Title: Somebody Say Something

Author: Gregory O'Brien

In: Sport 23: Spring 1999

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 1999

Part of: Sport

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Miserere

While studying at Auckland University in the early 1980s, one of my favourite items in the Elam library was the published version of Georges Rouault's series of Miserere lithographs. This was before the time of computerised library withdrawals and borrowers had to write their names on yellow or red cards located in a pouch at the rear of the book. These cards provided a useful and endlessly fascinating whakapapa of previous readers of any given book.⁴ I recall being surprised that hardly anyone had withdrawn Miserere during the 1970s although—and there his handwriting was, in pencil—Colin McCahon had signed it out many times while teaching at Elam during the 60s.

So much for the temper of the times. While Rouault's crushing meditation on morality and the modern world was bypassed by students, the copies of ARTFORUM in the Elam library were so well-read they were falling apart on the display shelves.

Like Rouault, McCahon was an artist concerned with moral and spiritual collapse. While many commentators have married McCahon's paintings to the ‘death of god’, the works might more accurately be page 17 seen as explorations into the ‘possibility of god’. (McCahon, as both painter and individual, didn't so much critique the idea of god as struggle towards some recognition or realisation.) McCahon's attachment to the work of the fervently Christian Rouault echoes through his word paintings with their moral imperatives.

‘Tomorrow will be beautiful,’ said the shipwrecked man
Peace seems never to reign
Over this anguished world
Of shams and shadows.

HOMO HOMINI LUPUS
‘Man is a wolf to man’

These quotations are from Rouault's Miserere, although they could easily have been taken from McCahon's canvases. (Conveniently, the Auckland Art Gallery owns a number of Rouault's Miserere lithographs which, no doubt, McCahon would have appreciated while he was employed at the gallery.) Like Rouault, McCahon was capable of the most abject despair. At other times, as in Storm Warning, he could also turn bull and charge.

ROUAULT:
‘Nous sommes fous’
We are mad

McCAHON:
‘Men will love nothing
but money and self …’