Lost, Stolen or Shredded Read online

  Over the next few months Gibbs tried to establish that the thieves could trust her as well, and her new contacts soon dropped their association with the lawyer Christopher Harder. Te Kaha was often seen with Gibbs, both at her home and socially, and rumours of a relationship flourished. Neighbours complained about the pair of moko-ed visitors, a rare species on Paritai Drive, and presumably felt racially and socially unsafe. Gibbs was lampooned in the press, and parallels with Leonard Bernstein’s hosting of the Black Panthers at a cocktail party (see Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic) were suggested. Obscene phone calls in the middle of the night sneered that she ‘liked a bit of black cock’. Through it all Gibbs kept her head up and her goal clear: she was trying to get the McCahon back. That was all that really mattered.

  Inspector Bell, however, regarded her as the foolish dupe of the two totally untrustworthy Maori activists, and suggested that she was significantly impeding his investigation. She wasn’t, but she certainly wasn’t helping him very much. She was pursuing her own agenda. Witi Ihimaera describes her as ‘sturdy and indestructible. If you were on the Titanic with her, she’d organize everyone to hold hands and climb to the bow rail and she’d be telling you that everything was going to be fine.’

  Which is high praise. But the Titanic sank, and things were not fine. Nor was it clear that McCahon’s painting was likely to be recovered. Tame Iti and Te Kaha were under severe pressure from feisty local voices, demanding that the painting be burned, or snipped into pieces and sent in the post (it was never clear to whom). Once she was told that the painting was now buried, Gibbs gave the two Maori ‘a very large roll of bubble wrap and a lot of tape’ to make sure it was safely entombed, and was relieved when it was reported that the rewrapping had been successful.

  It took Gibbs a few months, and a lot of apparently enjoyable social time, plus several visits to the Urewera region, before she was promised the safe return of the picture. There were a number of false starts: ‘You couldn’t call them reliable’, Gibbs observed wryly about Te Kaha and Tame Iti, who had repeatedly assured her of their intention to return the painting. Finally Gibbs was informed that ‘tonight’s the night!’ and driven in the back of her car, having promised to keep her eyes shut, to an unknown destination in Auckland. When she next opened her eyes, the painting was in the back. It was taken immediately to the Auckland Museum of Art, where the necessary restoration work could be done.

  The damage was far more extensive than the optimistic Gibbs would have suspected. The picture had been torn from the wall, folded roughly before it was put under the mattress, then rolled up for burial. It was dirty, and so badly crushed, creased and abraded that paint was missing along the fold lines. On the edges of the canvas there was some stretching and distortion, which may ease somewhat as the painting is rehung. Though it was possible to ameliorate much of the damage and retouching was done with gouache, the new paint can certainly be seen under raking light.

  Te Kaha pleaded guilty to the theft, claiming that it was, from the onset, politically motivated:

  McCahon was a taste of what it feels like to have something taken from you against your will and be powerless to stop it. The plan was always to show what it feels like … I can take you back into Urewera, I can take you back into Tuhoe and show you land and pa sites [defensive earthworks] that have been destroyed. I can even show you people that have been destroyed … people that are wasted. But why destroy a painting? At the end of the day it would mean sinking to the level of the people who had done things to Tuhoe.

  Hearing the case, Judge Thorburn accepted the argument in mitigation and sentenced Te Kaha to community service at the Auckland Museum of Art, while Laurie Davis was sent to jail. Unbowed, Te Kaha continued to protest about the historical injustice that took the Tuhoe lands from them, and predicted ‘an IRA type situation’ unless the Tuhoe lands were restored and nationhood granted. In 2006 a group of Tuhoe activists, led by Tame Iti, were arrested under the 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act for having established, or at least encouraged, a group of guerrilla-style ‘training camps’ deep in the Ureweras, where lessons were apparently given in rudimentary bomb-making, and a range of nasty firearms were in regular use. IRA manuals were found, and texts pledging to ‘kill the white motherfuckers’ were cited by the prosecution.

