Art-related Encounters and Interactions: Contact and Exchange between New Zealand and the United States, 1955 to 1974

Abstract

From the mid-1950s, there was an acceleration in various forms of art-related interactions and encounters between New Zealand and the United States. These encompassed trips in both directions by people involved in the visual arts as well as a range of exhibitions, including several of modern American art that travelled to New Zealand. This thesis examines a selection of the most important of these that took place in the years from 1955 to 1974, with a particular focus on those initiated by, or involving, governments and institutions. Many of the interactions under investigation have never been looked at in any depth and the thesis utilises a range of primary source material to reconstruct them. In doing so, I demonstrate the complex combination of factors that prompted them, and explore their impacts and implications, showing how art-related interactions informed, and were informed by, broader artistic, political and institutional contexts. The thesis shows the importance of such interactions within what was a formative period in New Zealand art history and in the growth of the New Zealand arts scene, when the art gallery institution developed and New Zealand artists were looking further afield for inspiration. It also connects them to the period in which American art was coming to global prominence, and was increasingly distributed around the world. I argue that there was a clear link between art-related interactions and the political relationship between New Zealand and the United States that had developed as a result of World War II. In the aftermath of that war New Zealand shifted away from its traditional relationships with Great Britain, and aligned increasingly with the United States. More particularly, in the period under investigation, the fact that the two countries were allies in two major conflicts, the ongoing Cold War and the Vietnam War, impacted on and informed a number of the interactions that took place, demonstrating the complex links between socio-political factors and the art scene.