Inscription
McCahon 15. 11. 59 (brushpoint, b.c.)

Colin McCahon’s 1958 trip to the United States was formative. Travelling with his wife, Anne, the artist spent four months engaging with art, visiting museums and dealer galleries in numerous cities including San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, and Washington DC. The art and landscape that he encountered there had a profound impact, and it has been observed that his art changed significantly upon his return.

McCahon’s trip was jointly funded by the Carnegie Foundation, Auckland Art Gallery, and the Arts Council. Ostensibly, it served the purpose of professional development for his role as Keeper at Auckland Art Gallery. Seeing works by leading artists of the day was significant to his understanding modern painting, though his experience of museum environments in the United States was also highly influential. The phenomenological aspects of how people enter, move through, and interact with such public spaces was of great interest to him. Consequently, he developed an understanding of painting as environment – how the viewer’s spatial relationship to a work in a gallery environment effected their experience of it.

McCahon’s engagement with the work of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian has been widely acknowledged in published material. Perhaps less so is the influence of the Japanese scrolls of Tomioka Tessai, which McCahon saw at the M.H. Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Art historian Gordon H. Brown wrote, “If it can be said that an exhibition can overwhelm one by the sheer beauty of what the paintings convey, then this is what McCahon felt as he allowed his mind to absorb the splendour of Tessai’s paintings.” The influence of Tessai’s scrolls, with their wet-on-wet painting, along with the long strips of unstretched canvas in the studio of Alan Kaprow that McCahon saw during a studio visit, can be seen in his approach to painting on strips of unstretched canvas on his return to New Zealand.

Reflecting on the trip many years later, McCahon stated, “We saw a lot and learnt a lot and came back to a first-light sight of North Head, and the despoiled landscape of Auckland... We went home to the bush of Titirangi. It was cold and dripping and shut in - and I had seen deserts and tumbleweed in fences and the Salt Lake Flats, and the Faulkner country with magnolias in bloom, cities - taller by far than kauri trees.” Return to the isolation of New Zealand was challenging, and his response was to move in a fresh artistic direction.

This work, titled French Bay, was produced in 1959, shortly after this important journey. McCahon’s art practice was invigorated by the trip. According to writer Peter Simpson, the months after returning “[…] were among the most prolific and important of his whole career, opening up a host of new directions”. He produced French Bay during this prolific period. The title of the work references the West Auckland beach near to McCahon’s Titirangi home. Painted on unstretched canvas, the work features expressive brush marks along with dark ink lines that structure the composition.

Writing on series A and B of his famous Landscape theme and variation works, the artist states, “These two series were painted to fill the Ikon Gallery, Symonds Street, Auckland, to make a true New Zealand environment. They were painted to be hung about eight inches from floor level. I hoped to throw people into an involvement with the raw land, and also with raw painting. No mounts, no frames, a bit curly at the edges, but with, I hoped, more than the usual New Zealand landscape meaning.” This account from the artist of the role of ‘raw painting’ is a useful touchstone in understanding his intentions with this work.

French Bay can be contextualised within McCahon’s oeuvre by two paintings from a similar era. In 1957, he created [Northland diptych], another work of unstretched canvas. This work was made just prior to the USA trip, and it came to be held in the Rutherford Trust Collection. [Northland diptych] is similar in intent and style to French Bay, though it is less grid-like, with fewer structural ink lines. Rocks at French Bay, also from 1959, is more closely linked. Ink lines lay out a geometric structure that could, with a little input from the title, be read as a birds-eye-view of French Bay. Expressive paint marks feature in this work, though they are somewhat more constrained. This work is held in the Chartwell Collection as a key example of McCahon’s output from this period.

French Bay is a significant work from a distinctly important phase of McCahon’s artistic output. Held in a private collection for many decades, it is a market rarity.
______________________
1. McCahon explicitly acknowledged that he had been impressed with Mondrian’s works that he had seen in various museums in the USA (this is acknowledged in Volume 2 of Peter Simpson’s extensive text on the artist, on page 26). In 1961, he created a work titled Here I give thanks to Mondrian, which is held in the collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
2. Gordon Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist (Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1984). Page 88.
3. Peter Simpson, Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction Vol. 1 1919-1959 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2019). 276.
4. Ibid. 271.
5. Quoted from the catalogue to McCahon’s 1972 survey exhibition. Page 30.