahon was a part-time student at the Dunedin School of Art, attending classes in winter and working on the tobacco fields and in the orchards around Nelson in the summer. He had already, in 1936, seen a show of Toss Woollaston’s paintings of the region; the following year he met the painter and they were two amongst a cohort of young artists and writers who shuttled between Dunedin and Nelson in the late 1930s and during the war.
William McCahon says that it was in the Nelson years that his father met the criminals and pacifists who introduced him to the idea, and ideal, of acting as a Christian witness: non-judgemental observation of his fellow men … while reporting and sharing his own state of mind. Toss Woollaston’s Uncle Frank was one of these early influences. He was a Buchmanite, a peripatetic preacher who travelled with certain teaching aids: blackboard signs lettered with religious texts and simple Christian symbols … a large version of a diagrammatic aid to meditation that he had painted himself. When Uncle Frank arrived at his nephew’s house he would take Toss’s paintings down off the wall and put up his own canvas. Buchman, also Frank, was an American, a Lutheran originally, a Protestant Christian evangelist who founded his Moral Rearmament Group (aka the Oxford Group) on the basis of four absolute truths: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. The essence of the strategy was self-improvement: Everybody wants to see the other fellow changed. Every nation wants to see the other nation changed. But everybody is waiting for the other fellow to begin. The Oxford Group is convinced that if you want an answer for the world today, the best place to start with is with yourself. This is the first and fundamental need.
McCahon and Woollaston might have encountered Buchman’s ideas previously through R. N. Field, an artist and a teacher at the Dunedin School of Art. The beliefs were pervasive anyway in the decades between the wars. Buchman travelled widely; he knew Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen and consciously attempted to set up his movement as a force against both communism and fascism; he even sought a meeting with Adolf Hitler because he thought he could convert him to the doctrine. There are strange episodes in the Buchmanite crusade: his visits to Norway and to Denmark in the mid-1930s were said to have changed the mental outlook of the whole country. The inheritors of his doctrine today are probably the charismatic churches but, in the case of Colin McCahon, the indelible effect of the Buchmanite doctrine was undoubtedly the requirement to begin with the self. Murray Bail, the Australian writer whose short essay on McCahon is the best introduction yet to his work, begins with a remark McCahon made in July 1970 in a letter to his friend and collaborator, the writer John Caselberg: I have the awful problem now of being a better person before I can paint better.
McCAHON IS USUALLY seen as essentially a landscape painter and perhaps he was. But among early works there is a still life that looks like an imitation of Giorgio Morandi and recalls the difficulty Nolan expressed, that of getting objects to cohere under the antipodean light; and a Madonna with Child and Angels that resembles a Byzantine icon. Both of these works were used in theatrical productions, the first in a July 1939 staging of Friedrich Wolf’s Professor Mamlock (an anti-Fascist, anti-anti-Semitic theatre piece), the second for a 1941 version of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Like Nolan, McCahon would work in the theatre for most of his life as a set and costume designer; like the Australian too, his painting would remain always theatrical in intent and affect. Early post-war works are sometimes pure landscapes: the hills of Takaka, for instance, stripped of vegetation and otherwise empty of human presence, under a green-yellow sky. They are strange paintings, at once peaceful and foreboding. McCahon compared one of these early landscapes, Triple Takaka (1948), to the music of Bach: a monotonous music but one when you listen with much form and order and lovely variation … isn’t really monotonous at all.
These Takaka paintings of hills are an explicit confirmation of McCahon’s vision of a landscape of splendour, order and peace; but the landscape they picture was at the same time the one in which, during the immediate post-war years, he staged a series of crucifixions and related dramas from the New Testament. These early religious paintings were controversial at the time and still look awkward and raw. The figures are crudely drawn and they sometimes speak in cartoon bubbles; they are ourselves in ways we perhaps do not wish to recognise. And in the 1940s the very idea of rehearsing biblical scenes in New Zealand landscapes seemed outré and somehow presumptuous (Nolan and his contemporary Arthur Boyd were doing the same thing at more or less the same time across the Tasman). On the other hand, why not? The Bible was an essential tool of the colonial enterprise, one of the four pillars of the domination of the native, along with alcohol, syphilis and trousers. McCahon’s vision is anyway not primarily critical. James K. Baxter, writing of the paintings in 1948, pointed out: There is in them a good deal of pity and terror and the monstrously ludicrous element which lies in all suffering … he is expressing the sour and struggling piety that lies behind the blank mask of Presbyterianism. Baxter would later found a dystopian utopia on the Whanganui River at Hiruharama, a community of emancipated remnants, Māori and Pākehā, catholic only in its inclusiveness.
One of the curious elements in McCahon’s original discovery of his particular God is that he was perhaps an Egyptian. Exactly what he meant by this enigmatic remark may have to remain ultimately unknown; but he was an extremely well-read man – he had read Plato’s Timaeus in his youth – and particularly well-informed about Christian iconography. In his crucifixions he usually showed an aberrant form of the cross known as the tau cross. Tau is the Greek letter T which such a cross resembles; but the sound derives from the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, X, also pronounced tau; in the sound transition from Hebrew to Greek some see a passing from the old to the new dispensation, Adam to Christ. Historical scholarship suggests that the cross the Romans used for their executions was probably a tau – not for any esoteric reason but simply because it was easier to erect. The upright of the cross, the stipes, was usually left in the ground; the cross piece or patibulum was hauled to the place of execution by the condemned man, he was tied or nailed to it then it was raised up and dropped down on to a peg at the top of the stipes.
