Editorial

The last few months have seen the fulfilment of several well-laid plans to make art from these shores better known abroad.

In August - September the exhibition ANZART: Australian & New Zealand Artists in Edinburgh was shown at the Edinburgh College of Art: concurrent with the Colin McCahon exhibition at the Talbot Rice Art Centre, Old College, University of Edinburgh.

There is some difference of opinion among artists and patrons about the relative merits of spending public money on showing art out of the country as against exhibitions and publications that contribute directly here to our own society: but however the debate may run, no-one can help feeling encouraged by the recognition of our present day talent, or appreciation of treasures from the past, in the established art centres of Europe and America.

In the next issue we will be covering the presence of the New Zealanders - painters, performance artists, film-makers - in Edinburgh.

From the riches of past Maori art, the exhibition Te Maori: Maori Art from New Zealand Collections (offering what is perhaps finally New Zealand's strongest claims to a place in World Art) opened ceremoniously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in September. The American response has been beyond all expectations; and there will be some pages on this, too, in the summer number.

At the same time as the Met exhibition, a few contemporary New Zealand artists were showing at various private galleries in New York. (This came about initially as a result of the efforts of Mary Evangelista who visited us last winter.)

In the present issue we survey the work of some newer artists in Art in Dunedin, and in New Women Artists at the Govett-Brewster. Both these exhibitions featured sculpture: elsewhere two individual sculptors are considered - in the article on Peter Nicholls based on his recent retrospective exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery; and in a piece on a motif in the recent work of Terry Stringer: Tables/Tableaux.

Also here exhibitions from two public galleries are considered: Aspects of New Zealand Art 1890 - 1940, from the National Gallery, Wellington; and the collection of contemporary painters Anxious Images, from the Auckland City Art Gallery. In Full Circle: Paintings by Melvin Day, a survey exhibition of a well-known Wellington painter, shown in the Wellington City Art Gallery is discussed.

An article by Michael Dunn deals with some remarkable and too-little-known photographs made by Theo Schoon in the thermal regions around Rotorua. In an essay on Lance-Sergeant John Williams an important topographical artist in the land wars of the last century, Roger Blackley sorts out some conflicting attributions.

Finally, we publish here notes on an informal discussion between three film-makers about their current work, Documentary Cinema in the Making; and a piece on a Gisborne printmakers group by Gordon H. Brown.

As we went to press the death was announced in Auckland of Lois White at the age of eighty-one. She was the last in a generation of artists that included John Weeks, James Turkington, Ida Eise and others, and it may be remembered that in Art New Zealand we published an interview and some works. It is to be hoped that one of the public galleries will soon see its way to mounting a major exhibition of this painter whose oeuvre was so evocative of a whole period of New Zealand Art.