Title: Somebody Say Something

Author: Gregory O'Brien

In: Sport 23: Spring 1999

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 1999

Part of: Sport

Conditions of use

The McCahon Vacuum (‘Towards Auckland’)

I imagine Colin McCahon—towards the end of his life—squirrelling some of his most potent works away in public collections to keep them away from the marketplace—a market he lampooned in the title and concept of his 1968 exhibition at the Barry Lett Gallery:

COLIN MC CAHON'S BARGAIN BASEMENT!

A few years ago, while working for the McCahon Trust, Gerald Barnett commented on how all the Colin McCahon paintings were heading for Auckland. It was as if a vacuum cleaner was positioned in the city and the paintings were being extracted from their collections and drawn inexorably northwards. More recently, Gerald observed, an even more powerful vacuum cleaner had begun shifting McCahons across the Tasman. And, in all likelihood, within the next decade an even more powerful vacuum will draw them further afield.

We witness the McCahons—apart from those secured in public collections—caught in this art-market whirlpool, a storm rather different from that in Storm Warning, although one into which the painting of that title has vanished.

According to the Head of Victoria's Art History Department, ‘the painting may have gone anyway … the issue of its value might have tipped the balance in the end’. A few years ago, our neighbours in McFarlane St, Mt Victoria were in a similar fix over a large painting which had been gifted to them. This work was on public display in the St Gerard's Monastery chapel which opened directly onto Hawker Street. The door was left unlocked during daylight hours. Gagliardi's painting of St Gerard (after whom the monastery was named) was gifted to the monastery at the turn of the century and, by 1992, was conservatively valued at just over one million dollars.⁵ So what was the church to do with it now the chapel was no longer in public use?

Far be it from me to endorse the fiscal policies of the Catholic Church in general but, in this instance, the religious community ceremonially farewelled the painting then shipped it back to the people of the Italian town of Mater Domini, whose forebears had gifted it to the Wellington parish a century earlier.