Composition of tools

In 1939 cubist artist André Lhote lamented artists’ obsession with the natural world: ‘Why always the corner of the river and the reflection in the water? There are veritable metallic landscapes, man-created. Pylons, gasometers and reservoirs offer as much variety in their combinations as natural elements do.’1

In Composition of tools John Weeks has taken his teacher Lhote’s comment to heart, drawing upon industrial materials for artistic inspiration. Weeks created bold shapes from tools like a handsaw, grinding wheel, scythes and gardening shears, arranging them in a complex, puzzle-like composition. Across the surface, he applied a rhythmic stippling of complementary colours, creating a vibrant play of light and shadow across the tools.

Although Weeks started incorporating industrial subjects into his work from the mid-1930s, he usually took inspiration from still lifes and figurative studies. Composition of tools, however, owes something to the Italian futurists, whose interest in machinery and technology represented a future-focused vision of art in the early twentieth century. However, where futurist painting is concerned with movement and motion, Weeks’ composition is still and considered. Like his more organic paintings, Weeks’ abiding concern is with the formal properties of colour, space and line.

Weeks’ concern with formal properties also reflects the influence of Lhote, with whom he had studied in Paris in 1926 and 1928. Lhote was an academic practitioner of cubism working on the fringes of the movement, who taught a mild faceting or geometricising of forms, informed by the compositions of Paul Cézanne. Through Lhote’s teachings, Weeks discovered a new path of pictorial arrangement — only somewhat inspired by cubism — which rejected traditional perspective and introduced a fractured sense of space.

Weeks, in turn, became an influential figure in New Zealand art of the 1940s and 1950s, introducing modernist pictorial strategies to the local art scene. Composition of tools in particular demonstrates the strength of Weeks’ compositions, with its complex arrangement of graphic objects and unconventional sense of space.

Chelsea Nichols

1 André Lhote, Treatise on landscape paintings, trans. WJ Strachan, A Zwemmer, London, 1950. First published by Floury, Paris, 1939.