Colin McCahon
The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version)
1961
enamel on board
signed C.M and dated OCT.'61 in brushpoint lower right; inscribed THE FIRST BELLINI MADONNA. (SECOND VERSION) in brushpoint lower edge
1205 x 755mm
PROVENANCE
Private collection, New South Wales.
EXHIBITIONS
Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 30 August - 10 November 2002; City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 7 December 2002 - 9 March 2003; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, 29 March - 15 June; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 4 July - 7 September; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 November - 16 January 2004.
LITERATURE
Marja Bloem & Martin Browne, Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum; Nelson: Craig Potton, 2002), 92, 196, 197.
NOTE
Colin McCahon Online Catalogue (www.mccahon.co.nz) number: cm001516.
Colin McCahon - The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version)
Essay by KELLY CARMICHAEL
Over the course of his career, Colin McCahon could be variously defined as a landscape artist, a figurative painter, a regionalist, and an innovator for his use of painted text. Perhaps the two most defining thematics of his practice, however, are McCahon’s relationship with religion and his abstraction. The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version) (1961) incorporates these two incredibly strong trajectories of McCahon’s practice. This work is one of a series of four known works by McCahon responding to Venetian Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini. McCahon was a lover of Bellini, and scholar Gordon H. Brown relates that, after discovering a colour plate showing Bellini’s The Pieta with St John, McCahon was so moved he slammed the book shut until he could recover his composure.¹ The Bellini Madonna series is said to be based on Bellini’s The Alzano Madonna/Madonna with a Pear (c.1485). The artist’s son William McCahon recalls that the series came from the time McCahon underwent religious instruction within the Catholic Church and, in particular, the trouble he was having with some of the doctrine around the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary.
At first glance Bellini’s sumptuous Madonna and Child seems unlikely source material for this series of abstract paintings, yet connections and allusions reveal themselves.. As in the Bellini, colour is a rich and allegorical component. Horizontal and vertical axes (the ‘implied cross’ composition of Christ symbolism) in both works become apparent, as do some of the tonal and textural qualities of background and drapery. The line created by the Christ child’s plump leg leading us to Bellini’s signature now becomes a diagonal black line defining the golden triangle in the lower right corner of the work, pointing to the work’s title written by McCahon in small capitals. McCahon has also replicated Bellini’s celebrated parapet seen in The Alzano Madonna, the compositional device that acts as a low barrier in the foreground of many of Bellini’s images of the Madonna and Child intended for private devotion. In many paintings, Bellini conspicuously placed his signature on this parapet, as does McCahon, using his initials here. More than just a convenient spot to place the pear – considered a symbol of virginity – the red marble parapet creates an illusion of three-dimensional space, functioning as a visual enticement for the viewer to look beyond, and into the painting.
Most striking about the work is the geometric blocks that make up the composition and the way the vertical and horizontal are split with a diagonal/triangular overlay. Here we might imagine McCahon extracting the abstraction he sensed in Bellini’s original. Painted between 1961 and 1962, The Bellini Madonna series came shortly after McCahon’s transformative trip to America in late 1958, a trip that shifted his practice in response to American abstraction. It is possible to imagine the green brocade curtain that hangs behind Bellini’s Madonna and Child translated into the top-left block of McCahon’s work, its texture brought out in colours of ash, charcoal and golden ochre. The soft modulating of light and dark in the lower left block – palpable, fleshy and warm in meaty pink and smudgy brown tones beneath a sky-blue triangle – derives from the marbled drapery seen in the cuff of the Madonna’s robe, and the red marble parapet. It also alludes to the suffering that will ensue for the Christ Child. “Here in the red marbling, Christ’s blood becomes a sunset, with the white light of a sunlit rainstorm below. Within the ‘sunset’, Colin uses the ‘crescent moon’ wound symbol that Bellini used when portraying the dead Christ,” William McCahon commented of The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version).² Dominating most of the right-hand side of the painting is the velvety black that would become so familiar in McCahon’s later religious works – the unknowable, the void, God.
The divisions between blocks and diagonals in The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version) are not so much defined by colour, but by McCahon exploiting line and light to section the pictorial plane. Light is symbolic, of course, both for Bellini and McCahon. Bellini’s use of light, in particular the shadowing behind the Madonna’s head and shoulders, places the figures in our world, suggesting the earthly reality of this divine vision. This shadow must be cast from a light source to the front and right of the figures, that’s to say from outside the frame, where we, the viewers, exist. The same light that illuminates them illuminates us, binding secular and divine. For McCahon, who explored and grappled with questions of faith and doubt throughout his life and practice, imagery of darkness and light in the Christian tradition was deeply significant and often employed. The Bellini Madonna became geometric abstractions into which he poured his broader message.
