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Dreamland
by Douglas Lloyd Jenkins
The old weird New Zealand of Felix Kelly.
Felix Kelly (1914-94) once cancelled a gift subscription to North & South magazine, observing that he preferred the New Zealand he remembered to the somewhat gloomy, issue-fixated one the magazine reported. Yet, as Don Bassett’s new biography Fix: The Art & Life of Felix Kelly reveals, it is Kelly’s spectacular misremembering of New Zealand that empowers his paintings and provides the potential to liberate New Zealand art history from its sometimes all-too-dreary self.
Auckland-born, Kelly started out on his art career by leaving New Zealand probably aged 21. He was already prone to lying about his age and education. In London, he moved between design and art, advertising and painting. Much admired today, this manoeuvre saw many of Kelly’s generation of New Zealand designer/artists cast into the darkness of inauthenticity. The close association with mass media that today makes the contemporary versions of artists like Kelly relevant, used to spell a difficult compromise. Yet there is nothing compromised about Kelly’s work.
Bassett makes that clear, but also keeps the mix in Kelly’s work alive by dividing Fix into areas of concern: “Murals”, “Architecture”, “the Machine” and “Decoration”. The expat artist starts out with surrealism, is transformed into a neo-romantic, exhibits alongside Lucian Freud, attracts the attention of Herbert Read (who not only wrote the introduction to a monograph on Kelly but commissioned Kelly to illustrate his surreal novel The Green Child).
By the 1950s, Kelly specialised in a surreal retelling of the architectural heritage of Britain and had become a favourite artist to the aristocratic Englishman with a stately home and a taste for the modern. Kelly’s ultimate prize was a guest spot on Brideshead Revisited and an invitation to re-design Highgrove for the Prince of Wales.
Yet, unlike almost every other expat painter, Kelly refused to delete New Zealand from his subject matter, choosing instead to reinvent it in a series of paintings that, ironically, remain best-known by his British patrons. He specialised in what Bassett calls “architectural painting with full blown romantic nostalgia” and Kelly’s New Zealand paintings, such as West Coast Beach, New Zealand (1944), A New Zealand Childhood Remembered (1959) and New Zealand River Scene (1962), are melancholic romantic confections of spectacular individuality. In one of Kelly’s first important works, Early Lineswoman (1937), a woman dressed in a ball gown clambers over what is clearly the roof of a weatherboard villa while in the background an industrial structure looms. This is Grey Lynn – not as we know it, but as Kelly reinvents it.
Kelly’s choice of iconography was unusual, personal, yet somehow familiar – the Mon Desir Hotel in Auckland, Woodlands, a colonial confection in the Waikato, a distantly remembered ferry. A New Zealand Childhood Remembered, like most Kellys, is charmingly infectious, enticingly decorative and fantastical, even whimsical – all the things that the art produced in New Zealand in the 1940s and 50s could not afford to be. His paintings posed questions that the New Zealand art world of the 50s, obsessed with melding landscape and modernity, could not accommodate. Even more dangerously, his paintings illustrated just how intoxicating an image-maker the homosexual artist could be, something the New Zealand art world of the 50s could never have embraced.
Bassett’s timing is excellent. New Zealand art history needs someone like Kelly to mix things up and to complicate a sometimes overly heterogeneous story. In Britain, Kelly belongs aside his contemporaries Cecil Beaton, Rex Whistler, Oliver Messel and Edward James; their work is being reassessed in English galleries currently re-examining the importance of what was considered a British (and, worse, homosexual) byway in an art world with a global agenda. In New Zealand, Kelly belongs alongside Hodgkins and McIntyre at the head of a queue of 20th-century artists who deserve to be repatriated.
Fix is a work of highly readable scholarship, but more than that it has something important to say about the way we’ve come to perceive New Zealand art. It exposes just how tyrannous the limited range of acceptable New Zealand art was and to an extent just how limited it remains.
FIX: THE ART & LIFE OF FELIX KELLY, by Donald Bassett (Darrow Press, $75, http://www.darrowpress.com).
FIX: THE ART & LIFE OF FELIX KELLY, by Donald Bassett (Darrow Press, $75)