  Following so closely upon the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the New Zealand legislation, and response to the Tuhoe activists, were out of proportion to the admittedly worrying nature of their activities. You don’t have to agree with the lawyer for the defence that this was just a bunch of teenagers larking about inappropriately to see clearly that they were not terrorists. Though it took five years, during which the framing of the 2002 Act was described by no less a person than New Zealand’s Solicitor-General as ‘unnecessarily complex, incoherent and as a result almost impossible to apply to the domestic circumstances in this case’, the Urewera Four, as Iti and his cohorts were known, were found not guilty of all the major charges against them.

  They got away with a lot. A lot of provocation, a lot of big talking, a lot that – in other cultures – might well have led to jail sentences. The guerrilla training, like the theft of the painting earlier, was symbolic. The thieves didn’t really intend to destroy it, any more than the inflamed teenagers intended mass murder. The McCahon mural was better lost than found: it had a more potent message, and would resonate longer in the collective memory if it stayed buried. Tacked to a wall, it was just another painting, however fine; lost, it became a potent symbol of the dispossession of an entire people.

  We are familiar with the hostility that extreme left-wing movements and fanatical groups can have to art establishments. Marinetti, Apollinaire and Picasso bombastically demanding the burning of museums, but instead merely pilfering from them occasionally. A real fanatic is quick to burn, while your revolutionary rhetorician merely wishes to shock. Witness the destruction of the ancient carved Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 by the Afghan Taliban, or the systematic destruction of the artefacts of the past by the Red Guards or the Khmer Rouge: regimes under which the mere terms ‘intellectual’ and ‘artist’ were abusive, and could lead to the killing fields. Sweep away the old to prepare for the new! Create a future fresh and unencumbered! Down with art! But there is, still, a long way to go from Marinetti to Pol Pot.

  But to the Tuhoe, to Te Kaha and Tame Iti, none of these arguments or instances was of any interest. Nor was the McCahon picture itself: though Jenny Gibbs tried to interest the two Maori in McCahon’s work, she acknowledges that they never engaged with it. ‘They didn’t care about the painting,’ she observes, ‘it was never the point. It was just something the loss of which would be deeply felt and create a response that would highlight the cause of the Tuhoe, and the much larger losses that had been imposed upon them.’

  We are accustomed in these liberal times to talking of the sanctity of human life, and would hesitate, for fear of the consequences, to talk of the sanctity of art. Sanctity refers to that which is of supreme importance. But let’s put a hypothetical to ourselves: a child is kidnapped, and the ransom demanded is the Urewera mural, or even the Mona Lisa.

  And don’t tell me we cannot negotiate with kidnappers or hostage takers. That is exactly what we must do. What do they want? A night at the Ritz? A ticket to the Cup Final? No problem. A Picasso print? It’s yours! The Mona Lisa? No! Alas, let the child die. So: a painting can be more valuable than a human life. How about two human lives? Or a hundred thousand? I have a bomb, and unless you give me Picasso’s Guernica, I will blow up Basingstoke! Hmmm. Time to think …

  Tame Iti and Te Kaha remind us that paintings like the Urewera mural do not exist for ‘art’s sake’ but have complex and often conflicting cultural meanings, and the weight that they carry depends on your point of view. After the painting had been returned, Jenny Gibbs said that she had ‘learned a lot’: it was, she observed, ‘a very clever scheme. I obviously don’t approve of stealing a painting … but they have h
ad so much stolen from them.’ She recognised clearly that she had been dealing with serious people, and a serious issue. The theft of the Urewera mural (unlike the theft of the Mona Lisa, in which a stink of farce and veniality prevails) brings into question many of our cherished, and frequently unexamined, notions about art and its relations to our lives, and the lives of others.

