Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists

Leonard Bell

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781776710645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photographie

For fifty years, Marti Friedlander (1928–2016) was one of New Zealand's most important photographers, her work singled out for praise and recognition here and around the world. Friedlander's powerful pictures chronicled the country's social and cultural life from the 1960s into the twenty-first century.From painters to potters, film makers to novelists, actors to musicians, Marti Friedlander was always deeply engaged with New Zealand's creative talent. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Wellington, brings together those extraordinary people and photographs: Rita Angus and Ralph Hotere, C. K. Stead and Maurice Gee, Neil Finn and Kapka Kassabova, Ans Westra and Kiri Te Kanawa, and many many more.Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists chronicles the changing face of the arts in New Zealand while also addressing a central theme in Marti Friedlander's photography. Featuring more than 250photographs, many never previously published, the book is an illuminating chronicle of the cultural life of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Rita Angus, Wellington, 1969.

PORTRAITS

The face continually invites questions even when they are unlikely to be answered.

—MAX KOZLOFF¹

Writing to historian Michael King in 1972, Marti Friedlander reflected: ‘For me it is people that matter, with all our fallibilities, and I have a sense of the absurd and the sadness attendant in all our endeavours and pretensions, and the alienation from each other, in spite of our need to belong.’²

And in a 1996 interview with Brian Edwards, she positioned herself: ‘I was always drawn to non-conformist people. I never wanted to belong to anything. I prefer to stand aside from the crowd.’³

The following texts establish the portrait’s subject, what they did and the nature of their relationship with the photographer. Most include the circumstances of production and use of the portrait. The subjects are people who were either prominent or ‘made marks’ in the arts and society at the time of their portrayal, whether or not they are still recognised today. These vignettes follow a roughly chronological sequence. View them overall as a kind of montage of observations and excerpts, by its very nature fragmentary. The portrayed subjects are diverse. They include the now well known, the little known and the unknown. Those forgotten or not included in the standard histories of the period are retrieved, even if only in part, from oblivion. These short texts, taken together, don’t reconstruct a past. Rather they offer insights into a broader field, and, hopefully, revealing images of that past, which might also illuminate aspects of our present.⁴

Maurice Gee (born 1931)

The photograph was taken at Tirimoana Street in Henderson, Auckland, at the home of Maurice Gee’s parents, Lyndahl and Len. Maurice, then called ‘Moss’, was in transit between Wellington and Melbourne, during a period of personal and professional instability. His first marriage appeared to be in trouble. It was not easy to establish himself as a professional writer.

Lyndahl Chapple Gee was a published short-story writer and poet, although she received little public recognition. Len Gee, a builder, played a major role in Henderson’s development in the 1940s and early to mid-1950s: ‘There were shops and houses to build, plenty of jobs,’ Gee remembered, ‘the Bank of New Zealand building, a butcher shop for George and Henry Holborow, a house for his friend Bob Norcross, and a large two-storied one for Dr Friedlander [Marti Friedlander’s father-in-law, a refugee from Nazism], a local dentist.’ ⁵

Friedlander recalled, ‘One day Moss … was there. I’d never met him before … he was gorgeous [and] I thought Lyndahl would love to have [a portrait of him]…. [the] photograph was taken in the kitchen by bay windows with good light … you get this strong effect of shadow … [Moss] really wasn’t that willing to be photographed…. He was a very shy man … he didn’t like to say too much about himself … I was just the next-door neighbour. You could call that photo a brief encounter. Because a portrait does not imply an intimate knowledge of the subject. A portrait is what you are interpreting … he was comfortable because he was in his parents’ house … I never came to know Maurice over the years because he moved … [It was] my first portrait of anybody [in New Zealand] I thought was going to be well known.’ ⁶

She was prescient. Gee went on to become one of New Zealand’s most celebrated and prolific writers, successful both popularly and critically, here and internationally. His many books include The Big Season (1962), A Glorious Morning, Comrade (1975), Plumb (1978), Meg (1981), Sole Survivor (1983), Live Bodies (1998), Blindsight (2005) and Memory Pieces (2018).⁷

A radically cropped version of a similar portrait (one of a photo portfolio of six New Zealand writers) was published in Landfall in March 1960, right at the beginning of Gee’s writing career.⁸ In the editor’s ‘Notes’, Charles Brasch wondered, ‘How do writers manage to keep writing … in this time and society in which writing is not highly regarded?’⁹

Maurice Gee, Auckland, 1959.

Keith (‘Spud’) Patterson (1925–1993)

One of the most vigorous talents of the group of artists that emerged just after World War II … an un-cohesive group of privately influential, though now sometimes neglected painters.

