CHARLES F GOLDIE

CF Goldie
CHARLES F GOLDIE
http://www.mcdougall.org.nz/archive/goldie.html

1870 - 1947

INTRODUCTION

The PATEA MAORI CLUB, CARA PEWHAIRANGI, MOANA MANIAPOTO JACKSON myself and many more of New Zealand’s top Maori entertainers were privileged to star in the Television spectacular ‘TE HOKINGA MAI’ the concert. The show’s director Derek Wooster rang me and asked me what I thought of the title for the show and the beautiful song "TE HOKINGA MAI" by the PAKI PAKI SCHOOL. I told him what an awesome tribute to the many people involved with the negotiations for the exhibition to tour America, and now that they and our Treasures were returning home the song was appropriate as a dedication to the curators of the exhibition and more importantly the TAONGA themselves. The late MAUI POMARE and DAVID SIMMONS were two of those fortunate people involved with assembling the many pieces along with Professor SIDNEY MOKO MEAD It was while the exhibition was in New York at the Metropolitan that MAUI and Professor MEAD visited the AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY to request that the ROBLEY collection of MOKOMOKAI be taken off display. Professor MEAD even threatened to ship busloads of Maori down from the MET to protest outside of the AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.

TE MAORI had been very much a part of my tribe's lives. Members of the PATEA MAORI CLUB were in the first concert party which accompanied the Exhibition to New York, Our late Kaumatua SONNY WARU, HOANI HEREMAIA, and RUKA BROUGHTON were also in New York. The PATEA MAORI CLUB and myself attended the Exhibition in St Louis. Although the focus was on the carvings and the other superb Taonga I always wondered why the portraits of GOLDIE, LINDAUER, and ROBLEY were not included in an accompanying exhibition to compliment the Taonga. All over New York in selected Gallery’s contemporary art both Maori and Pakeha was given a showcase. To this day I say it was an opportunity missed. Maybe by having this exhibition running in syncronicity with TE MAORI, museum boards in America who have our KO IWI, TOI MOKO, MOKOMOKAI in their collections would understand the beauty of what they have in their possession and the total reverence and respect we have to what they hold. GOLDIE like LINDAUER and ROBLEY captured the true essence and mana of TA MOKO. If we succumb to our colonisation and bury these treasures should we have the fortune to have the real items returned to us, all we will have left to remind us of our truly unique art are the paintings and sketches by pakeha old art masters to replace our own.

When the TE MAORI – TE HOKINGA MAI exhibition opened at the Auckland City Art Gallery I like many New Zealanders was struck by the GOLDIE’S on display in synchronicity with TE MAORI.

Why was this not done in America? GOLDIE like his contemporaries realised the beauty and Mana of TA MOKO. (Do a link here please to http://www.culture.co.nz/expressions/tamoko/index.htm)The fact that many Maori willingly posed for his brush and canvas did so knowing their image was being captured for perpetuity. In retrospect do we compare the preservation of the UPOKO, TOI MOKO, MOKOMOKAI resplendent in MOKO with the preservation of that same image captured by the brush of ROBLEY, LINDAUER, and GOLDIE? Both were mediums of conservation and preservation and are as significant then as they are now. In June 1999 I once again viewed the GOLDIE collection at TE PAPA TONGAREWA. If only foreign curators, ethnologists, and anthropologists could see GOLDIE’S genius. Maybe it would not be too painful for them to give back what are so rightfully ours, the real thing. The canvas and paintbrush are comparable to the mallet and chisel, both tools of trade used to capture and fashion images. Where the art of the pakeha was still and inanimate, Our art walked, talked and breathed. We believed by preserving the head long after the breath of life had departed that our art form lived on in reproducing those walking images in carvings of wood, pounamu and stone. When we paid out respect to that departed ancestor who was and still is a daily activity in Maori society; we were in fact reanimating the ancestor back into the world of the living. The Tohunga, artisans, who carved MOKO into living flesh, were just as relevant as the artisan who sought to preserve that art after death. Like LINDAUER, ROBLEY and GOLDIE their art in Maori society was ‘Old master, Classic, and Academic, after all they too learnt their craft in Wananga, taught to them by their Tohunga, their masters.

Na Maui Dalvanius Prime.

Director MOKOMOKAI the Documentary.

Author MOKOMOKAI the Book.



GOLDIE is probably New Zealand’s best-known artist. A constant stream of newspaper reports, documenting record shattering prices, thefts, vandalisms and forgeries has fed his popular fame. Descendants of GOLDIE’S models revere the depictions of their ancestors, while others have denounced the paintings as documents of colonial racism. Yet the story of the artist and his career is embedded in a thick accretion of myth, where dubious anecdotes rub shoulders with strongly apposing opinions.

The mystique surrounding GOLDIE and his art works is unparalleled in New Zealand art. Researching an Article for the Woman's Weekly in 1958, Florence Roberts found it difficult to trace accurate information about the artist and his career. GOLDIE did a great service in recording the Maori of his day it seems that no one has done him a similar service.

The art establishment firmly turned their back on the artist, regarding the New Zealand public’s fixation with his work as one more unfortunate element of popular taste that required correction. GOLDIES artworks although fitfully on display, were usually found in the storeroom of the Auckland City Art Gallery. I remember DAVID SIMMONS and the late MAUI POMARE proclaiming GOLDIE’S genius. When I first approached them to be a part of my Documentary they said emphatically LINDAUER and GOLDIE paintings made the MOKO on his subjects leap out at you from the canvas. When the TE MAORI art exhibition returned home from its record breaking American tour in 1987, the sizeable Maori viewing audience highlighted the radically conflicting attitudes towards GOLDIE and his works. The contrast between the respect expressed by many Maori and the widespread denigration on the part of the ‘politically correct’. PAKEHA. Even more fascinating were the gulf between ‘informed’ or ‘expert’ opinion and the enthusiasms of the public at large, as recorded in the gallery’s visitor's book.

The massive controversy that erupted late in 1999 over the National Art Gallery’s $900,000 acquisition of two important GOLDIE paintings graphically demonstrated GOLDIES paradoxical status: a painter of immense popularity familiar to both Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders whose precise value as an artist seemed decidedly uncertain. GOLDIE is New Zealand’s ‘old Master’. Museum’s and individual owners will continue to treasure his works, while his stature, as the country’s paramount academic painter of the early twentieth century will undoubtedly be re-evaluated by successive generations.