Dear Colin, Dear Ron selects from the correspondence between Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly over a period of nearly forty years (1944-1981). The stats are impressive: 165,000 words over 500 plus pages; 380 letters, split more or less equally between the two; 1500 footnotes; sixty colour illustrations, ordered sequentially and keyed to relevant passages in the text; one colour and three black and white photographs. The correspondence is however incomplete because not all of the letters survived; and some of those which did are missing pages. Those printed here have been lightly edited, to omit unnecessary information or repetitive details. The book, put together by Peter Simpson over a period of ten years, with a preface and informative introductions to each of the three sections, is a magnificent achievement in scholarship. It is also a typically handsome and accessible production by Te Papa Press.
Inadvertently, though appropriately, the sections form a triptych, with three panels of unequal size. O’Reilly and McCahon met in Dunedin in the late 1930s, in the theatre, when Ron was acting and Colin designing sets. From 1944 to 1951 they lived in different parts of the country and wrote to each other regularly. There was a break when both were in Christchurch in the early 1950s. Their letter writing resumed after McCahon went to Auckland in 1953. Another break occurred between 1964 and 1966, years O’Reilly spent in Nigeria. Thereafter the correspondence continued until the early 1980s. The last panel is the largest of the three but also the most uneven, as McCahon’s production accelerated towards its end and changes in the lives of both men affected their relationship.
It is also no doubt inadvertent that the selection begins and ends with letters from O’Reilly. He is, throughout, more prolix than McCahon, and more inclined towards philosophic speculation, some of which is too abstruse for my taste or perhaps my understanding; whereas his interlocutor is briefer, pithier and favours the metaphoric and the poetic over the analytic or the expository. Both men’s writing, in their different ways, is inclined to disappear into obscurity, McCahon’s becoming gnomic and O’Reilly’s abstracted; nevertheless an outsider’s view can’t say if this is how they read each other. McCahon did remark once that O’Reilly’s letters might go on to fill ten volumes.
The main subject of conversation is the art work McCahon was making; but that work is seen in a wider context: artistic, cultural, social and existential. Politics rarely, if ever, get a look in, apart of course from the politics of the art world, which are of constant concern. The two are consciously opening up a space in which the kind of art they both prefer — and which Colin makes — may prosper. This means, first of all, painting, but it encompasses other mediums in the fine arts and also literature, especially poetry, as well as architecture, music, town planning and a general commitment to harmony and excellence in the life of the people.
The high-mindedness implied in that last sentence is entirely and unapologetically characteristic of the correspondence; but any suggestion of the musings of two members of a coterie or an elite is not. The intent was to expand the practice and the appreciation of the arts beyond the narrow confines in which it endured, precariously, in the mid-century years, into other areas — including schools and prisons, as well as marae and even beyond the national borders into the Pacific. McCahon in the 1960s taught for a period in Suva in Fiji and there are works made in Lautoka.
These generalities are familiar from the histories of cultural nationalism in New Zealand in the twentieth century. What is perhaps unfamiliar, and an engrossing theme of the correspondence, is the artisanal nature of painting as an occupation — especially the way McCahon, who described his works as ‘jobs’, practiced it — and the consequent detail about the materials of art and their handling. And then the dissemination of the works so made. Throughout the book, art works are being packaged up and sent all over the place, including overseas (Britain; Australia), and, often enough, sent back again. They are frequently damaged in transit and sometimes lost altogether — usually the result of carelessness but sometimes because they’ve been stolen.
In one of the afterwords Ron’s son Matt, himself a framer, summarises his father’s activities: “encouragement, cajoling and exhortation; exhibition management, promotion, advertising, hanging, wrapping, framing, despatching, storing, curation and interpretation; lending.” Sometimes Ron encloses cash in his letters to Colin; after receiving one such gift he responds: “workers love banknotes”. O’Reilly also, on occasion, and only at McCahon’s request, alters or conserves paintings in his care. Less successfully, the archivist tries, using detailed feedback, to get the artist to amend compositions; although this aspect of the relationship only pertains to the early stages of their association. Later O’Reilly contributes, inexhaustibly, landscape photographs; though it isn’t clear, apart from one or two examples, how or even if McCahon used these.
One of McCahon’s peculiarities is that he didn’t keep accurate records of his work; or only within the fallibilities of memory. In effect, he entrusted the record-keeping to others, including his galleries and his dealers, and to individuals like Gordon Brown, Ron O’Reilly and others. The McCahon-O’Reilly correspondence is thus an invaluable resource for those who, like Peter Simpson, wish to restore the oeuvre to its full glory. Because it is more informal, it is perhaps of less value than the records of, say, the Peter McLeavey gallery, McCahon’s long time Wellington dealer; by the same token, casual letters preserve material that might not have entered a more formal record.
Another of McCahon’s peculiarities, related to his inability or unwillingness to keep proper records, was his habit of working in sustained bursts of activity during which, he says, he was unable to write. This means we hear of works only when he is about to begin a series or after he has completed one; rarely, if ever, while they are in progress. His activity in the studio remains (as he surely preferred) a mystery; and the story of his art making has to be reconstructed from these prospective or retrospective remarks: another reason why this correspondence is so interesting.