—KEVIN IRELAND ¹⁰

When I was young it was sissy to paint, to play music. You had to be a rugby player…. though there’s much greater appreciation of the arts in New Zealand now.

—KEITH PATTERSON ¹¹

Friedlander met Keith Patterson soon after her arrival in New Zealand. They kept in touch after he left New Zealand in the early 1960s for ‘richer pastures’ (for an artist) in Europe. He felt ‘[a]ttitudes were very parochial [here] then, and I was considered a rebel’.¹² Patterson had started painting in the late 1940s, and in 1950 co-founded the Contemporary Artists’ group, which aimed to bring innovating artists together, mitigating their isolation in a society generally suspicious of modern art. Patterson was also a member of the literary and artistic circle known as the North Shore Spaniards, bohemian, free-thinking, looking for the new and different.

From 1951 to 1957 Patterson travelled in Europe, while based in Spain. He was married to Christina Texidor, daughter of the writer Greville Texidor (1902–1964) and German émigré Werner Droescher (1911–1978), who had met in Spain during the Civil War and landed up in New Zealand as refugees in 1941.¹³ Back in Auckland from 1957, teaching at Mt Roskill Intermediate School, Patterson was one of New Zealand’s foremost artists at that time, his work exhibited at Auckland Art Gallery on several occasions and included in the New Zealand art show that travelled to the Soviet Union in 1958. His art, cosmopolitan rather than nationalist in orientation, was informed by Klee, Braque and cubism generally. Patterson returned to Spain in the early 1960s, disillusioned with what he still saw as a ‘rugby, racing and beer society’.¹⁴ He taught for twenty-five years at Barcelona’s American School, played his flamenco guitar and exhibited widely in Europe, culminating in a major retrospective there in 1991. From 1989 until his death he ‘commuted’ between Barcelona and Auckland (his studio was a former fruit-packing shed in Ōrātia, West Auckland) and exhibited at Warwick Henderson Gallery and the Bruce Mason Centre. Although primarily a painter, Patterson worked across media and experimented with unconventional materials – for instance, working sawdust (from olive and mānuka) and marble dust into his paintings, so enabling ‘a subtle playing of light and shade across surfaces’.¹⁵

Although Patterson is one of the country’s most eminent expatriate artists – perhaps why he barely rates a mention in the standard histories – due recognition of his work remains slow in coming here.

Keith Patterson, Auckland, early 1960s.

Phil Slight (born 1932)

The portrait on the facing page was taken in an urban street in England. We see a lightly built, wiry young man, lighting his pipe, through a window. Its dark surround internally frames and concentrates the focus on the man, who looks somewhat preoccupied. The mood is almost ‘kitchen sink’, the British critic David Sylvester’s term for art that was embedded in the (not so ordinary) ‘ordinary’.¹⁶ In pictorial iconography a window, especially from inside looking out as here, can signal a threshold between different social worlds or states of being. The man is Phil Slight: his portrait taken not so long after he made a shift from one hemisphere to another.

The Friedlanders and Slight were friends in Auckland in the late 1950s, when Slight, who studied at the Canterbury University College School of Art, was prominent in the nascent, modernist-informed art scene. Friedlander’s portraits of him were ‘personal’, not intended for reproduction or exhibition. This book and the accompanying exhibition may well be the first time that this portrait has been seen publicly. The Friedlanders and Slight kept up intermittent contact after the artist left New Zealand in the early 1960s, seeing one another in England, or when, as in early 2019, Slight and Gerrard met in Auckland.

Slight exhibited at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington and at the Auckland Society of Arts. His paintings were included in exhibitions at the Auckland Art Gallery – for example, in a three-person show (with Keith Patterson and Jim Allen) in 1958 and in Contemporary New Zealand Painting (1961). Art critic Imric Porsolt described the 1958 show as ‘fine’ and Slight as a ‘colour man’, using ‘warm, heartening kinds of colour’.¹⁷ One of Slight’s works, Long Landscape, is in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery. With it in off-site storage, so difficult for a member of the public to access, I’ve yet to see it. It hasn’t been exhibited for decades.

After departing New Zealand, Slight travelled to Spain along with artist friends Keith Patterson (another expatriate by then and a friend of the Friedlanders) and English-born Elam School of Fine Arts lecturer Bob Ellis (also photographed by Friedlander), driven by their intense enthusiasm for flamenco guitar music. While lecturing in art at Birmingham University, Slight developed expertise in contemporary Spanish ceramics. He has now lived in Spain (Salobreña, Granada) for many years. Known primarily there as a scholar of flamenco – a flamencologist – h...