Town and country landscape

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

Welcome to mid-twentieth-century New Zealand, land of milk and honey, the third richest nation in the world! Marcus King’s super-sized painting is a symphony of searing colour, light and abundant objects, conveying an infectious belief in the nation’s beauty, prosperity and progress. As senior artist at the government’s Tourist and Publicity Department, King had a vested interest in accentuating the positive about his country. Through his many posters — now highly collectible — and large canvases and murals shown at international exhibitions, he was a key figure in ‘painting New Zealand for the world’.1

Yet King remains relatively unknown. Although he had trained under Edward Friström at art school, he was no bohemian rebel but rather a respectable middle-class commercial artist whose aesthetic fell emphatically on the ‘traditionalist’ side of the divide with modern art. However, as Dick Frizzell suggests, ‘There was a great deal of good on both sides … and Marcus was clearly one of the good guys.’2

Town and country landscape was never intended as a poster; but rather as a large, prestigious painting. It represented the culmination of King’s imaginative and patriotic aspirations. New Zealand’s prosperity famously came off a sheep’s back — and through a cow’s udders. Both animals loom in the foreground. Beyond, fertile countryside with manicured hedgerows rolls agreeably before us. Cars with art deco lines and suicide doors careen through it. A state-of-the-art diesel train thunders across a viaduct, but where does it go, especially as the gentle land makes a tunnel unnecessary?

Really we should regard it as part of a glorious collage of motifs, cumulatively testifying to post-war progress. Milking and shearing sheds lead on to a futuristic inland city, its prosperity fed by the fat of the land. Finally, the eye settles on a sublime snow-capped alpine range. King liberally borrows motifs from the upper North Island in the bangalow palms on the left, from Manawatū in the foreground and from the Southern Alps in the distant peaks. Yes, it is a fantasy, positively naïve when viewed through today’s environmentally responsible lens, but it is also a poignant time capsule, a vision of a perfect land that never really was.

Mark Stocker

1 Peter Alsop and Warren Feeney, Marcus King: Painting New Zealand for the world, Potton & Burton, Nelson, 2015.

2 Ibid., p. 11.