The tau symbol was adopted by the Franciscans; a robed monk with his arms outspread made the shape that was also, by analogy, the shape of the crucifix. In Ezekiel 9:4, when the man clothed in linen, with a writer’s inkhorn by his side, is sent out into the city to set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof, it is usually supposed that the mark was a tau. Pope Innocent III, who commissioned the Franciscan order in 1209, six years later in 1215 recalled this passage when he said: We are called to reform our lives, to stand in the presence of God as righteous people. God will know us by the sign of the Tau marked on our foreheads.
But the tau is older than Christianity. It was used by worshippers of the Roman god Mithras, whose cult might have been derived from earlier, Zoroastrian sources; and by devotees of the Greek Attis and the Akkadian and Sumerian Tammuz. The custom of marking the forehead with a cross of ashes may in fact date back to rituals associated with the death and resurrection of the seasonal god Tammuz and the tau cross may also be understood as taking the shape of the first letter of his name – at least in Hebrew (in Sumerian it is usually written as a D for Dumu-zid, Akkadian, Dumuzi, meaning true son). The sole mention of Tammuz in the Bible is in Ezekiel, where the prophet finds women weeping for the dead go
d outside the gates of the temple of Jerusalem – one of the abominations. McCahon in the 1940s painted the valley of dry bones that Ezekiel breathed into life.
The shape of the tau resembles that of the Egyptian ankh and this could be the source of one of its many alternative names, the Egyptian cross. The ankh can represent the sun rising over the horizon or the path of the sun from east to west; a stylised person; it may be understood as a combination of the male (the cross) and female (the oval) symbols; or seen as a union of heaven and earth, earth and sky. It has even been suggested that it is derived from a cross-section of the vertebrae of an ox. Its key-like shape has led to the suggestion that the ankh unlocks the gates of death; and Coptic Christians use it as a symbol of life after death. The tau may in itself represent a gate or an opening – a potent image in McCahon’s late 1950s and early 1960s painting. McCahon’s biographer, Gordon Brown, wrote that the tau cross was associated with Moses: first as a sign with which the Israelites marked the doorposts of their dwellings in Egypt on the night of the Passover and secondly as the shape of the staff, with the brazen serpent, lifted up by Moses while in the wilderness. McCahon once told his friend Chris Cathcart that he was Jewish on his father’s side: an ancestor, a grocer in nineteenth-century Dunedin, changed the family name from Kahn (= Cohen) to McCahon, the better to blend in with the prevailing Scots Protestant orthodoxy. Like Moses he saw, but did not enter, the Promised Land.
Of all of these many and not necessarily contradictory interpretations of the meaning of the tau, the one that seems most apt to McCahon’s lifelong use of the symbol is that it signifies the union of earth and sky. The vertical beam of the cross is a symbol of the relationship between Humanity and God, Baxter wrote, while the horizontal beam symbolized caritas, or communal love, between people. But there is no simple one-to-one correspondence between symbol and meaning in McCahon’s work; his tau crosses evoke many things: the trunk of a tree, for instance, and by analogy that dimension of Māori thought that sees Tāne, the forest god, as the source of creation. (McCahon also told Cathcart that there was Māori blood on his mother’s side of the family and that he had Māori cousins; he said he regretted not having further explored his Māori side.) The telegraph poles that march down most New Zealand roads and across many landscapes look very much like crosses. McCahon explicitly identified the shape as a T-bar or load-bearing structure in a series of works from 1978, Truth from the King Country, based around the Mangaweka Viaduct on the Main Trunk Line. These works recall his 1950s cubistic triptych On Building Bridges and also the profession of his uncle, Colin Ferrier, killed in the war. Both bridges and telegraph poles are structures that deal in communication. The tau cross appears as an altar or a table in some other work of the 1970s; elsewhere it is evoked as a window of sky between two dark bluffs.
Its most notable incarnation is probably the Urewera mural of 1975, a work commissioned for the Department of Conservation centre at Aniwaniwa in the Urewera country in the east of the North Island of New Zealand. In this work the tau cross at the centre of the composition is a massive tree-trunk with its crown spreading over a landscape of dark and light hills. The words TANE and ATUA stand either side of the base of the tau and elsewhere on the painting the prophetic and ancestral traditions of the Tūhoe people are explicitly evoked: Our landed inheritance / comes from / Toi or Potiki or Hape / our / prestige from Tuhoe. The tau stands as a gate and a barrier beyond which lies a land, and a dispensation, that must be approached with respect and honoured in its own terms.