  But aren’t we admonished to respect art for art’s sake? I’ve never understood what ‘art’ is, such that it should have a ‘sake.’ Persons do, though, and sometimes our attitudes to people and our respect for art collide in unexpected and unsettling ways. I suspect that Jenny Gibbs would have entirely understood, perhaps sympathised if only fleetingly, if the mural had been destroyed. If not – she is an art collector, after all – it is certainly a line of thought that would have occurred to Colin McCahon. His sense of the deep symbolic potential of place would have been shared by the Tuhoe, and might well have been incomprehensible to most contemporary Pakeha. As he said, in 1977: ‘You bury your heart, and as it goes deeper into the land. You can only follow, it’s a painful love, loving a land. It takes a long time.’

  The Visitors’ Centre is now closed, condemned ‘because of leaks’ (water gets in, paintings get out) and resulting wet rot. And McCahon’s great Urewera mural, after a whistlestop tour of a number of provincial galleries, now resides in the Auckland Gallery, where it is still undergoing restoration and in which it will eventually hang until a new Visitors’ Centre at the lake is built. But neither the room nor the light nor the ambience at the Art Gallery will be quite right for McCahon’s masterpiece. Hamish Keith, a distinguished art historian and former Director of the Arts Council of New Zealand, observed: ‘I have no doubt at all that the work, if removed from the Park Headquarters at Urewera National Park, would find some safe home. Simply to remove the painting from the context for which it was conceived is, however, little short of an act of vandalism.’

  It is unclear when some new Visitors’ Centre will open to the public, but there can be no one who doesn’t wish for the return of the mural to its natural habitat, for the enjoyment of all those who may come to see it, and because it is as integral a part of that landscape, now, as Lake Waikaremoana itself. It is a great painting, even ignoring its history. As sympathetic as one is to the cause of the dispossessed Tuhoe tribe, one can only be grateful that they eventually returned the picture. Political causes and allegiances, like personal ones, come and go, and it is the purpose and nature of art both to reflect such differences and to transcend them. To stand as the last word, the greatest legacy mankind and its artists have provided to the transience of things, and to reside in permanent opposition to that which, finally but surely, passes. No justification, surely, can be adequately adduced for the destruction of an artistic masterpiece.

  That’s the common view, but I’m not sure Jenny Gibbs would have shared it wholeheartedly. Neither do I.

  3

  ‘Half-Witted’: Graham Sutherland’s Portrait of Winston Churchill

  On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, on 30 November 1954, Winston Churchill was honoured by both Houses of Parliament. His speech in Westminster Hall was worthy of the occasion, as he looked back upon his career and achievements:

  I have never accepted what many people have kindly said – namely, that I inspired the nation. … Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved unconquerable. … It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.

  But the old lion was tired, and acknowledged that his days of political life, after some fifty-four years, were almost over:

  I am now nearing the end of my journey. … I hope I still have some service to render. However that may be, whatever may befall, I am sure I shall never forget the emotions of this day.

  He resigned as Prime Minister less than a year later, but in the remaining ten years of his life still found the energy to write the six volumes of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He also produced a large number of competent, slightly old-fashioned (though with occasional Impressionist touches) oils on canvas, which gave him great satisfaction. Though he did some reasonably accomplished portraits, he preferred landscapes. ‘Trees don’t complain’, he observed in wry acknowledgement of the fact that sitters for portraits frequently do.

  The Parliamentary celebrations, in front of an audience of some 2,500 people, were broadcast live on BBC television. As the aged Prime Minister delivered his speech, both the live and televised audiences were faced not merely by the orator but also by the life-size portrait of him, commissioned to mark the occasion, which was hanging on the wall behind him. It was by Graham Sutherland, one of the celebrated artists of the day, whose paintings of bomb damage during the Blitz are amongst the most memorable artistic images of the Second World War.

