KEY ARTISTS:
Lindauer & Goldie
KEY MEANINGS:
Sense of place
Cultural
Social and everyday life
KEY CONTEXTS:
Historical
Treaty of Waitangi (1840) - NZ proclaimed a British colony followed by the onset of the colonisation process.
Wars (The Musket Wars: Maori inter-tribal & The NZ Land Wars: Pakeha vs Maori) up until the 1870s. A historical time (1840-1900) known as 'decades of despair' for Maori, as Europeans started to view Maori as a 'Dying Race'. |
Social & Cultural
- The Māori population continued its downward spiral in the wake of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, reaching a low of about 42,000 in 1896. Population decline and racist ideologies combined to fuel forewarnings about Māori extinction. The belief that Māori would eventually die out reflected colonial sentiment that indigenous peoples would not survive European conquest and disease.
- The scale and pace of colonisation increased rapidly after the Treaty. In 1840 the ratio of Pākehā to Māori was about one to 40. By 1860 the groups had reached parity and Pākehā dominance was ensured by sizeable inflows of British migrants until the mid-1870s, swamping Māori. After 1874 Māori were less than one-tenth of the national population, and this remained the case for a century.
- The rapid growth of the Pākehā population was the key to the demographic marginalisation of Māori – but depended on the alienation of Māori land. By 1860, 65% of land had passed out of Māori ownership. During the wars of the 1860s ‘rebel’ tribes that opposed the Crown had vast tracts of land confiscated by the government.
- The issue of cultural assimilation became a real issue for many Maori youths and young adults.
Te Ara: Decades of despair 1840-1900
- The scale and pace of colonisation increased rapidly after the Treaty. In 1840 the ratio of Pākehā to Māori was about one to 40. By 1860 the groups had reached parity and Pākehā dominance was ensured by sizeable inflows of British migrants until the mid-1870s, swamping Māori. After 1874 Māori were less than one-tenth of the national population, and this remained the case for a century.
- The rapid growth of the Pākehā population was the key to the demographic marginalisation of Māori – but depended on the alienation of Māori land. By 1860, 65% of land had passed out of Māori ownership. During the wars of the 1860s ‘rebel’ tribes that opposed the Crown had vast tracts of land confiscated by the government.
- The issue of cultural assimilation became a real issue for many Maori youths and young adults.
Te Ara: Decades of despair 1840-1900
The Musket Wars 1818-1833 |
The New Zealand Wars 1843-1872 |
|
|
Early Depictions of Maori
Maori were depicted in certain ways by the European artists before the colonisation process started.
|
Maori as ethnographic specimen:Head of a Maori Chief Curiously Tattooed,
Sydney Parkinson, 1769 |
Romanticized, exotic savages living in nature
|
Curious subject of exploration:Distant View of the Bay of Islands, Augustus Earle, 1827
|
The enemy at war:Ambuscade in Taranaki, Von Tempsky, 1866
|
|
DOCUMENTING AN ENDANGERED CULTUREGottfried Lindauer (1839-1926) Lindauer came to New Zealand from Europe in 1873 where he had been trained in
portraiture. Under the patronage of Henry Partridge, he specialised in portaits of Maori. He had a number of paintings exhibited in London’s Colonial Exhibition 1885 and was awarded the grand prize for Ana Rupene and Child. Lindauer’s paintings of Maori customs and traditions have a frozen, posed quality. They are a part of an increasing interest among artists in painting genre scenes from the 1890s, although engravings of the subject exist from the 1860s and were published in newspapers. They relate to the type of genre painting common in Europe since the 17th century. Judging by the growth in publications, including the establishment of the Journal of the Polynesian Society, interest in Maori also grew at around the same time Lindauer’s work also proved popular overseas. The emphasis is on the exotic or picturesque rather than an attempt at anthropological accuracy. There was definitely no attempt at depicting the social problems associated with land loss and population decline. Throughout his career in New Zealand Lindauer produced many kinds of paintings, including portraits of settlers, European genre scenes and copies of old and nineteenth century masters; but he specialised in portraits of Maori, the first of which were painted in Nelson where he moved soon after his arrival. In late 1875 or early 1876 he shifted to Auckland, where he met Henry Partridge, a businessman who was to become Lindauer's chief patron. Partridge believed that there was an urgent need for a pictorial record of the traditional Maori, and over the next 30 or so years he commissioned from Lindauer many portraits and depictions of Maori life and customs. Lindauer's Maori paintings were highly valued by his contemporaries as ethnological and historical records. Yet, while the attention to physiognomy, artefacts, moko and dress is very detailed, his paintings are not always ethnologically