The paintings by Patricia France and Ralph Hotere, the small Paul Beadle bronze sculpture and the four Marti Friedlander photographs were all part of Marti and Gerrard Friedlander’s art collection, much of which was sold back in 2018. Marti Friedlander (1928-2016) and Ralph Hotere (1931-2013) were friends, and she took many photographs of him. They had several paintings and drawings by Hotere, one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed artists, about whose work much has been written.Untitled, Port Chambers Painting exemplifies strikingly Hotere’s innovative use of materials, steel, acrylic and an old window frame, to visualise anew a topical situation.

Friedlander also photographed Patricia France (1911-1995), a close friend of Hotere’s, who lived in Dunedin. Her paintings appealed strongly. The Friedlanders had five of France’s enigmatic, faux-naive figurative images; dreamlike, mysterious, compelling, which both invite and elude interpretation.

The exquisite bronze angel by Paul Beadle (1917-1992) hung on their dining room wall for many years. Beadle was undoubtedly one of the most highly accomplished sculptors and medallists to have lived in New Zealand, though his works are now little-seen in public. The Friedlanders knew Beadle well. He belonged to the same Auckland social and cultural milieu during the 1960s and 1970s and she photographed him too. Beadle was the first Professor of Fine Arts at Auckland University and showed his finely crafted work at the New Vision Gallery and throughout the world.

The subjects of the four photographs make up a diverse group. James K. Baxte (1926-1972) was born and spent his early years in Dunedin. One of New Zealand’s best known poets and social provocateurs, this riveting image was made from a negative in Auckland in the mid-1960s. Friedlander had photographed Baxter from above in a room where he sat by a table, on which various small object were arranged as if for a still-life. This image was radically cropped from that negative, so that we see only Baxter’s face and head filling the frame. The close-up, in effect, enables us to probe beneath the surface of this complicated man.

The photograph of the artist, writer and film maker,Joanna Paul (1945-2003) was taken in Dunedin, where she was then living. It was one Friedlander’s favourite portraits. She liked Paul alot. According to Friedlander, Paul was a very introspective person, whose art wasn’t getting much attention at the time. The portrait is a virtuoso orchestration of light and shadowed passages. Paul, meditative, looks almost embraced by the couch; the interior an enclosure, as if the outside world is far away.

The image of the colonial period house at Puhoi, taken from outside its gate, was also one of Friedlander’s favourites. It was included in her and James McNeish’s Larks in a Paradise: Portraits of New Zealand (1974). Gates, of course, are thresholds. Once open, we could move towards the semi-distant house’s man on the veranda and dark doorway. He and what is inside are not known – a visual metaphor, perhaps, from Friedlander’s experience of rural New Zealand; an immigrant exploring what was strange to her. The colour photograph of the Japanese school girl has only ever been exhibited once (in 2009) and reproduced in my Marti Friedlander (2009). It was one of a large number (c. 500) taken for a planned book on Japan by English writer, Jacqueline Simms, with whom Friedlander travelled in Japan. The book, though, never eventuated. Thus, Friedlander’s Japanese photographs remained unseen and mostly unprinted, except for this smiling child in a narrow alley; the promise of a land and people new to the photographer.

LEONARD BELL

The Marti & Gerrard Friedlander Collection