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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Although Gordon Walters is best known for his koru paintings first developed in the 1950s, he made important works as early as the 1940s. Of these, The poet is arguably the best known. Reproduced in the Yearbook of the arts in New Zealand in 1947, the year it was painted, it was a radical work for its time. Rather than depicting an observed subject, like a scenic landscape or a bowl of flowers — still the mainstay of art society exhibitions — it is instead an invention of the artist. It is a skilful design of curving parallel lines drawn in pencil on a painted off-white ground colour. The title and two circles or ‘eyes’ alone make a direct reference to a figurative subject. The artist’s technique, too, is unconventional, and lies somewhere between drawing and painting.
In fact Walters created The poet in response to prehistoric rock drawings to which he had been introduced by his friend and mentor, the Dutch émigré artist Theo Schoon. Schoon was making painted copies of the rock drawings in South Canterbury and North Otago for the Department of Internal Affairs in 1946 and 1947, and invited Walters and other friends to visit him on location. The drawings were a revelation to Walters, and he was impressed by their economy of means, usually one tone of black or red on the pale surface of the limestone. There was no illusionism, no perspective, no painterly handling, just a subtle design dependent on shape, line and pattern. Both Schoon and Walters admired the visual counterpoint of the rock drawings that linked the simplified figures to the ground in a subtle way so that positive and negative shapes each had a role to play.
Many of the rock art drawings were of single figures viewed in characteristic profile or frontal dispositions. Back in his Wellington studio, Walters had Schoon’s photographs to help him rethink his own work and make a radical change of style. His use of a wiggly line above the head of the figure in The poet evokes thought and inspiration in a witty, whimsical way, reminiscent of Paul Klee, the Swiss artist and Bauhaus teacher, whose drawings also influenced Walters’ choice of a primitivist style.
Michael Dunn
Gordon Walters made The poet after visiting Theo Schoon, his friend and fellow artist, in South Canterbury in 1946. There, he saw the Māori rock art that Schoon was recording. Walters was impressed by its ‘economy of means’, which he linked with the ‘abbreviated language of line and form’ of European artist Paul Klee.
The poet is one of Walters’ first works to incorporate Māori art ideas and forms. Its repeated lines echo those in many rock drawings of people and animals – as you can see in Schoon’s photographs of rock art in this exhibition.