Buildings

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

Born in Dargaville of Dalmatian parents, Milan Mrkusich trained as a commercial artist before taking up painting. In 1949 he helped form the design firm Brenner Associates and became interested in linking modern art to life through the integration of architecture, design and painting. A pioneer of New Zealand abstract painting, he looked to the international context of modernist art in Europe and the United States at a time when regionalism and landscape were still dominant in local art practice.

Buildings is one of a number of attractive and accessible paintings Mrkusich made in 1955. Like its well-known companion, City lights, 1955 (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), it does not depict an actual urban landscape. Instead it takes as its starting point Mrkusich’s experience of looking at the lights of Auckland in the evening. He later recalled that in Buildings he used patches of colour to give the effect of moonlight on houses.

The idea of using rectangular patches of different sizes, tones and colours to make a composition can be traced back to Bauhaus exercises in the handling of form and colour. Mrkusich arrived at the actual placement of each rectangle, its colour, its size and tone intuitively within the grid-like structure. He juxtaposed warm and cool colours, such as red and green, yellow and blue, to give a pulsating effect — cool colours appear to recede and warm ones to advance. He handpainted each rectangular patch of colour, creating irregularities of shape and departing from a strict geometric alignment. By doing this, and by allowing brushmarks to show, he gave a softness and atmospheric quality to his work, suggestive of a landscape space.

In the late 1950s Mrkusich’s attention to the application of paint and to surface texture grew in sophistication and richness. In the process his paintings became larger and more abstract. Buildings belongs to a period of experimentation that laid the foundations for his long and influential career as an abstract painter. It is noteworthy that Colin McCahon drew on the example of this and related works for paintings such as Te Papa’s French Bay, 1956.

Michael Dunn

 

 

This abstract oil painting by Milan Mrkusich was painted in 1955. It is one of a series of his paintings from that period that are studies of the advancing and receding qualities of certain colours. Buildings is grid of larger squares and rectangles that has been overlaid with smaller areas of bright colour. In this way Mrkusich has achieved a contrast between the order of the grid and the optical shimmer of the colour areas.

International examples
Mrkusich's painting recalls Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie paintings of the 1940s. Mrkusich, who didn't travel overseas until 1982, knew of international modern art through books and magazines. Along with the geometric abstraction of Mondrian, Mrkusich was interested in the gestural and spontaneous modernism of painters like Kandinsky. Buildings' combination of broad gestural brushwork and geometric structure shows aspects of both these traditions.

A commitment to abstraction
According to Michael Dunn and Petar Vuletic, who curated the first retrospective of Mrkusich's work in 1972, Buildings suggests 'an effect of moonlight on a group of houses'. They go on to note that 'In terms of abstraction, these paintings, which have subject references, appear retrogressive; however, in their handling of colour they reveal a new degree of sophistication.'

While the atmospheric effects of Buildings do evoke a landscape at night, Mrkusich is more correctly understood as an abstract painter. The painting's formal relationships are internal, rather than toward external subjects like the twinkling lights of buildings. Mrkusich is notable for his commitment to abstract art at a time when New Zealand painting was dominated by landscape and figurative painting.

Te Papa's collection
There are thirteen paintings by Mrkusich in the Te Papa collection. He also created a mural of glass spandrels on the south facade of Te Papa's Cable Street building.