Transition No. 8 (Creation Cycle)

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

On 18 April 1960 a hundred thousand protesters swarmed Trafalgar Square to demonstrate against the atom bomb. Edward Bullmore — a young New Zealand artist who had only just arrived in London — was awestruck by the scale of the protest and the simmering social anxiety caused by the threat of nuclear war.

The demonstration inspired Bullmore’s ‘Transition’ series, an ambitious set of paintings which explore an aesthetic of nuclear paranoia. The nine paintings were the first he painted in a deliberately surrealist style, influenced by the eerie dreamscapes of Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Nash. Bullmore drew on the psychological uneasiness of surrealist painting, combining it with his sense of contemporary political upheaval.

Filled with imagery of decay and decline, Transition no. 8 (creation cycle) focuses on the cycle between creation and death. On the left, Eve emerges from Adam’s rib, faceless and innocent in a lush garden. An encroaching storm on the horizon, however, portends the fall of man. The choppy grey sea has washed boat wreckage and weird bone-like forms onto the shore — a surrealist metaphor for lost memories emerging from the unconscious. On the right, the face of an expressionless god, half-way between an Easter Island sculpture and Benito Mussolini, emerges from decaying rock formations. Though the specific meaning of the painting is enigmatic, Bullmore creates a sense of bleak poetry in a threatened landscape.

Bullmore was among several significant New Zealand artists who worked in London in the early 1960s, including Billy Apple, Bill Culbert, Ralph Hotere, John Drawbridge and Pat Hanly. Like many of these artists, Bullmore found success there, and in 1967 was included in the British surrealist exhibition The enchanted domain, alongside artists like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. One of his fans was the legendary dystopian film director Stanley Kubrick.

When Bullmore returned home in 1969, however, his work was not widely embraced — surrealism had never fitted comfortably in the New Zealand canon and his personal shyness didn’t help matters. Only in the past twenty years have art historians begun to reassess the significance of Bullmore’s work, acknowledging that paintings like Transition no. 8 fused elements of the New Zealand landscape with a significant international style.

Chelsea Nichols