On the other hand, when he wasn’t painting, McCahon carried on a vast correspondence with all sorts of people and there is as a result a prodigious number of letters, many of which were, of course, business letters, since that was how things were done in those pre-internet days. Even phone calls were unusual for anything except matters of urgency or else to make arrangements; for which telegrams might also be used. McCahon often complains about the number of letters he has to write. He also sometimes loses those he has written, for instance to the vagaries of an errant grandchild or to a blast of wind and rain through an open door.
O’Reilly, too, was a prodigious letter writer as well as a professional with many demands upon his time. At the beginning of the correspondence he is a bureaucrat in the Customs Department; then he goes to Library School in Wellington and thence, via the Hutt Valley, to Christchurch as City Librarian. His trip to Nigeria, during which he became enamoured of, and well informed about, Yoruba sculpture, was to develop librarianship further in that country. On his return he headed up the Library School in Wellington for a period and then became the third Director of the Govett-Brewster gallery in New Plymouth. He doesn’t complain about letter writing but allows he is often too busy to write as much as he wants to.
McCahon, too, after stints as a fruit picker, builder’s labourer and jewellery maker, was a salaried professional for most of the 1950s and 1960s, first at the Auckland City Art Gallery, then at Elam School of Art. He was an occasional teacher as well, for instance at summer schools, and maintained an involvement in the theatre for most of his working life. He also, in Auckland, accepted commissions to make and install stained glass windows in churches and in private homes. In this respect it is remarkable how these two busy men managed to maintain a correspondence of such length, interest, intricacy and discernment. It is also remarkable how many others enter into their correspondence — the proverbial cast of thousands.
They are, generally speaking, art world people, whether painters, gallerists, arts bureaucrats, critics, writers or cultural commentators. There are enemies and friends; antagonists and supporters; people who may be flattered or persuaded, people to be avoided at all costs. When it comes to other artists, it is impossible not to be impressed by the scrupulousness of McCahon’s judgements, especially in comparison with the occasional bluntness of O’Reilly’s; which sometimes got him into trouble. When this happened he invariably apologised while, at the same time, giving an exhaustive explanation of precisely why he behaved the way he did, or said the things that he said.
Among this cast of thousands — these ghosts and kindred spirits — several stand out. Most of all, Toss Woollaston, who is a perennial topic of discussion throughout the correspondence. Sometimes he is pictured as recalcitrant, or badly behaved, or self-deceiving; sometimes his work is in catastrophic decline; or, alternatively, on the upswing again; often his services as a critic or a letter writer are praised; and every now and then an individual work receives an accolade. O’Reilly was as interested in, and connected with, Woollaston as he was with McCahon and I wonder if an equivalent two way correspondence between them exists or existed.
The culmination of this thread is a forensic, sometimes inadvertently comic, attempt to work out just how the influence of Hans Hofmann, famously transmitted by the artist Flora Scales, operated on Woollaston. Scales herself, living not far away from the McCahons in Auckland, makes a brief appearance after Colin tracks her down at home and organises a small retrospective of her work. Another perennial is Doris Lusk, always mentioned positively but usually with the implication that she doesn’t receive her due as an artist. Which is surely true. Louise Lewis also figures as an under-appreciated contemporary woman painter. Bill Sutton and Leo Bensemann make frequent, sometimes equivocal, appearances in the text, especially during the period when O’Reilly is in Christchurch and McCahon in Auckland.
I did not know that O’Reilly, to his credit, was a strong and early supporter of Tony Fomison. They go and look at rock carvings together. He asks McCahon for his opinion of Fomison’s early work but McCahon doesn’t respond — or else the reply is lost. McCahon does at one point remark, perhaps defensively, that he prefers not to comment on other people’s work; if he has something to say he will say it directly to the artist: a rare and honourable attitude. George Wilder and Ronald Jorgenson have brief cameos; they were both taught in prison by McCahon and he persuades O’Reilly to visit Wilder in Paparua — a prospect as incongruous as big Ron and little Tony inspecting rock art sites together in the hinterland of Te Wai Pounamu.
Amongst the literary people we encounter Charles Brasch, Jim Baxter and John Caselberg, who supplied McCahon with texts over the years and who was married to Woollaston’s daughter. There is surprisingly little mention of Gordon Brown. Later in the correspondence we meet rising young art writers Wystan Curnow and Tony Green — the final shape of the latter’s article about the McCahons in the United States diverts both letter writers for quite a while before a satisfactory resolution is reached. McCahon becomes quite prickly when O’Reilly starts writing an encyclopedia article about Māori art; he is particularly protective of his friend and pupil Buster Black (a pseudonym) and defends his, and Ralph Hotere’s, desire to be seen, not as Māori artists, but artists per se.
There is also the strange case of Malcolm Ross, one of McCahon’s most brilliant students at Elam who, with both men’s encouragement, briefly attends Library School in Wellington. McCahon is critical of his drug-taking and his drinking and this condemnation of his behaviour is the only time in the letters the two men discuss the subject of alcohol. McCahon’s indulgences in that area go unmentioned. O’Reilly, who was a frequent visitor to the McCahon house, and just as frequently hosts McCahon, must have known of his friend’s predilections. When McCahon complains that someone has stolen his letter box, he doesn’t know it was his former student and sometime drinking partner, Malcolm Ross, who has done this — as a work of artistic appropriation.
