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Lot Essay
French Bay is a small cove on the Manukau Harbour, one of two harbours (the other being the Waitemata) between which lies the isthmus which forms much of the city of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. One harbour (the Waitemata) opens east onto the Pacific Ocean, the other (the Manukau) opens west onto the Tasman Sea. From 1953-59, Colin McCahon, New Zealand’s leading twentieth-century painter, lived with his family at French Bay in a small cottage surrounded by regenerating rain-forest, especially kauri, the tall native conifers which he made the subject of many of his paintings in that period. His other favourite subject of the time was the nearby coastal environment of bush, beach and sea. More than forty paintings and drawings in the period 1953-59 had either ‘French Bay’ or ‘Manukau’ in their titles and more than twenty are called baldly ‘French Bay’.
But McCahon was not interested in conventional or old-fashioned marine pictures. A devout follower of Parisian cubism, which he had studied in Melbourne shortly before moving to Auckland from the South Island, with an elderly Australian painter Mary Cockburn Mercer who had herself been a student in Paris before World War One, he was determined to avoid an overly ‘descriptive’ approach. His 'French Bay' paintings are no mere mimetic windows on to bush-fringed beaches and harbour waters but are rather assemblages of shapes and colours derived from the marine environment into pleasing two-dimensional pictures according to his understanding of Cubist principles of faceted surfaces and multiple perspectives.
This was for McCahon a period of continuous experiment. It is possible to discern five distinctly different ‘French Bay’ series each year from 1955 through to 1959. The 1957 group, of which there were only five, are distinct from those painted earlier or later. They are all oil paintings on hardboard, painted in the spring through early summer of that year, and are characterised by brightly coloured minutely fractionated surfaces made up of a myriad lozenges of pure colour, not unrelated to Seurat’s pointillism. In this particular painting the palette is brightest of all largely due to the presence of pale orange among the whites, blues, greens and browns of lighter or darker hue.
Although ‘description’ is avoided, a clear distinction between land and sea (and to a lesser extent sea and sky) is discernible as if the scene were viewed from the elevated perspective of a passing sea-bird. There is an infectious gaiety and vibrancy in the painting, a scintillating quality, a delight in pure perceptual sensation, quite rare in a painter better known for weighty metaphysical themes expressed in a palette often restricted to black and white.
We are grateful to Dr Peter Simpson for this catalogue entry.
But McCahon was not interested in conventional or old-fashioned marine pictures. A devout follower of Parisian cubism, which he had studied in Melbourne shortly before moving to Auckland from the South Island, with an elderly Australian painter Mary Cockburn Mercer who had herself been a student in Paris before World War One, he was determined to avoid an overly ‘descriptive’ approach. His 'French Bay' paintings are no mere mimetic windows on to bush-fringed beaches and harbour waters but are rather assemblages of shapes and colours derived from the marine environment into pleasing two-dimensional pictures according to his understanding of Cubist principles of faceted surfaces and multiple perspectives.
This was for McCahon a period of continuous experiment. It is possible to discern five distinctly different ‘French Bay’ series each year from 1955 through to 1959. The 1957 group, of which there were only five, are distinct from those painted earlier or later. They are all oil paintings on hardboard, painted in the spring through early summer of that year, and are characterised by brightly coloured minutely fractionated surfaces made up of a myriad lozenges of pure colour, not unrelated to Seurat’s pointillism. In this particular painting the palette is brightest of all largely due to the presence of pale orange among the whites, blues, greens and browns of lighter or darker hue.
Although ‘description’ is avoided, a clear distinction between land and sea (and to a lesser extent sea and sky) is discernible as if the scene were viewed from the elevated perspective of a passing sea-bird. There is an infectious gaiety and vibrancy in the painting, a scintillating quality, a delight in pure perceptual sensation, quite rare in a painter better known for weighty metaphysical themes expressed in a palette often restricted to black and white.
We are grateful to Dr Peter Simpson for this catalogue entry.