Maho

In te reo Māori, maho means quiet, undisturbed. Although Gordon Walters seldom used Māori titles for their literal meaning — they were a way of acknowledging the Maori tradition that informed his work and of identifying individual paintings more elegantly than with the conventional modernist epithet, ‘Untitled’ — in this case it is remarkably apt. As Margaret Orbell, the artist’s wife and a leading scholar of Maori poetry and song, wrote, ‘It is a poetic word, which can be used in a mystical sense. Here it conveys something of the stillness and calm which this painting communicates.’1

Simple and austere, the composition of Maho had earlier found expression in a screenprint, one of the artist’s first forays into the medium. For the painting, Walters refined the motif, giving it a new sense of weight and stability that makes the vertical composition particularly successful. Walters exhibited Maho in Auckland in 1974, and featured it in an exhibition of his recent paintings at Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington, in 1976. Despite a number of potential buyers, Walters withdrew the painting from sale and gave it to his wife. While it is tempting to read the painting’s composition as a testament to Walters’ and Orbell’s marriage and their mutual support for each other’s careers, the motivation for the gift may well lie in the fact that Walters regarded Maho as one his finest works.

William McAloon

A version of this essay originally appeared in Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2009).

1. Margaret Orbell, to Sue Crockford, [October 2003], Gordon Walters object file, 2004-0015-1, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.