French Bay, Titirangi

"Some time, I don’t quite know when, out for a Sunday visit with the family, I discovered Cubism." - Colin McCahon.

Colin McCahon, widely regarded as New Zealand’s greatest painter, wrote this in 1966. He was describing a childhood encounter with modern art through the pages of the Illustrated London News. Such magazines and books made important connections for those living so far away from the centres of modern art.

Cubism was jointly developed in the early twentieth century by French artist Georges Braque and the Spaniard Pablo Picasso. Rather than using conventional perspective and a single viewpoint, cubist artworks show scenes or objects from multiple angles. Images are broken down and reassembled into abstract forms. For McCahon, cubism represented ‘a bright new vision of reality'. The style came to the fore in McCahon’s work in the 1950s, after he moved from Christchurch to Auckland. The light and landscape of Titirangi on Auckland’s Manukau Harbour were quite different from what McCahon had known in the South Island. So was the art scene.

Here, McCahon presents the headlands and mudflats, clouds and tides as a series of geometric forms. These fragments seem to dissolve and reassemble as the work is viewed.