Long-awaited book reveals richness of New Zealand’s Nationalist art and thought

Over a quarter of a century in the making, art historian Francis Pound’s new book The Invention of New Zealand: Art & National Identity, 1930–1970 (Auckland University Press) has been launched in Auckland by writer, curator and fine printer Peter Simpson.

Launching the book, Simpson remarked, “Because of its lengthy gestation some might have wondered if Francis’ book was like the long-awaited figure in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot who never shows up.

“But the skeptics (if they exist) have been thoroughly confounded. Francis, has not only delivered, he has written one of the great books of this country. It is passionate, scholarly, crowded with characters, rich in texture, highly readable and admirably contentious.”

And, he noted, at times it made him laugh out loud.

From the 1930s onwards, artists, writers and critics such as Toss Woollaston, Allen Curnow, Colin McCahon, Rita Angus, ARD Fairburn, Doris Lusk and M H Holcroft consciously deployed art, literature and theory in the construction of a national identity and the invention of a specifically New Zealand high culture.

In 10 chapters with nearly 200 accompanying plates, Francis Pound brings to light the profusion, cohesion and intricacy of the Nationalist movement and its imaginative life — until the 1970s, when it was rejected by a new generation of artists, critics and dealers. He covers the Nationalists’ problems with antecedents, the formulation of their canon and their adoptions, co-options and rejections of international modernism.

Begun in 1983 as a commissioned sequel to his famous Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand, Pound says that when his English-owned publisher, quite out of the blue some years ago, announced it was walking out on its contract to publish Invention, he continued to write it on his own, convinced that New Zealand art and thought was rich enough to warrant a big book.

He also felt that New Zealand high culture typified the ways countries located in the cultural margins respond to the art of the cultural centres and was symptomatic of something larger than itself — a case study at once of an international flow of ideas from the centres outwards to the peripheries, and of localised resistances to them.

For some years Dr Francis Pound, (pic right-photo by his daughter Veronica Crockford Pound), taught art history at the University of Auckland, specialising in Renaissance and New Zealand art. He is now an independent curator and writer.
His books include the acclaimed Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand (1983), The Space Between: Pakeha Use of Maori Motifs in Modernist New Zealand Art (1994) and Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Paintings of Richard Killeen (1999). He curated, and wrote a book to accompany, the 2004 exhibition Walters en Abyme, and is currently working on a major monograph on Gordon Walters.


The Invention of New Zealand: Art & National Identity, 1930–1970
Francis Pound
Auckland University Press (with assistance from the Schaeffer Family Foundation and the Chartwell Trust)
Hardback; colour and b&w illustrations; RRP $75