The Invention of New Zealand Art & National Identity, 1930-1970
GENERAL NON-FICTION FINALIST
The Invention of New Zealand Art & National Identity, 1930-1970
Francis Pound
Auckland University Press
ISBN 9781869404147
RRP $75.00
From the 1930s, artists and writers such as Woollaston, Curnow, McCahon, Angus, Fairburn, and Holcroft deployed art, literature and theory in the construction of national identity and the invention of a New Zealand high culture. Here, Francis Pound brings to light the profusion, cohesion and intricacy of the Nationalist movement and its imaginative life — until the 1970s, when it was rejected by a new generation.
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Dr Francis Pound, MFA, PhD, is an independent writer and curator based in Auckland, New Zealand. Born in Wellington in 1948, he studied at The University of Auckland and taught for some years in the art history department there, specialising in Renaissance art and twentieth-century New Zealand art. Pound has a particular interest in how a national identity is constructed in art and literature, in the intersection of nationalism with primitivism, and in New Zealand readings and misreadings of international modernism. He is an acknowledged expert on a number of individual visual artists such as Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters and Richard Killeen, on whom he wrote his PhD thesis, ‘Cut-outs, Killeen’. |
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