'Te Puhi o te tai Haruru', 1984-85
Acknowledgements
Copyright Reproduced courtesy of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Creator
Tony Fomison, artist, 1984-85
Identifiers
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa number 2003-0013-1
TLF resource R4412
Source
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, http://www.tepapa.govt.nz
Description
This is an oil painting on hessian on board, created in 1984-85 by New Zealand artist Tony Fomison
(1939-90). It is a large, horizontal composition with two Polynesian faces in the foreground and middle
ground, and a coastal landscape in the right background. The larger portrait fills the left third of the
canvas, and is cropped severely so that it appears in extreme close-up. In the lower middle of the
canvas there is a head-and-shoulders portrait of a younger Māori woman. Behind and above her is a
large overhanging rock frontage, while in the background to the right are sea, coastline and sky. The
work measures 90.5 cm x 181.7 cm.
Educational value
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This asset is an example of the work of one of New Zealand's significant 20th-century
painters, perhaps best known for his figurative work and dark-hued palette - this large work
uses a compressed sense of space within the composition to characterise a particular unease.
It is representative of many of Tony Fomison's interests - it draws on his longstanding
ambition to make mural-sized 'apocalyptic' paintings of history in New Zealand, his interest in
Māori rock drawings and his 'sense of a burgeoning biculturalism'.
It comes as close as Fomison ever does to depicting a particular place - it is set on a shore
line in Taranaki (on the west coast of the North Island) where he also studied Māori rock
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drawings; the feathers worn by the female figure refer to the Taranaki people of Te Whiti o
Rongomai (a 19th-century Māori leader renowned for his pacifist resistance to European
settlement); Fomison imagined the ancestors of this place, and sought to confront his
audiences with this tangible, powerful past.
It illustrates his attitude towards the use of preEuropean Māori rock drawings by contemporary
artists - in 1959, Fomison worked for Canterbury Museum making tracings of rock drawings in
South Canterbury in the South Island, but he was critical of European artists who used the
drawings as the basis for their own creative work; Fomison made it clear that his landscapes
do not have any literal reference to the rock drawings.
It illustrates Fomison’s belief that 'In pre-pakeha times at least, art was too sacred for casual
use ... none but a craftsman in the service of his ancestors was free to render the sacred
spiral in a more permanent form'; rather than copy the actual markings directly from these
Māori rock drawings which inspired him, Fomison imagines the people who made them.
It is the largest of a number of paintings Fomison made about the 'handing on' of ancestral
knowledge - the female Puhi figure can be seen as the daughter of a chief looking to her
ancestors for guidance.
It is the work of a painter who has been called a New Zealand expressionist - while he has
little in common with European expressionists, he has been associated with the Australians
Boyd, Nolan and Williams, although his work is less openly decorative.
© Curriculum Corporation and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 2006, except where
indicated under Acknowledgements
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