Works of Art - Ralph Hotere’s Requiem (B) (For Tony)
Ian Wedde ONZM, poet, curator, and editor of the monograph Ralph Hotere: Black Light, shares insights on Requiem (B) (For Tony); a recently rediscovered painting in the story of a friendship between painter Ralph Hotere and the late composer Anthony Watson. This cellulose lacquer and acrylic on hardboard hung in a civic building for over half a century. For the first time since it was created, this major painting is coming up for auction at Webb’s Works of Art.
A resumé: Ralph Hotere’s Requiem (B) (For Tony) (1973–74) has emerged after half a century as the missing quarter of a series believed until recently to consist of three works (A, C, D?). I’ve seen the other three up for sale: one in the online catalogue, Page Galleries Secondary Market, Requiem (1974), without an identifying capital letter; two more, also without capital letters, Requiem (1975) and Requiem [for Tony Watson] (1973), at Gow Langsford Gallery in the substantial exhibition Ralph Hotere: Requiem, 14 June – 8 July 2023. The 1975 Requiem stretches the date span of the Tony Watson homages, but this doesn’t impact on Requiem (B). It now seems that this additional, late-rediscovered work has been brought to market from its location outside the mayor’s office at South Waikato District Council. It may have been included in the solo exhibition Ralph Hotere 1970–73 at the Waikato Art Gallery under the collective title Requiem for Tony, but I’m unable to trace a complete works catalogue for this exhibition.
Webb’s Wellington gallery featuring the artworks for Ralph Hotere and several other artists from the Works of Art catalogue
Lot 43. Ralph Hotere, Requiem (B) (For Tony), 1973-74, cellulose lacquer and acrylic on hardboard, 1150 x 900mm. EST. $130,000—$180,000
A picture of the back of the frame of Requiem (B) (For Tony).
The current vendors inform us that the work was purchased by the Tokoroa Arts Trust (Waikato) in 1974; it therefore probably wasn’t included in the exhibition of the ‘Requiem’ series at Barry Lett Galleries, Auckland, 9–10 December 1974, or at Bosshard Gallery, Akaroa, in the same year. Hotere’s note for the Barry Lett exhibition states, “The Latin text is from Verdi’s Requiem – the Māori, a translation from the Psalms. This work is a tribute to Anthony [Watson], musician and composer 1933–1973.”1 The work’s history includes the fact that it was entered by Hotere in the Tokoroa Arts Society annual art competition, which it won. The Tokoroa Arts Trust purchased the work under the terms of the competition and, apparently as an insurance cost-recovery exercise, loaned it to the South Waikato District Council, where it was hung outside the mayor’s office. The work in its current presentation condition has a label at its base that reads, “Requiem for Tony/ Ralph Hotere/ Art Award Winner* 1974/ [partially illegible] Property of [Tokoroa Arts Trust]”. So, reading across these clues, it seems more than likely that the work did indeed escape the public record after its award and sale to the Tokoroa Arts Trust in 1974, given that it no longer had any commercial sale value to dealer galleries such as Barry Lett and Bosshard.
The thought of the work’s ‘disappeared’ life in an obscure civic corridor for just over half a century is an incentive to look closely at its individual characteristics, as well as at the ways in which it now rejoins a creative conversation within Hotere’s highly personalised explorations of painterly themes and variations. And the work’s emergence as a ‘recovered’ treasure is also, of course, a poignant factor in its contemporary value. I was reminded of the artist John Reynolds’ interview transcript in Ralph Hotere Black Light, where he remembers phoning Ralph in Carey’s Bay in 1991 and then responding to Ralph’s invitation to come down and meet. Reynolds’ description of the trip down to Dunedin, then out to Port Chalmers, and finally to Ralph’s place around at isolated Carey’s Bay, reads like a wonderfully apt account of the essential chemistry of Hotere’s work, for which the ‘disappeared’ Requiem is an analogue:
It’s that whole thing about approaching Ralph: there is always another little distance you have to travel, then around the corner, then just tangentially, then just up the hill. It’s not as if Ralph just lives in an isolated part of New Zealand, it’s actually an isolated part of an isolated part of New Zealand, which I now understand is essential, it makes sense in terms of his chemistry. … but then of course Ralph was tremendously welcoming. The moment you are in his house you have the use of everything.2
In addition, the label mentioned above appears to partially conceal a tag of some sort at the base of the frame, which may have originally been needed to pull the window down (unlikely). Other, unrelated, window works such as the ‘Black Windows’ of 1981/82 – including Black Window (Towards Aramoana) (1981) and Black Window, Port Chalmers (1982) – appear to hint at their outward points of view, though hardly on distant prospects.
Leaving aside the issue of inward or outward, but folding that teasing ambiguity into what’s legible in the complex and very beautiful surface of the painting, we encounter a number of effects. The frame’s content begins with a broad border of smooth black on the base and two sides, with a band of lightly scumbled grey across the top. This band introduces a simple, teasing sense of what/where ambiguity, as well as of surface or depth – what do the barely perceptible ‘wipes’ in the greyish band hint at by way of interference or engagement with the severe cropping of the black border? Are the complex visual effects below this band permitted entry by it – by its softening of the three-sided black border? Below this soft-focus grey band and seeming to pour from it is a descending, paler grey rectangle with barely perceptible effects in its surface. On this surface and increasing its sense of recess are vigorous black swirls bleeding out top-left and unravelling or weakening into the right and bottom margins of the black-band-enclosed space. These energetic, almost untidy effects have a strong narrative presence: they are ‘audible’ as they trail down and out to the right across the by-now-three-dimensional space of the painting.
This three-dimensionality – this sense of depth and orchestration – is next increased by effects simultaneously startling and serene: exquisitely orderly veils of precise, thin, down-pouring lines of colour, blue-grey on the right-hand side of the space, orange-red on the left, cross the surfaces of the untidy black swirls, but transparently, allowing the inflected hues of the background to show through.
The combined vitality and orchestrated serenity of these effects are, again, so close to music or speech that a viewer’s ‘entry’ to the work is almost in terms of listening and responding, of speaking or singing ‘along with’ the painting’s score. It’s a moving sense, like being within the engaged space of music that invites us to join, in the darkness of a disorderly grief that becomes the ground of, is incorporated into, an exquisite eulogy – ‘out there’ or ‘in here’ or both at once. In sum, an extraordinary contribution to the suite of tributes to a dearly loved composer and friend, Tony Watson.
FOOTNOTES
1 Ralph Hotere, Ian Wedde, Gwynneth Porter and John Walsh, Ralph Hotere Black Light: Major Works Including Collaborations with Bill Culbert (Te Papa Press and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2000), 116.
2 Hotere, Wedde, Porter and Walsh, Ralph Hotere Black Light, 4.
The winter 2025 edition of Webb's foremost art auction series, Works of Art offers an enviable selection of museum-quality pieces by some of the most seminal practitioners from New Zealand and beyond. Live auction is scheduled for Monday 28 July, 6.30pm in our Mount Eden Gallery.
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