In her essay from the publication for the exhibition A Question of Faith, Stedelijk Museum curator Marja Bloem describes how, in deciding which work to select for the first European retrospective of Colin McCahon and how to present his practice, “…it became apparent that landscape and religion or, more accurately, the spiritual – but also humanist – message conveyed by the language of the Christian Bible, are constant factors in his life and work.” McCahon’s relationship with Christianity was complex and multifaceted.. McCahon remained, in the words of his son William, a “homeless Christian”. As an exhibition, A Question of Faith focused on the artist's ongoing spiritual quest, demonstrating how McCahon explored questions of faith, doubt, hope, and eventually despair, in his practice. While visual clues could be ambiguous, there were always signs for the spiritually cognisant. However, even in the paintings offering more obvious clues, McCahon’s audience didn’t seem to understand his paintings as vehicles for spiritual thought, a foundational theme of his practice. “No one seems to know what I’m on about, it amazes me, no one seems to know that I’m painting Christ,”³ McCahon told an interviewer in 1980.
Painted in 1961, The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version) comes shortly after McCahon’s first Gate series, a body of work that contended with the formal challenges and opportunities abstraction offered. The series reflected the artist’s meditations on the world around him and the obstacles to human progress and happiness he saw as posed by the nuclear threat of the time. McCahon described the paintings as a "way through" for humanity, presenting an abstract discourse through which to critique and construct contemporary culture. Gate 15 (1961) and another work from the same year, Here I Give Thanks to Mondrian, show strong compositional similarities with The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version), including geometric blocks, diagonal shifts, enhanced spatial dynamics and triangular corners. Here I Give Thanks to Mondrian sees McCahon paraphrasing Mondrian’s geometric shapes but with softened portions and angularity, and a muted tonal palette. McCahon has added painterly texture, the handwritten dedication in his own distinctive script, and the blended outlines seen in the first Gate series. McCahon deeply admired the abstract painter Piet Mondrian and believed that the artist had achieved paintings that “beat like, and with, a human heart.”
In her book The Spirit of Colin McCahon, which focuses on the religious dimension of his art, author Zoe Alderton contends that “…Mondrian inspired McCahon to structure his works in a way that would give them inner life.” Spirituality and the abstract may not be the odd bedfellows first glance would have them be. Wassily Kandinsky, like other artists at the end of the 19th century, saw art as a new religion. In his 1912 essay “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, Kandinsky equated representational art with materialism. He saw abstraction as a language that was not only capable of expressing deeper truth but also of communicating it to all five senses we possess. Indeed, in the 1986 exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, American curator Maurice Tuchman asserted that the “genesis and development of abstract art were inextricably tied to spiritual ideas current in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Known as a radical abstractionist, Mondrian is also regarded as a spiritual painter, and many writers have explored mystical content in abstraction, seeing grids as spiritual thresholds.
McCahon grappled with Mondrian, commenting, “Mondrian, it seemed to me, came up in this century as a great barrier – the painting to END all painting. As a painter, how do you get around either a Michelangelo or a Mondrian? It seems that the only way is not more ‘masking tape’ but more involvement in the human situation.” This shift from perfection to connection defined McCahon’s practice. Like Mondrian, his desire to express a spiritual essence to the viewer through his work, and communicate the universal questions and concerns of humanity, led to a simplification of composition in which line, shape and colour are significant. In this sense, The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version) is a distillation of Bellini’s Christian symbolism and an exploration of how meaning can be communicated with sparse means. Both traditionalist and radical innovator, McCahon dared to ask humanity’s big questions, those of doubt and of faith, of hope and despair, with simple form. The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version) is a remarkable work, offering substance and engagement with spiritual matters without the easy handrails offered by the figures, narratives and texts of McCahon’s career output.
1 Gordon H. Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist (Wellington, NZ: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1984), 35.
2 William McCahon, “The First Bellini Madonna (Second Version),” (unpublished essay, January 2002) as quoted in Marja Bloem and Martin Browne, Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith (Nelson, NZ and Amsterdam, Netherlands: Craig Potton Publishing and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2002), np.
3 Ibid., 50.
4 Carel Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction (London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2001), np.