  The portrait of Churchill was arresting, and it would have been impossible for a member of the audience not to have cast his eye back and forth between the man himself and the image in oil behind him. The picture was by no means intended simply to flatter its subject. It had ‘truth’ as its aim, as serious portraiture must: a good portrait, gently or brutally, lays its subject bare. Churchill is seated, leaning – almost teetering – slightly to his right, facing outwards with an expression which is at once bewildered and irascible, stripped of the fund of loquacious good humour that was so characteristic of him in his prime. He retains a stoic authority, though, and the head has the monumental quality of a Roman bust. This is an old man, sadly aware of the decline of his powers, full of bitter regret, the predominant tones being rust and brown. Churchill’s response to such colouration was distinctly sniffy: ‘I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.’

  Winston Churchill overshadowed by Graham Sutherland’s sombre portrait, which he hated.

  The portrait ends at the sitter’s ankles, as if he were, now, incapable of locomotion. Directly below the painting a bank of flowers was in place, as if offered at a funeral service. Studying this image, a viewer might well have acknowledged that the portrait was fair comment. When he had been elected in 1951, Churchill had concealed the fact that he had suffered a major stroke, and the intervening three years had only hastened his decline. On the day of the celebrations, he rose magnificently to the occasion, but it was one of the last of his great speeches. He was exhausted, and his health was declining rapidly, but he had not fully accepted that his time was over. The portrait – like that of Wilde’s Dorian Gray – starkly revealed the truth. What we see, in the apt words of the Guardian’s art critic at the time, is ‘a reactionary curmudgeon surrounded by the shades of night’.

  Sutherland’s portrait had been commissioned by the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary colleagues as a birthday gift, to be retained by him during his lifetime, and afterwards hung at Westminster. Churchill and his wife were, of course, already familiar with the portrait, for the Prime Minister sat for it at Chartwell, his home in Kent, at various sessions between August and November of 1954. He was, apparently, a ‘grumpy and difficult’ subject, who tended to slump into his chair after a few drinks at lunch and was roused into good humour only by the presence of his dog. The process was eased by Lady Churchill’s reaction to the artist, whom she called ‘a most attractive man … a Wow!’ When she first saw the finished picture at Kenneth Clark’s home, in October, she was immediately taken by its ‘truthfulness’, but after a time she began to feel that it cast her husband as ‘a gross and cruel monster’. This was an ominous sign: Clementine clearly felt it not merely her right, but her duty, to monitor images of the great man, and had previously destroyed pictures of him by both Walter Sickert (in 1927) and Paul Maze (in 1944). Maze, ironically, had given Churchill some tips about how to paint.

  Churchill saw the finished portrait some weeks later, and was chagrined by its ‘malignant’ quality, though he generously resolved to accept it in the s
pirit in which it was offered, announcing with studied ambiguity that ‘the portrait is a remarkable example of modern art. It certainly combines force and candour.’ Though he was not disposed airily to dismiss modernity (‘Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse’), he had little taste for it. His private response to the alleged ‘truthfulness’ of the portrait was that the posture and expression made him look as if he were straining on the toilet, and that ‘it makes me look half-witted, which I ain’t.’

  So: if the Churchills so disliked the finished image, why hadn’t they said so during the sittings, when they were presumably able to inspect the portrait as it developed? The answer is that Sutherland’s finished product differed considerably from the studies done at Chartwell. For many of the sittings the Prime Minister was dressed in his Knight of the Garter robes (which do not appear in the final picture), and the surviving sketches, many of them now at the National Portrait Gallery, show him in a gentler, and more respectful, light. He would hardly have anticipated the gross truthfulness, if that is what it is, of the finished product. It must have been particularly galling, and humiliating, for the Prime Minister as he stood before the offending object, live on the BBC, to thank his colleagues for a gift which offended him so egregiously.

  I don’t know who was responsible for the choice of Graham Sutherland as Churchill’s portraitist, but they – I presume some committee or other – made a bad mistake. It might have been because they knew too little about contemporary art, or too much. The result would have been the same: an ignorant selection panel would have chosen the most highly rated artist of the day, on the assumption that such a choice would signify the depth of affection in which Churchill was held. Similarly, a knowledgeable panel might have come to the same conclusion, only they would have reached it themselves. In either case they would have been wrong.