Who was Christopher Perkins?
Looking for a New Country: Christopher Perkins in New Zealand Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, 6 November 2019–22 March curated by Christina Barton & Lachlan Taylor
All through the decade of our growing up, the black cloud of Nazi-ism had hung over Europe . . . Yet there was a dreamlike quality about those stories, as though they had happened long ago as well as far away. There was not only a great distance between us and Europe, but a time-span incomprehensible today. Ruth Park (1992)1
Looking for a New Country: Christopher Perkins in New Zealand offered an array of 30 or so paintings and drawings never before seen together and new for many viewers: portraits, Maori subjects, landscapes and cityscapes, scenes from urban life (a road gang, café, beach) and domestic life (homework), plus reproductions of the lost major oil paintings, Brickworks: Silverstream and Activity on the Wharf.
There were a few well-known pieces, such as Taranaki, Meditation and Maori Meeting, although most of Perkins’ New Zealand works, especially his accomplished drawings, have not had a public life here.2 Wall texts and captions made good use of quotations from his and others’ writings in an exhibition that enabled a comprehensive view of the range and variety of his work in New Zealand.
The English artist Christopher Perkins lived in New Zealand from 1929–33. Schooled at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, where his fellow students included prominent artists such as Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer and David Bomberg, he was recruited to teach at the Wellington Technical College. According to a close friend, Perkins envisaged New Zealand ‘in his enthusiasm as a temperate version of Gauguin’s Tahiti . . . [with] a vigorous native art. It was something of a shock therefore when he discovered on his arrival a strip of Victorian England When his teaching contract expired in 1931, Perkins and family shifted to Rotorua and then returned to England at the end of 1933.
