Two Centuries Of New Zealand Landscape Art

Two Centuries of New Zealand Landscape Art is the sort of title that sounds, at first, as though it might be a dutiful march through a great many hills. But this handsome volume turns out to be something far better: a rich, civilised, quietly fascinating tour through the way an entire country has been seen, imagined, framed, romanticised, and occasionally improved upon with paint.

Because landscape art is never just about landscape, however earnestly it may pretend otherwise. A mountain is never merely a mountain once an artist has arrived with oils, ambition, and a theory about light. A harbour becomes identity. A valley becomes myth. A line of trees becomes nationhood with better weather. Over two centuries, New Zealand’s land has been painted as sublime, raw, settled, contested, majestic, empty-looking but not empty, and generally capable of making Europe seem faintly overfurnished. This book gathers all that visual argument into one place, which is very convenient for those of us who like our cultural perspective bound between covers.

Roger Blackley, with the calm authority of someone who knows both art and the stories that cling to it, offers not just pictures but a whole evolving sensibility. You can sense the shifts in taste, purpose, and politics. Early artists arrive and gaze upon the scenery as though God has been showing off. Later painters begin to see more than spectacle: atmosphere, settlement, memory, ownership, mood, modernity, perhaps even the faint suspicion that landscape is never innocent once people start naming it, painting it, selling it, and hanging it in drawing rooms. It is art history doing what art history does best: revealing that even a peaceful-looking view contains quite a lot of human intention.

And what views they must be. New Zealand, after all, is one of those countries that behaves like an overachiever in visual terms. Lakes that look invented. Mountains with the dramatic timing of opera singers. Coastlines determined to be noticed. Skies apparently unwilling to settle for mere background duty. One imagines that the poor artists barely stood a chance. The landscape is doing at least half the work already, leaving them to decide whether to worship it, interpret it, tame it, or produce something tasteful enough for a gallery wall without simply writing “look at this” underneath.

This 1990 Auckland City Art Gallery publication has exactly the right aura for the subject: serious but attractive, scholarly without becoming a punishment, and likely filled with the sort of plates that make you involuntarily slow down and stare a bit. It sounds like the kind of art book that belongs equally well on a coffee table, a studio shelf, or in the possession of someone who says “tonal qualities” with complete sincerity. In other words, ideal Crappy Old Books material.

As a Good condition copy, it promises the sensible virtues one hopes for in an illustrated art book: sound, presentable, and ready to resume its duties as a portable museum for the visually inclined. Perhaps it has already lived a respectable life among gallery-goers, students, homes with large windows, or travellers who returned from New Zealand convinced the place had no business being that scenic. Now it stands ready for its next custodian, who may be an art lover, a collector, an armchair traveller, or simply someone who enjoys books that make landscapes look more meaningful than one’s own commute.

There is also a pleasing irony in landscape art books generally. They allow one to admire vast wilderness, light, distance, and elemental grandeur while sitting indoors with a cup of tea, in weather entirely of one’s choosing. No mud, no midges, no carrying easels up slopes, no sudden rain ruining one’s transcendent communion with nature. Just two centuries of carefully curated visual awe, conveniently flattened into pages.

So Two Centuries of New Zealand Landscape Art offers rather more than a procession of pretty scenes. It is a record of vision, of culture, of changing ways of looking at land and, through it, at nationhood itself. Thoughtful, handsome, and full of the sort of quiet authority that makes a room feel more educated merely by containing it, this is exactly the kind of volume Crappy Old Books is delighted to send back into circulation.

A grand, civilised survey of beauty, identity, and the longstanding human urge to stand in front of a magnificent view and say, in effect, “this ought to be painted.”

Keep browsing: See more Art books Other books by Roger Blackley