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The art world |
There was a sense of political stability under the rule of Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon) and France continued their progress with modernisation inspired by the Industrial Revolution. The middle class continued to prosper economically within this context, while the working class largely remained in roles that served them.
The increased wealth brought more social power to the middle class, which they began to demonstrate in various aspects of the French society and culture. |
The middle class started to enjoy life of travel, leisure and pleasure, as now they were living in a modern society – thanks to the Industrial Revolution. They thrived in the refreshed city of Paris which now had new buildings, parks, electricity, nightlife, cafes and theatre entertainment under the Haussmann project. They also often enjoyed trips to the countryside and showed off their elevated status with elegant fashion.
The French Salon still imposed unbending rules on the young artists who started to look away from the tradition with their new interest in Japonism and photography. Manet's submission caused a social scandal at 'Salon des Refuses 1863' and became a catalyst for the development of Impressionism, a break from the Salon academicism pioneered by Courbet. |
Getting to a "pure" state of abstraction |
Why should we try to understand abstract art? |
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NEW ZEALAND'S ULTIMATE FORMALIST PAINTERGordon Walters (1919-1995)In the mid-1960s, Gordon Walters emerged as a unique presence in the modern movement in New Zealand. His works engaging with international modernism in a series of geometric, abstract paintings that positioned the traditional, organic koru form of Māori art within the aesthetics of European and American abstraction.
Walters had attended the Wellington Technical School of Art, New Zealand (1935-1944), becoming interested in European modernism through reproductions of works by Yves Tanguy and his association with Dutch refugee, Theo Schoon, who introduced Walters to Māori rock art. Travelling to Europe in 1950, he was exposed to works by Mondrian, as well as the pure abstraction paintings. In the mid fifties he had researched Māori rafter painting and decorative design by visiting museums with fellow artist Theo Schoon and analyzing the forms. Walters modified the fern motif found in Maori meeting houses and traditional Polynesian tattoos, by geometricizing it and alternating positive and negative versions with a horizontal axis. From the mid-1950s his painting utilized this koru form, responding to its potential for simultaneously defining positive and negative space on the surface of the picture plane. Using black and white (softened sometimes to grey and cream) Walters’ canvases created a pulsing musicality. When the korus were vertically stacked, an optical shimmer akin to that found in the works of Bridget Riley, occurred. Or when sparely organized, a subtle lyricism was created. Walters also often experimented with muted colour and dramatically enlarged korus, always settling on final composition and scale by adjusting preparatory collages. In the mid nineteen-eighties Walters abandoned korus and began using austere rectanglar planar compositions that investigated tensions and spatial suggestiveness resulting from transparency, colour, tone and proportion. These were a result of his long interest in the French abstract artist Herbin, the American abstract artist McLaughlin and forms found in Māori cave art. This much revered figure of New Zealand modernism is represented in all New Zealand’s major collections as well as public collections in Australia. In 1983 the Auckland Art Gallery presented a retrospective. ocula.com/artists/gordon-walters/ |
KORU WORKS
Black on white, 1965
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Gordon Walters is best-known for work that fused the influence of European modernist art and Māori and Pacific art forms, particularly the koru motif of painted kōwhaiwhai rafter designs. Walters’ influences from European modernism included the hard-edged geometric abstraction paintings seen while in Europe in 1950–51. Walters made his first optically charged ‘koru paintings’ in 1956, but didn’t show them until 1966 when he first exhibited this painting in Auckland.
Walters’ adaptation of the koru has been both admired and criticised by cultural commentators. Walters himself, when discussing the motif, increasingly focused on the fine mechanics of abstraction: 'What I’ve done to the form is push it more in the direction of geometry. So that I can have in my painting not only a positive/negative effect of black and white, but I can also have a working of vertical and horizontal, which is equally important.' (Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016) christchurchartgallery.org.nz/collection/2014-036/gordon-walters/black-on-white WHERE DOES THE 'KORU' MOTIF COME FROM?
Kōwhaiwhai are traditional Māori painted scroll patterns. Kōwhaiwhai are mainly used for decorative purposes, so you often see kōwhaiwhai designs adorning the ridgepole and rafters of wharenui – meeing houses. When used in this way kōwhaiwhai depict tribal lineage, capture memories, and tell stories.
