Gordon Walters

Francis Pound’s Gordon Walters could be considered the final component and critical analysis of the life and times of four pioneering New Zealand artists whose reputations and legacies acquired prominence in the 1960s. Where Toss Woollaston (1910–1998) and Rita Angus (1908–1970) are given due and comprehensive consideration by Jill Trevelyan (2004 and 2020 respectively), and Colin McCahon (1919–1987) in Peter Simpson’s two-volume magnum opus (2019–2020), Pound’s book on the life and art of Gordon Walters (1919–1995) completes this equation. In making connections between these artists, there is inevitably a sense of the founding of a national art history. Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith’s once highly influential publication, An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1839–1967 (1969), devoted less attention to Walters’ abstraction than to the more figurative and referential work of his peers. But now Pound’s Gordon Walters comprehensively eliminates the remnants of any possible doubt about Walters’ central importance in New Zealand art history. To paraphrase the writer’s commentary on Walters’ own art and legacy, this is an astonishing publication.