Their families, too, were intertwined. Ron usually ends his letters with love to Anne McCahon and a couple of times her voice, writing on Colin’s behalf, enters the record. While Colin’s widowed mother Edith is still alive, Ron visits her in Geraldine. Their children holiday together and Colin was close to Ron’s two, Rachel and Matt. Indeed, the premature death of Matt’s wife Robin, of cancer, was one of the inspirations for the Jet Out and the Jump series. She was Australian and died in Sydney. The letters between Ron and Colin around her death are both tender and revealing; and Ron’s description of her last days is one of the rare occasions when the mask slips and we see the sensitivity and vulnerability it conceals.
Therefore it is distressing to read those letters from the mid-1970s where a falling out between them occurred. It was over the Necessary Protection show which O’Reilly curated at the Govett-Brewster gallery, which then toured to other centres. Without going into too much detail, what seems to have happened is that McCahon accused O’Reilly of adding works from his own collection to the exhibition, thus compromising the integrity of the series. Subsequently, when some of the works came back damaged, McCahon was even more upset. The rift, if that’s what it was, was healed but the possible larger reasons for it are worth interrogating.
By then O’Reilly’s sponsorship of McCahon — along with those of other friends and allies — had been largely successful and his place in the tradition, as forebear, exemplar and major practitioner, was assured. McCahon did not necessarily welcome this shift into legacy mode, nor the personal popularity, or notoriety, it involved. His preferred approach was always prospective. Nor was he ever quite comfortable with O’Reilly’s interpretative strategies. McCahon invariably opposed the imposition of meanings, especially those which claimed to be definitive, on his work; whereas O’Reilly, as a librarian and a philosopher, had an urge to classify and to define. He wanted to formalise the significance of the oeuvre he had watched, and to some degree helped, come into being. Even though it was a testament to the success of their shared enterprise, McCahon resisted his attempts to reach a conclusion. It was a fundamental disagreement.
Colin’s irritation was exacerbated by inquiries Ron felt obliged to make when he was, informally, commissioned by Blackwood and Janet Paul to write a book about McCahon. Several other book proposals were mooted over the course of the 1960s and 70s but none of them came to pass either; until, in 1984, Reeds published Gordon Brown’s study. Meanwhile O’Reilly’s last project, a big show of Māori art, precursory to but significantly different in conception from the Te Māori exhibition, also 1984, never eventuated. His death from heart failure, perhaps consequent upon a bout of rheumatic fever as a child, occurred in July 1982; by which time, even though he had another five years to live, McCahon was so damaged that he had ceased painting.
McCahon’s letters, especially towards the end, are succinct and to the point; sometimes, as in his distressed response after O’Reilly takes him to Parihaka, almost unbearably intense. They are endlessly quotable but never definitive because whatever he says in one place might be re-formulated, revised or contradicted somewhere else. One thing which is consistent, however, and consistently emphasised, is that he sees the significance of his work in the conversations it initiates — with other artists, whether living or dead, as much as with his own audience, past, present and future. This book, too, is a conversation, a vast and fascinating one which equally addresses present and future audiences. Though it is conducted in sober terms, it is actually a series of exchanges between two men who are highly emotional as well as intricately involved with each other. The relationship is one of need on both sides — to come to an understanding of what these needs were is another reason to read this book.
Colin McCahon, apart from his prowess as an artist, emerges as a man with an insatiable desire, a calling perhaps, to care for those who cannot care for themselves; one of the ironies of his life is that he too ended up as someone who could not look after himself. In a more indirect way Ron O’Reilly was also a man who needed looking after (he has four wives, one de facto, in the course of the book). His personality, sometimes obdurate, even abrasive, usually veiled, is superbly evoked by his son Matt in one of the afterwords to the book. The other, by Colin’s grandson, Finn McCahon-Jones, takes a different tack. As emotional as his grandfather was, Finn hopes that readers will ‘explore these pages gently’. As indeed we should.
Of the four photographs, the two at the front are formal portraits, while those at the back show the men in their respective working environments. The cover, in an artful piece of design, has the title, in red on an ochre ground, in McCahon’s instantly recognisable script. A passage from one of his letters is reproduced on the front end papers; O’Reilly’s elegant hand graces those at the back. There are two ribbons, one red and one black, so that you may flip easily between text and footnotes. I didn’t consult every footnote but I did read most of them; and found just one typo and one error (the Ratana temple is not outside Raetihi but in the eponymous settlement down by the sea). The inclusion in the appendices of O’Reilly’s introduction to the catalogue for McCahon’s 1972 retrospective is an inspired addition; the only sustained piece of writing about Colin Ron ever published. That is, until this splendid book appeared.
Dear Colin, Dear Ron: The Selected Letters of Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly edited by Peter Simpson (Te Papa Press) is available in bookstores nationwide.