That this statement should be made by an ostensible Pākehā is both contradictory and meaningful and these meaningful contradictions were activated in the most urgent and dramatic manner when the painting was taken by Tūhoe activists in 1997 and held incognito for fifteen months before being returned undamaged. Māori artist Shane Cotton wrote: Our perception of the work is changed forever. While McCahon will always be acknowledged as delivering a message that Tuhoe are the Tangata Whenua of the Urewera, Tame Iti and Te Kaha Karaitiana [the two men who removed the work] will always be acknowledged as Tuhoe artisans who literally took McCahon at his word, imbuing the work, through their infamous interaction with it, with the ihi (power), the wehi (awe) and the mana (prestige) that is Ngati Tuhoe.
McCahon’s lifelong use of a complex of visual motifs derived ultimately from Christian iconography is subsumed into an equally pervasive and persuasive concern with landscape in such a way as to make of New Zealand a kind of promised land that can, or will be, entered into by those who live there. He is never doctrinaire in a narrowly religious sense, nor is he ever free of the doubt that such an exalted ambition can in fact be achieved. We are always at some gate into what may be paradise but might also turn out to be a valley of dry bones or a place of empty denuded hills, a skyline beyond which there is nothing but a void. The ancient idea that in the south there was a land that could be an earthly – or heavenly – paradise is the essential engine of all McCahon’s painting and he is perhaps unique in the way that he made the idea at once literal and speculative, actual and ideal, a possibility that might not be achieved but must always be attempted. The paintings, mostly from the later part of his life, that incorporate aspects of the Māori prophetic tradition, itself heavily Christianised, are a synthesis of north and south, Christian and pagan, ideal and actual, that anticipate a new kind of society, one that has not been seen before on earth, or one that has yet to be seen here. The fourteen stations of the cross, in this synthesis, are re-imagined as the spirit path to the north taken by Māori souls on their way back to the ancestral land. And by McCahon himself, with his mixed identity: Pākehā, Māori, wandering Jew.
All painting is about death, he once said; but what is death about? The answer, if there is an answer, is that death is not about anything, it just is: like the enormous I AM emblazoned on the huge canvas Victory over death 2 of 1970. McCahon was the wordiest of painters and many of the later works are simply text on canvas with vestigial landscape forms which, towards the end, are reduced to a line of white at the back or base of the pictorial space – the horizon line. It is an obvious point, worth making anyway, that in order to write his texts in white he had first to paint the canvas black; in this sense the darkness does precede the light, a negation upon which he wrote his affirmations. He seldom wrote his own words but took his texts from many sources and was a lifelong collaborator with poets; increasingly his texts were biblical and from 1969 on he used the stripped-down, vernacular and plain-speaking New English Bible published over the decade of the 1960s (the New Testament appeared in 1961, the Old, along with the Apocrypha, in 1970). Notwithstanding T. S. Eliot’s sonorous complaint that it astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic, McCahon found its contemporary idiom direct and uncomplicated. He would excerpt those passages he liked, write them on paper and then paint them on to his prepared canvases.
McCAHON’S LAST PAINTINGS draw texts from two main sources: the New Testament Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Ecclesiastes from the Old. Among these is the 1980 work A painting for Uncle Frank in which the painter explicitly adopts the role of the preacher. It is a two-panel work, the left surmounted by the cone of the volcano Egmont (now more usually known as Taranaki), the right by a hill that is identified as part of an Ahipara landscape. Ahipara is where Ninety Mile Beach, the final stretch of the Māori spirit path to the north, begins. Here the souls of the dead gather before their final journey to Cape Rēinga. The text beneath these two images is apocalyptic: Those who refused to hear the oracle speaking on earth found no escape; still less shall we escape if we refuse to hear the ONE speaking from heaven. This voice shakes heaven and earth; and earth and heaven will both pass away: But thou art the same and thy years shall have no end. There is a personal note – Ahipara / here I come / back home where / I started / from. We are face to face with the last things, with death, and it is with the authority given by imminent death that the preacher, both Uncle Frank and McCahon
himself, excoriates the living.
The four last paintings all take their texts from Ecclesiastes, once thought to have been written by King Solomon. In the standard arrangement of the books of the Bible it is preceded by Proverbs and followed by the Song of Solomon, which itself introduces Isaiah, whose words McCahon had used twenty years earlier in his two Gate series. Solomon’s authorship is disputed these days, although there is general agreement that Ecclesiastes was most likely written in the third century BCE. But there are some anomalous facts about the book: nowhere in it is the Hebrew deity Jehovah (Yahweh) mentioned by name; instead the expression ha-Elohim, God, is used. The Jewish encyclopaedia suggests that hence there seems to be a possibility that the book is an adaptation of a work in some other language. It has already been mentioned that there are correspondences between verses in Ecclesiastes and those in the far more ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. These correspondences extend to Greek literature of the classic period: Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say / Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; / The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away. This is W. B. Yeats’ translation of a passage from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. The idea reoccurs in Ecclesiastes and McCahon quotes a version of it in the last painting of all: I Counted the dead happy / Because they were dead, happier / than the living who were / still in life. More fortunate / than either I reckoned / man yet unborn, who had not / witnessed the wicked deeds done / here under the SUN.
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