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Salient: At Victoria University College, Wellington, N. Z. Vol. 24, No. 10. 1961.

Round the Galleries

Round the Galleries

I am afraid I am unable to concur with my colleague, K.N.B's views on the recent Peter McIntyre exhibition. Nor do I feel the extremist and laudatory comments made by E.R. of the "Evening Post" were at all justified. The show was not "brilliant" at all; in fact it left me cold.

Peter Mclntyre is, in my opinion, trying to be a New Zealand Bratby. Unlike Bratby, however, he is mass-producing pictures which are rapidly becoming mere photographic representations devoid of any cerebral processes whatsoever. "What is more, he is becoming very careless: one of his Chinese children oil studies depicted a Chinese girl with four toes on her left foot, which was quite dearly a careless blunder. The only redeeming feature of his show was, as K.N.B. pointed out. the "masterful use he makes of light." However, far too often we were met with water colour after insipid water colour. How I wish McIntyre would throw away that horrible blue he is so wedded to!

Mclntyre pictured for us the seething Chinese humanity he met with, but what does he think, as an artist, of what he saw? Apparently absolutely nothing at all. Heaven knows, as Professor Edgar Wind in his recent Relth Lecture series on "Art and Anarchy" was at pains to point out, the Inherent dangers in artistic mass production. There are enough photographers and copyists in the world today without McIntvre joining in, for he has undoubted genius when he cares to use it. It is to be honed that he will return from his Italian visit with work more commensurate with his artistic stature, and more significant for those who are saddened by certain anarchic and ubiouitious tendencies in the modern art world which Wind saw fit to castigate so severely. In a later article we may look at Wind's lectures.