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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen-Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Important Paintings & Contemporary Art
• Sale Date:
  29 Nov 2016 ~ 6.30pm (NZ time)
• Lot #:
  18
• Lot Description:
  Colin McCahon
  Landscape Titirangi
  oil on hardboard
  462 x 557mm
  signed McCahon, dated 56 in brushpoint lower right
• Provenance:
  Janet Paul Collection, Christchurch, early 1970s; Passed by descent; Sold at Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, June 2003.
• References:
  Colin McCahon database cm001209. www.colinmccahon.co.nz.
• Notes:
  Living in the bush at Titirangi, from 1953 to early 1960, changed both life and art for Colin McCahon. Until then he had lived in the South Island, especially Otago, North Otago, Canterbury and various parts of Nelson. In his paintings of these regions he mostly stripped the land bare of trees, houses, roads etcetera in order to reveal the underlying structure of the land, a geomorphological approach, much influenced, indeed, by Charles Cotton's classic book, Geomorphology , which he and Anne Hamblett were given as a wedding present in 1942. After the wide open spaces of the South, the Auckland landscape was a revelation to McCahon - warmer, wetter, more populous, clad in regenerating rain-forest, especially out west in the Waitakere Hills where the McCahons soon chose to live - inside the kauri forest, close to the shores of the Manukau Harbour at French Bay. For most of his seven years at Titirangi this land-and-seascape was his primary subject matter, as the titles of his major series suggest: Towards Auckland, Manukau, Kauri, French Bay, Titirangi . Some of these series were numerous and open-ended. For instance, the McCahon Data Base lists more than 30 works with 'Titirangi' in their title. Since visiting Australia in 1951 McCahon had a long lasting love-affair with Cubism, in the principles of which he was briefly instructed in Melbourne by an elderly painter who had studied in Paris before 1914 - Mary Cockburn Mercer. McCahon claimed to have learned more from her in three days than ever before, and immediately put his discoveries to work in the major triptych, On building bridges (1952, Auckland Art Gallery). He was still experimenting with Cubist ideas and techniques as he worked to come to terms with the radically new and different environment of the North. Some purists argue that McCahon had only a shaky understanding of Cubism; this may or may not be true but is largely beside the point; it worked for him. If he was in error it was a highly creative and productive error. And he did fully grasp the primary cubist perception that a painting should not be a description of reality - like the depiction of a view through a rectangular window - but a two dimensional arrangement of shapes, lines and colours which might (or might not) include elements taken from reality - clouds, sky, trees, for example - but organised and transformed by the artist so as to make a coherent and convincing picture. Landscape, Titirangi was one of many in which the primary subject matter is the bush in the neighbourhood of the McCahons' Titirangi house - what he called the 'domestic environment'. A vestigial criss-crossing diagonal grid holds the work together, creating small irregular patches of colour - white, grey, green, ochre, blue - while the ragged saw-toothed bushline marks the porous and misty boundary between sky and earth. Not the kind of painting for which McCahon is best known, such Titirangi paintings as this are among his most enduringly popular and well-liked works, the products of a painter for whom for once in his life the secular and visible world of nature was intriguing and sufficient. Peter Simpson
• Estimate:
  NZ$120,000 - 140,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.