The Angel of the Annunciation

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

Commenting on The Group’s 1947 exhibition, in which these paintings were shown, critic and poet ARD Fairburn suggested that ‘they might pass as graffiti on the walls of some celestial lavatory’.1 Fairburn’s assessment was far from typical of the reception of Colin McCahon’s work at this time. Poet James K Baxter wrote about it enthusiastically, as did the historian JC Beaglehole. Even reviewers who found McCahon’s paintings challenging were prepared to recognise the sincerity that underpinned them.

One of the challenges these paintings offered was their representation of biblical stories within a recognisably New Zealand context. The Angel of the Annunciation shows Mary receiving the news of her miraculous pregnancy. Nelson’s ochre hills rise up in the background, while a building McCahon later identified as the Tāhunanui golfcourse clubhouse is shown in the middle distance. By giving local, vernacular expression to the mysteries of the Bible, McCahon was consciously taking his cues from the art of the early Renaissance; if such events could be depicted as reality in Florence or Siena, so too could they belong to contemporary New Zealand.

McCahon’s use of words had similar origins, in the painted scrolls and illuminated script of earlier religious art. The text in King of the Jews also had a contemporary source, as McCahon revealed to a friend: ‘The inspiration — the legend from a Rinso packet & the yellow I suppose from Byzantium’,2 while the figures of Christ and the Virgin were modelled on the work of Luca Signorelli, recently encountered as tiny black and white illustrations in Thomas Bodkin’s 1945 book Dismembered masterpieces, and pronounced to be ‘magnificent, magnificent, magnificent, magnificent’.3 This blend of disparate sources, an admixture of high art and popular culture, modernity and tradition, the local and the universal, signals the formation of the extraordinary vision that would propel McCahon’s work throughout his career.

William McAloon

1 ARD Fairburn, ‘Art in Canterbury: Some notes on the Group Show’, Landfall 5, vol. 2, no. 1, March 1948, p. 50.

2 Colin McCahon, letter to Rodney Kennedy, 26 January 1947, transcribed by Hamish Keith, Hamish Keith papers, CA125/3/9, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa archives.

3 Ibid.

In 1966 Colin McCahon, New Zealand’s most critically acclaimed artist, wrote ‘Angels can herald beginnings’. Here, against a background of Nelson hills, an angel tells Mary, the future mother of Jesus, that she will conceive a child.

This painting belongs to a series of religious paintings that Colin McCahon produced during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In these works, the artist took on a formidable challenge: creating art with a strong social message through a style of painting that was bracingly modern by contemporary New Zealand standards.

Nativity in the Nelson hills
Although not directly involved in World War II, the conflict left McCahon with a keen social conscience and a sense of personal mission. He had a long-standing interest in religious art, and looked to painters of the past, especially to the Italian primitives, in an effort to bring biblical stories to life for New Zealanders. In this work and others of the period, McCahon boldly locates biblical events in the New Zealand landscape. Here, the annunciation takes place in Nelson, with the local golf club in the background and the monumental golden hills beyond.

A shocking message
The Angel of the Annunciation recalls the work of modern European artists such as Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, and Georges Rouault. But in New Zealand there had been no precedent for art like this, with its deliberately thick black outlines, crude forms, ungainly figures, and expressive colour. Audiences were shocked, even outraged, and McCahon was accused of vulgarity and incompetence.

Text and image
In The Angel of the Annunciation, the title becomes an integral part of the composition, anticipating other works in which McCahon would use the comic-book device of speech balloons to give voice to his characters.

Te Papa's substantial collection of works by McCahon includes five of his early religious paintings.