accurate. There are errors or alterations, for example, in the rendering of moko and the presentation of dress. Moreover, although Lindauer painted some of his Maori subjects from life, he relied primarily on photographs, so that his representations of Maori were usually produced at several removes from their subject. Although he captured a sense of likeness in many of his Maori portraits, the history he represented is very much a European construct – a romanticised depiction of an allegedly dying race. The artistic or aesthetic value of Lindauer's paintings has also been exaggerated. While his output of oil paintings of Maori was, with that of C. F. Goldie, far larger than that of any other European artist, Lindauer was fundamentally a journeyman painter – a tradesman producing portraits on commission (mostly for European clients, but for some Maori) – rather than a fine artist. Nevertheless, his works remain, along with Goldie's, the best-known and most popular paintings of Maori in New Zealand, and among Maori are valued as memorials to ancestors and kin. teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2l12/lindauer-gottfried |
|
NOSTALGIA, MEMORY AND LOSS OF THE BYGONE ERACharles Frederick Goldie (1870-1947) Charles Goldie is one of this country’s most controversial artists, and one of the best known. He has been both denounced and praised by various critics, and squabbles about the artist and the value of his works continue today. But while he may be criticised by the art establishment, his paintings fetch high prices and the public loves his work.
Goldie was born in 1870 in Auckland, the son of a timber merchant and former Mayor of Auckland. In 1892, he went to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian. There he received a conservative academic training which included life drawing and the copying of Old Masters from the Louvre. He won several prizes for excellence. At the time Impressionism was well-established in Paris, but Goldie was not influenced by such modern developments. On his return to Auckland, Goldie set up the French Academy of Art. Goldie’s style remained largely the same throughout his career. At first Goldie painted historical allegories and commissioned portraits, but in 1901 he visited Rotorua where Mary Wharepapa, a friend’s wife, helped to persuade local Māori to sit for him. In 1902 Goldie made contact with elderly Māori in the Auckland area, including Ina Te Papatahi, who was to become one of his favourite models. By 1904 Goldie was considered the leading portrait painter of Māori, and was renowned for his technical brilliance. However, he had his detractors – some critics believed his work was repetitive and lacked vitality. They also condemned his practice of painting from photographs. Goldie thought that Māori were about to die out or be assimilated by the Pakeha, and that he was recording the last survivors. The titles of many of his paintings – Last of the Cannibals, Darby and Joan, A Noble Relic of a Noble Race – reinforced this sentimental and romantic vision, as well as the dejected poses his elderly subjects would assume at his behest. In fact, the Māori population, while it had declined in the last part of the nineteenth century, increased during the early part of the twentieth century, and many vigorous young Māori political organisations were springing up – ‘this “old-time” Māori was largely his [Goldie’s] own creation – a product of a European painter’s artistic training and social attitudes, not Māori life as it had actually been lived and experienced by the Māoris themselves’. However, many Māori see Goldie's works as taonga representing irreplaceable ancestral images of koroua and kuia which, for Māori, have special significance. By 1910 Goldie found it difficult to locate suitable subjects, since many of his old models had died or were too old to sit for him, so he painted from photographs, or copied from earlier works. Goldie’s career went into decline and as his reputation waned, he became embittered towards his critics and wrote long tirades against modern art, vigorously defending more traditional ideas. Goldie stopped painting in 1941 and died in 1947, aged seventy-seven. “His favourite mode of presentation of his subjects... mostly elderly, eyes averted, with passivity, sadness or resignation, sleepiness or dreaminess in mood prevailing, correlated with the notion, popular among European New Zealanders in the early twentieth century, of a distinct Maori people and culture as bound to die out, either literally or through eventual complete assimilation into European culture... Whether ‘dying Maori’ constituted a fiction or a credible prognosis is not difficult to determine. By the early 1900s the Maori population was increasing. There was plenty of evidence of vigorous activity and vitality among Maori, the resistance, collective and individual, to the colonial programme, particularly over land ownership and usage and parliamentary representation.” – Art New Zealand 59 (p.91) https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/945 |