Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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New Zealand’s Expressionist and Gothic Traditions
While the Romantic movement had its roots in European art traditions, there is a New
Zealand strain of Romanticism clearly visible in some New Zealand landscape painting.
It could also be argued that there is also a New Zealand strain of Expressionism in the
work of artists such as Rudi Gopas (a German immigrant), and in the work of writers
such as Janet Frame. The 1984 exhibition of selected New Zealand artists entitled
“Anxious Images” was described in its catalogue as a reflection of the “strong
expressionist tradition” which had been “extremely powerful” in New Zealand art in the
twenty years prior to the exhibition. 194 This tradition is linked primarily to the South
Island where the influence of Rudi Gopas as a charismatic art school teacher “provides
a direct link back to earlier German expressionism and accounts for much of the
southern concern for anxious images”. The “Anxious Images” exhibition included the
work of Philip Clairmont, “whose work clearly continues in the German expressionist
tradition of apocalyptic visions and hectic attitudes toward form […], breaking through
exteriors to expose the tangled web of emotions which seems to characterise the human
condition”. 195 Other artists included in the exhibition were Barry Cleavin, Jacqueline
Fahey, Jeffrey Harris, Tony Fomison, Vivian Lynn, Alan Pearson, Peter Peryer, Sylvia
Siddell and Michael Smither. What they had in common was that their principal
concerns were “the expression and communication of powerful emotion: unease,
anxiety, anger, fear and pain”. The works by these artists shared “no overriding stylistic
affinities” but they displayed similarities “in content and intention rather than in
outward form”. 196 Ward was directly influenced by this local tradition of
Expressionism as has been noted by Laurence Simmons, whose review of John
Downie’s The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey, makes reference to Ward’s training in
Fine Arts at Ilam, Canterbury University and the influence of the “strong tradition of
Expressionist painting in New Zealand, a tradition which rehearses many of Ward’s
themes”. 197
The atmosphere of unease which underlies this strain of art is mirrored in New Zealand
film, according to Sam Neill and Judy Rymer, whose film Cinema of Unease: A
194 Anxious Images: Aspects of Recent New Zealand Art (Exhibition Catalogue), Foreward.
195 Anxious Images: Aspects of Recent New Zealand Art (Exhibition Catalogue), 11.
196 Anxious Images: Aspects of Recent New Zealand Art (Exhibition Catalogue), 6.
197 Lawrence Simmons, "Navigating Vincent Ward," Illusions.34 (2000): 46.