Eclecticism and Continuities: A Thematic Approach to the Oeuvre of John Weeks

Abstract

John Weeks currently occupies a respected place in New Zealand art history, one predicated on his formalist emphases. However, his presence is muted and almost nominal. There are several reasons for his neglect, including the loss of around 200 works to fire late in his career. His diverse approach to art (with little work dated) also complicates straightforward assessment of his contribution. Nor does Weeks’ output at large straightforwardly meet with art history’s modernist or regionalist narratives. My research examines and reinstates Weeks’ career and significance by piecing together and closely examining six areas of sustained thematic enquiry through close visual analysis. These subjects emerge over (almost) the full course of his oeuvre and reveal him as a modern, subjective artist. This organisation allows a grasp of Weeks’ varied enquiry, the interconnections it entails, and a much firmer perspective on his development. His imagery, overall, can be better understood now, as parts of a larger whole. Five of the thematic areas I discuss are the primary subjects he explored: industry, still life, landscape, the female figure composition, and North Africa. The remaining chapter, titled “‘Strange Things’: Nature, Abstraction and the Imagination,” addresses, more directly, the artist’s interest in abstraction and intersecting notions of intuition, primitivism, the subconscious and chance. The chapters do not represent isolated currents of thought: there are inevitable overlaps between them. Weeks’ painting and drawing prior to 1929 is almost completely overlooked in published texts. I view this period as the early part of a continuum of preoccupations during his self-reflexive oeuvre. Weeks’ restless enquiry is sometimes noted but needs to be better understood through a wider but sharper lens that captures variations and marked departures, as well as continuities. Formal vocabularies are considered alongside a range of social aspects, including: biography, visual culture, political context and connotations, the representation of women in art, Orientalism, visual perception and cognition. An overarching thematic approach, rather than one predicated on the uncertain parameters of modernism or the ‘progressive’, reveals Weeks’ contribution as an original, knowledgeable force in New Zealand art history.