NORTH OTAGO LANDSCAPE, 1951
COLIN McCAHON
oil on canvas on board
51.5 x 66.0 cm
signed and dated lower left: McCahon / May '51
signed, dated, titled and inscribed verso: Colin McCahon / Art Gallery Auckland / North Otago Landscape / 1951 ...
Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney
Private collection, New South Wales
Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 30 August – 10 November 2002
Bloem, M. and Browne, M., Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2002, p. 76 (illus.)
McCahon's landscape abstraction of the early 1950s is inspired by the southern region and the artist's childhood days in Oamaru, North Otago. A related work from this group of hill landscapes, North Canterbury Landscape, 1951 in the collection of the Auckland City Art Gallery 'shows one of several attempts to work out a way of integrating horizontal plains with the vertical picture plain. The zig-zag grid is common to a group of paintings and drawings of this time. Aerial photographs of Canterbury plains and the hills beyond were an important source for these paintings.'1
'Characteristic [of these works] are the hill profiles parallel to the vertical of the picture-plane. McCahon treats them as simple geometric outline, divided internally into angular slabs. He arrives at this in the later 1940s. In the 1950s it becomes the basis for cubist influenced landscapes... These are finally tilted up into the vertical plane and structured like the vertical hills from On Building Bridges [1952, collection Auckland City Art Gallery] onwards. The grid-like geometry is nowhere purist. McCahon's sensitivity to colour and the material of paints is clearly visible in all these paintings.'2
1. Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys, Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, 1988, p. 84
2. Ibid., p. 83