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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Rudolf (Rudi) Gopas was born Rudolf Hopp near the Baltic coast of what was then East Prussia, where members of the first wave of German expressionism had painted. He studied art in Kaunas, the provisional capital of Lithuania, and served in the German army during the Second World War. When he was resettled in New Zealand in 1949, he had changed his surname to the Lithuanian Gopas.
After moving from Dunedin to Christchurch in 1953, Gopas embarked on a rapid artistic transformation, engaging with the modern art styles that had been proscribed by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’. He reacquainted himself with the styles of van Gogh, Cézanne, the fauves and the cubists, and studied closely the German expressionists whose work was becoming known at this time through English-language publications.
Making frequent trips to the port town of Lyttelton and the coastal town of Kaikōura, he gathered visual material for harbour, coastal and wharf subject paintings, which convey nostalgia for his Baltic homeland and engage with different expressionist modes. Lyttelton landscape is clearly a product of these visits. Worked up from a sketch completed at Port Levy on Banks Peninsula, it demonstrates how Gopas attempted to synthesise the geometry and structure of cubism with the exaggerated rhythms of expressionism. He had just taken on a temporary assistant lectureship at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts when he painted the work. Very little was known about him, and he had been appointed on the strength of portraits, landscapes, and coastal and wharf scenes he had exhibited with the Independent Group in Dunedin and The Group in Christchurch: paintings such as Lyttelton landscape were important in establishing his credentials.
In 1960 Gopas’s appointment to the permanent teaching staff at Canterbury was confirmed, and he continued in this position until 1977. A challenging and forceful teacher, he established an expressionist lineage in New Zealand that continued through the art of his students, including Philip Trusttum, Philip Clairmont, Philippa Blair and Kura Te Waru Rewiri.
Jonathan Mane-Wheoki