Masterly work raises the bar
By Peter Simpson, writing in the New Zealand Herald,
Saturday Dec 12, 2009

Francis Pound takes his title The Invention of New Zealand from two very similar statements, made 20 years apart, by poet and critic Allen Curnow and painter Colin McCahon.
In 1945 Curnow said: "Strictly speaking NZ doesn't exist yet ... It remains to be created - should I say invented - by writers, musicians, artists, architects, publishers."
And in 1966 McCahon wrote: "I saw something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land and not yet to its people. Not yet understood or communicated, not even really yet invented".
The quotes are printed on the back cover of this book, book-ending it so to speak, and serve Pound's purpose perfectly, for the imaginative "invention" of the nation by the creative efforts of artists and writers is his central theme.

First, one quote is by a poet and critic, the other by a painter, and this is appropriate because although this is primarily a book of art history it is also informed by an intimate knowledge of New Zealand literature and of the close parallels between the two art forms in the period (which Pound designates Nationalism) being investigated.

There were many cross-overs between the two art forms, with writers such as E. H. McCormick, A.R.D. Fairburn and Charles Brasch being active (as practitioners and/or critics) in both fields. Both artists and writers were equally preoccupied with what Curnow once called "the condition of New Zealand".

Secondly, Curnow and McCahon were, in Pound's reading, the key practitioners and theorisers of New Zealand literature and art, so not surprisingly they are crucial to his argument.
Curnow is crucial both for his New Zealand-centred poems of the 1940s and for his core belief, as laid out in his poetry anthology introductions of 1945 and 1960, that "what is special belongs here uniquely to the islands of New Zealand" and that New Zealanders by definition "see differently and see different things from others".

McCahon is crucial for his heroic journey as a painter from the "regional realism" (in Pound's phrase) of his manner in the 1940s (the South Island landscape and biblical paintings), through in the 1950s his seminal encounters with European Cubism and abstraction and with American abstract expressionism, encounters which transformed his work.
At the same time his work changed Cubism and abstraction into something distinctly unlike themselves - bending them to accommodate the New Zealand landscape, so central to the aesthetics of Nationalism.
While generally sceptical about the claims of Nationalism, Pound develops a reluctant admiration for this deliberate misreading of international movements.
To read Peter Simpson's full essay link to NZH.

The Invention of New Zealand: Art & National Identity 1939-1970,
by Francis Pound (Auckland University Press $75)

Peter Simpson is an Auckland reviewer and founding director of the Holloway Press.