Kōwhaiwhai designs involve a fair amount of mathematical precision, they use symmetry, rotation and reflection. The most basic design element in kōwhaiwhai is the koru or pītau, and the kape - crescent. The design process elaborates on these motifs to produce the scroll patterns. The spiral is a koru, which represents the fern frond as it opens bringing new life and purity to the world. It also represents peace, tranquility and spirituality along with a strong sense of re growth or new beginnings. my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/toi-maori-traditional-maori-art/ |
A post-colonial appropriation or a legitimate artistic decision?
What is post-colonialism?Broadly a study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies. It is concerned with both how European nations conquered and controlled "indigenous" cultures and how these groups have since responded to and resisted those encroachments. Post-colonialism, as both a body of theory and a study of political and cultural change, has gone and continues to go through three broad stages:
https://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/postcold.htm |
The artist has said...The design in Makaro is derived from the koru motif, best known from painted heke (rafters) in meeting houses.
Walters has straightened the stem and integrated the foreground and background in a way not seen in customary Māori contexts. Walters was criticised for appropriating Māori art without regard to its cultural meanings. He responded: ‘all I have done with the koru motif is make a reference to it and naturally, since I’m a contemporary Pakeha artist, the result is not Maori art. It’s not supposed to be.’ Walters was interested in the dynamic relationship between different forms. It is the repetitive and decorative qualities, and the figure/ground ambiguities which create spatial illusions (all characteristics of op art), that are the subject of this work. At this time, Walters was one of the most sophisticated modernist artists working in this kind of geometric abstraction in New Zealand. nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/makaro-gordon-walters |
Parekowhai appropriates Walters' appropriation
'Kiss The Baby Goodbye' by Michael Parekowhai (1994)
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'Kahukura' by Gordon Walters (1968)
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The smooth powder-coated surface of Michael Parekowhai’s Kiss the Baby Goodbye disguises its layers of densely packed meaning. With tongue in cheek, Parekowhai has appropriated Gordon Walters’s classic 1969 painting Kahukura. He transforms Walters’s coolly modernist painting into a sculpture resembling an oversized child’s toy – a plastic kitset model with snap out, glue together components.
Parekowhai’s barbed homage refers in part to the debate surrounding Walters’s appropriation of the koru, a traditional Māori art form. Walters, a New Zealander of European ancestry, made his signature works of the 1960s and 1970s with a stripped-back version of the traditional koru – a move that has been seen by some as divesting the koru of its cultural significance. Parekowhai is of European and Māori descent, but his work neither prosecutes or defends Walters’s use of the koru. Instead, he appropriates the appropriation. Kiss the Baby Goodbye’s industrial finish, with its connotations of assembly line production, further unsettles any distinction between what is authentic and what is borrowed.
Walters’s paintings create a play of positive and negative space, with light and dark graphic elements curving into and forming each other. Of course, in Parekowhai’s sculptural version these interlocking dark and light elements become actual solids and voids. While the ‘kitset’ format seems to invite us to snap the koru components out of their frame and build something new – do-it-yourself sculpture – this would cause the negative space to disappear and the tension and balance of the composition to be lost. Ambiguous, mischievious and subversive, Parekowhai’s work dismantles easy categories and simple oppositions, opening a field of play.
artsandculture.google.com/asset/kiss-the-baby-goodbye-michael-parekowhai/uwEhw2tbqCQOdQ?hl=en
Parekowhai’s barbed homage refers in part to the debate surrounding Walters’s appropriation of the koru, a traditional Māori art form. Walters, a New Zealander of European ancestry, made his signature works of the 1960s and 1970s with a stripped-back version of the traditional koru – a move that has been seen by some as divesting the koru of its cultural significance. Parekowhai is of European and Māori descent, but his work neither prosecutes or defends Walters’s use of the koru. Instead, he appropriates the appropriation. Kiss the Baby Goodbye’s industrial finish, with its connotations of assembly line production, further unsettles any distinction between what is authentic and what is borrowed.
Walters’s paintings create a play of positive and negative space, with light and dark graphic elements curving into and forming each other. Of course, in Parekowhai’s sculptural version these interlocking dark and light elements become actual solids and voids. While the ‘kitset’ format seems to invite us to snap the koru components out of their frame and build something new – do-it-yourself sculpture – this would cause the negative space to disappear and the tension and balance of the composition to be lost. Ambiguous, mischievious and subversive, Parekowhai’s work dismantles easy categories and simple oppositions, opening a field of play.
artsandculture.google.com/asset/kiss-the-baby-goodbye-michael-parekowhai/uwEhw2tbqCQOdQ?hl=en