Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction, Vol. I 1919–1959

The extraordinary first volume of a two-volume work chronicling forty-five years of painting by our most important artist, Colin McCahon.

Colin McCahon (1919–1987) was New Zealand’s greatest twentieth-century artist. Through landscapes, biblical paintings and abstraction, the introduction of words and M?ori motifs, McCahon’s work came to define a distinctly New Zealand modernist idiom. Collected and exhibited extensively in Australasia and Europe, McCahon’s work has not been assessed as a whole for thirty-five years.

In this richly illustrated two-volume work, written in an accessible style and published to coincide with the centenary of Colin McCahon’s birth, leading McCahon scholar, writer and curator Dr Peter Simpson chronicles the evolution of the artist’s work over McCahon’s entire forty-five-year career.

Simpson has enjoyed unprecedented access to McCahon’s extensive correspondence with friends, family, dealers, patrons and others. This material enables us to begin to understand McCahon’s work as the artist himself conceived it. Each volume includes over three-hundred illustrations in colour, with a generous selection of reproductions of McCahon’s work (many never previously published), plus photographs, catalogue covers, facsimiles and other illustrative material. This will be the definitive work on New Zealand’s leading artist for many years to come.

Dr. Peter Simpson is a former associate professor of English at the University of Auckland. He is the author of numerous critically acclaimed books including Colin McCahon: The Titirangi Years, 1953–1959 (AUP, 2007) and Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933–1953 (AUP, 2016). He has also curated three significant exhibitions of McCahon’s work. He received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (non-fiction) in 2017.

Reviews - ‘New Zealand’s foremost artist Colin McCahon is many things to many people: modernist, visionary, environmentalist, shaman, preacher, rustic provincialist, bicultural trailblazer, painter-poet, graffiti artist, teacher, maverick . . . Peter Simpson’s account interrogates as well as accommodates all of these possibilities. Guiding us year by year through the artist’s career, he offers a ground-breaking overview of the life’s work of a tenacious, brilliant and endlessly fascinating figure.’ – Gregory O’Brien

 

ISBN 9781869408954
Hardcover, 360 pages
Dimensions: 290 x 240mm
Publication date: October 2019
Publisher: Auckland University Press

Price: $75