Last chance to see Elvis before he leaves the building

2026-01-28 - 16:04

Opinion: For a limited time only! Until February 8 visitors to the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki can enjoy one of the greatest selections of international art ever assembled in Aotearoa – courtesy of the intersection of The Robertson Gift: Paths to Modernity which concludes its two-year run in early February and Pop to Present: American Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (until March 15). These two shows combine in a mega-watt display of iconic European and American modern and contemporary art. For art history students, who have grown up on a diet of VHS-era reference books, these 80-plus arrivals in Aotearoa, here at last, in the flesh, are the real deal. And it’s a genuine pinch-yourself moment. Major works by Mondrian, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso from the Robertson Gift seamlessly meet canvases at scale by American post World War II heavyweights Rothko, Twombly, Frankenthaler and Guston from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in a transatlantic hit parade that will linger long in local art fans memory banks. Andy Warhol, Triple Elvis, 1963, silkscreen ink, silver paint, and spray paint on linen, gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis, 85.453. © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency, 2025. © ABG EPE IP LLC. Andy Warhol’s Triple Elvis from 1963 is a prime example of the star power at the Auckland Art Gallery right now. Cowboy Presley draws his six-gun into the gallery space and asserts his leading man machismo. It’s one of dozens of multi-million dollar artworks: a painting of a celebrity, by a celebrity, that’s a celebrity in its own right. The pulling power of Warhol and Elvis provides the frisson of art as spectacle rarely seen on these shores. And then there is the big daddy of them all: Pablo Picasso. Paths to Modernity begins elegantly, in late 19th century France, with a sweet still life of pink roses by one of Impressionism’s quiet achievers, Henri Fantin-Latour. Similar works are held in the collections of the Louvre and the Musée D’Orsay. A bucolic landscape by Paul Gauguin, a Ballerina by Edgar Degas and a water lillies canvas by Claude Monet are interspersed with period-correct works from the Auckland Art Gallery collection including a nude by Charles Goldie, dating to the 1890s, from his Parisian sojourn. Henri Fantin-Latour, Roses [Roses], 1875, installation view, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of Julian and Josie Robertson through the Auckland Art Gallery Foundation, 2023. Photo: David St George, 2024. Paths to Modernity then segues into the early 20th century with a portrait set on the Côte D’Azur by Henri Matisse and another of New Zealand’s émigre artist Frances Hodgkins by British painter Cedric Morris – delightful entrees to two show-stoppers by Picasso, Femme à la résille (Woman in a Hairnet, 1938) and Mère aux enfants à l’orange (Mother and Children with an Orange, 1951). Both paintings mash up foundational movements of the 20th century, namely cubism and surrealism, with an added dose of Mediterranean colour and a soupçon of the Renaissance portrait to dazzling effect. “Who sees the human face correctly: The photographer, the mirror or the painter?” was a question posed by Picasso. His response, in the form of Femme and Mère aux enfants, sits at the heart of ‘the modern’ as an idea in art. As one casts an eye around Paths to Modernity, at say the early cubism of Georges Braque, or the ‘Tubism’ of Fernand Léger and his glorification of the ‘whirr, hiss and churn of well-running machinery’ in the canvas The Pistons of 1918, the ‘Brave New World’ of modernity surrounds us with new ways of seeing. These artists couldn’t wait to get to the future. Fernand Léger, Les Pistons (The Pistons), 1918, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of Julian and Josie Robertson through the Auckland Art Gallery Foundation, 2023. Léger’s canvas embodies ‘The Shock of the New’ as Australian critic Robert Hughes dubbed modernism in his legendary 1980 TV series. This is art as an exhilarating ride to a new utopia, summarised in the wall text for Les Pistons as the artist’s ‘sincere optimism for modern society’. Neither World War I nor the depression of the 1920s, or even the Russian revolution, could blunt modern art’s progress via the bewildering array of stylistic variations on display for another few weeks at Toi o Tāmaki – from the subconscious unleashed via the surrealism of Salvador Dali and Eileen Agar (her evocation of ancient belief systems in the 1938 mixed media work Tree of Knowledge is a highlight) to the simplest geometric abstraction of a Ben Nicholson canvas, simply, if ominously, titled 1939. Paths to Modernity articulates the giddy forward momentum of modernism. Art of the 20th century then runs headlong into the roadblock of World War II. At the conclusion of that epochal conflict in 1945, the centre had shifted. Post-Hiroshima, we had arrived well and truly in the American Century. The pre-war ‘isms’ of Europe – Fauvism, Vorticism and Futurism –were replaced by movements generated in the new art capital of New York: Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art being the two most represented by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts collection. Modernism was defined by an avant-garde pioneering novel ways of explaining new realities, on the one hand responding to the challenge of photography as the provider of visual ‘truth’ and on the other exhilarated by the explosive and generative power of technological inventions such as the car, the plane and, most exciting of all, electricity. But World War II, the Nazis and the destructive power of the atom bomb shrouded all that optimism with mechanised death on an epic scale. As Pop to Present reveals post-war art faced a monolithic adversary: mass media. The rise of popular culture: cinema, magazines and comics as the eye-candy of choice for the average punter threw shade on art, and though mostly gaudy, filled the spiritual void of