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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
In the mid-1940s Dutch émigré Theo Schoon became fascinated by the Māori rock drawings that line the limestone caves of South Canterbury and North Otago. These drawings were the earliest known art form in New Zealand but had previously been of little interest to Pākehā — ethnologist Roger Duff, for instance, had dismissed them as mere ‘doodling’. Schoon, however, was astonished by their quality and originality, and took them seriously as artworks. He convinced the Department of Internal Affairs to employ him from 1945 to 1948 to document the rock drawings, which were located across rough and difficult-to-access terrain.
Schoon showed Pākehā artists like Gordon Walters and ARD Fairburn a new way of seeing these drawings — through the eyes of a modern artist. He painted Kaikoura, Monkey Face Reserve part 1 and Monkey Face Shelter No 1 part 6, Kaikoura in the style of rock art from the Kaikōura region, but Schoon’s forms are cleaner and more uniform than those in the caves, transforming them into carefully arranged linear designs. Using a simplified language of pattern and line, Schoon’s paintings attempt to tap into an ancient spiritual force that to him the rock drawings evoked: ‘Again and again I have found the most surprising and original creations — major artistic feats — which border on the uncanny: frozen music in which the very soul of the mythopoetic Polynesian has been crystallised.’1
This view reflects the ‘primitivist’ influences of modern artists like Paul Klee and Joan Miró, whose work Schoon encountered while studying at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Technical Sciences in the 1930s. As a Dutch national born in the East Indies, Schoon had also immersed himself in traditional Javanese culture, which further contributed to his belief that indigenous art offered a purer expression of the mystical truths of the universe. This romanticism of non-Western art forms is, however, made troubling by the fact he used grease crayons to retouch many of the original rock drawings, demonstrating an inappropriate sense of ownership over them. Nonetheless, Schoon’s paintings reflect his forward-thinking philosophy that fusing Māori art and European modernism would open up fruitful new paths for modern art in New Zealand.
Chelsea Nichols
1 Theo Schoon, ‘New Zealand’s oldest art galleries’,
New Zealand Listener, 12 September 1947, p. 7.In their deceptive simplicity, rock drawings are powerful taoka [cultural treasures], which represent one of the long-range continuities of Maori art.
Archaeologist Atholl Anderson, 1988
In the mid 1940s, the artist Theo Schoon became deeply interested in the South Island Maori drawings in the limestone caves of Canterbury and North Otago.
Ethnologist Roger Duff had dismissed the drawings as ‘the scribbling of storm-bound Maori travellers’. Schoon was the first non-Māori artist to see their value as art. In 1946, he managed to secure funding to record them.
These four paintings all depict drawings from the Kaikōura region. They are just a fraction of Schoon’s survey. Although they document rock art, they are also modernist paintings in their own right.