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Featured artist: Colin McCahon

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Hocken Digital Collections

The Virgin and Child compared

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Accession Number20,924CreatorMcCahon, Colin, 1919-1987 (Colin John)Date1948

Description

Media & Sizeoil on canvas on board, 1053 x 805mmInscriptionsl.r. with brush: McCahon Nov ’48; through image with brush: the Blessed Virgin Compared to a jug of pure Water and the infant Jesus to a lampDescriptionMarried and living with his wife and young son near Nelson in the late forties, Colin McCahon (1919-87) turned from depicting landscapes to Christian imagery. By synthesising disparate elements -- portraiture, still-life, and words -- McCahon emphasised that his works had a message.
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The purity and innocence of childhood are memorialised in this post-war work, but it also carries art historical and cinematic references. The Virgin Compared, McCahon revealed, owed its being to the grisly sixteenth-century German painter Grünewald and to ‘that cruel and beautiful film, Open City’. Director Rossellini explained his aim there as showing that acts of heroism and human kindness obviously spring from faith, and the brutalities of war from cynicism and absence of moral code.
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McCahon’s work was often ridiculed when exhibited and proved difficult to sell. The religious paintings, in particular, attracted derisory comments from critics, such as A.R.D. Fairburn, who described them as being like ‘graffiti on the walls of some celestial lavatory’.

Charles Brasch, who had this painting in his own collection, in 1950 reproduced it in Landfall, a literary journal which he also used to promote artists. Very few understood McCahon’s need to ‘map the relationship between man and his God’, as John Caselberg described it, but without such support McCahon would not have continued painting.ProvenanceGiven by Dr Charles Brasch, Dunedin, 1963Caption Courtesy of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust.CitationColin McCahon, 1919-1987, The Virgin and Child compared, 1948, oil on canvas on board, 1053x805mm, given by Dr Charles Brasch, Dunedin, 1963, 20, 924, Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago.
Reproduction courtesy of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust

Depicts Or Relates To

NamesBrasch, Charles Orwell, 1909-1973 SubjectsVirgin MaryJesus ChristAllegorical PaintingsReligious WorksChristianity

CollectionFeatured artist: Colin McCahon

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The Virgin and Child compared

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