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There is a great photograph, from 1940, of Leo Bensemann
and two contemporaries morris-dancing on a tennis court
in Nelson. In the background some bewildered onlookers
wonder what on earth they are witnessing. This image,
reproduced in Mark Stocker’s book on another of that
jangling, twinkle-toed morris-dancing company, Francis
Shurrock, highlights a maverick, eccentric,
inexplicable, unabashed but not much talked about spirit
in New Zealand art. It leads me to think that, alongside
the haka, morris-dancing might be given more
consideration as a valid manifestation of cultural
formation, identity and expression in this country.
Like morris-dancing, Bensemann’s art has seemed—until
recently, anyway—not exactly fashionable. Too European,
maybe. Too off-the-wall. His canvases fit awkwardly into
accepted notions of New Zealand painting and it is a
madness peculiar to this country that we have never
taken fine art printmaking seriously.
Bensemann is, in some respects, an outsider in New
Zealand arts and letters yet, paradoxically, he was on
the surface of it an insider. He was involved in The
Group and, over a period of forty years, the Caxton
Press. He was, you could say, well-placed but, as a
practitioner, also strangely absent or, at least,
elusive. Clearly, Bensemann devoted huge amounts of
energy to the presentation and publication of work by
others. Holding only four solo exhibitions during his
life, he worked away from the limelight—a subscriber to
Aldous Huxley’s notion that: ‘Genuineness only thrives
in the dark, like celery.’
Two qualities strike me in Bensemann’s WOOD ENGRAVINGS,
neither of them typical of New Zealand art. The first is
an intense attraction to the fantastical and the second
a respect for, indeed love of, traditions of
craftsmanship. These two things: fantasy and craft
together generate a certain tension: fantasy is
unbridled flight, a heightened state, delirium – whereas
craftsmanship is predicated on patience, restraint,
meeting the demands of what was and is, in this case, a
very demanding medium. The end result, the new book,
accommodates such refinement and intensity, just as it
contains the lyrical alongside the Gothic.
Rather than devoting thousands of words to shoehorning
Bensemann into some orderly role within the canon as it
stands, Peter Simpson, with great sensitivity and sound
judgement, presents the work itself. He leaves it up to
the canon to accommodate Bensemann. The work is the
thing. And that’s why this production is not only
compelling but appropriate. Printed from original
blocks, the images are rendered as fresh and persuasive
as ever, by-product of a living tradition of fine press
printing.
It the adjectives ‘illustrative’ and ‘imaginative’ have
in the past been terms of derision in New Zealand art,
Bensemann’s wood engravings reclaim and recast them.
Stating the case for a different set of priorities, his
work is a key component in a largely unacknowledged
tradition of High Gothic in New Zealand art.
A few years ago I wrote a piece in the literary journal
SPORT linking James K. Baxter’s early poetry with Peter
Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS. I included reproductions of
two Bensemann pictures in that essay as evidence of an
ongoing strand of northern-European-derived Gothic in
New Zealand culture. A tradition spanning Van der
Velden’s canvases to Vincent Ward’s THE NAVIGATOR to
Tony Fomison to Bill Hammond. Most recently we have the
tattoo parlour Gothic of Tony De Lautour and Jason Grieg.
I can imagine Bensemann as a kind of artistic
grandfather to this recent anarchic crew, encouraging
their high-octane, theatrical productions. Julia Morison
is another in this Gothic counter-tradition—and it is
apposite that Bensemann published early work by her in
LANDFALL when he was editor in 1975.
Indications are that the country’s art history is
starting to come around to acknowledging Bensemann’s
relevance. His work presents as Peter Simpson puts it,
‘the dark side of the moon as compared to the bland
unambiguous face of New Zealand “regional realism”.’
With contemporary practitioners filing in behind him,
perhaps we are moving towards an alternative nationalism
that can be as gnomic and maverick as it wants to; that
can be extravagant, alchemical and, on occasion, even
diabolical.
It occurs to me that the pleasures in Bensemann’s works
are, specifically, those that differentiate it from the
work of, say, McCahon and Woollaston. There is an almost
decadent use of line, a sharpness, a musical cadence to
the forms: The art is more Beardsley than Cezanne. There
is an operatic love of gesture and theatre—and also an
inherent belief that, as well as being obsessive,
fastidious work, art is unabashed play—as images in this
book like DANCING DWARF and BALL DANCE attest.
Against the prevailing dourness and puritanism of New
Zealand art, Leo Bensemann’s art is a pagan dance of
sorts. If in recent times the New Zealand landscape has
had a Christian or Maori spirituality laid like Ready
Lawn across it, Bensemann proposes a different
earth-mysticism—one imbued with magic, strangeness and
euphoria rather than Jansenist gloom. The landscape
paintings of his last years play this out.
Poetry. Mysticism. Play. Anarchy, Beauty. All are
contained in the book WOOD ENGRAVINGS, printed by
handpress maestro Tara McLeod. He has made a fine job of
it. The shade of Bensemann who, in the best Gothic
sense, is—I am sure--with us today must be inexpressibly
happy.
One final point: Peter Simpson in his introduction
quotes Eric Gill on the merits of wood-engraving
which—in Gill’s words—‘does away with several sets of
middle men and places responsibility upon the shoulders
of the workman. The workman who draws, engraves and
prints his own blocks is master of the situation.’
In the instance of the new book, I have to stand up for
Eric Gill’s blighted ‘middle men’. Of course middle men
were necessary for this posthumous project, chief among
them Tara McLeod and Peter Simpson himself. Both have
worked in the spirit of Bensemann and with the kind of
unerring attentiveness and craft he would have. They are
also masters of the situation, and we have the
two of them as well as the artist himself to thank.
I commend the book, this phantasmagoria, to you—the
latest in a marvellous sequence of books from a press
which is, I can assure you, the envy of other emerging
university handpresses in the country.
And now, in the spirit of Leo Bensemann, let us all get
out our handkerchieves, gather in a circle, raise our
knees together and join in a commemorative morris-dance…
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