Monuments to patience

The late Francis Pound's homage to one of our greatest painters is a magnificent mystery story told by a master.

- BRIAN BOYD

Francis Pound writes: "It has long been my experience that when we New Zealanders want to show something of our art to visitors from Europe, we show them McCahon. But what they want to see is Walters." I myself would prefer to take visitors to see the work of carver Pataromu Tamatea or later Robin White or Gordon Walters of any period, from the Koru series to before and after. And I would feel the more confident in doing so from all I have learned from Pound's magnificent, magisterial Gordon Walters.

This mighty monograph is an art history masterclass, the most in-depth study of an unfolding artistic imagination this country has produced. You can enjoy its 429 illustrations as a vivid record of Walters' development, achievement and influences, his groping in what would turn out to be "only one direction", to cite Colin McCahon and the title of Peter Simpson's first volume in his fine study of McCahon. But you can enjoy the illustrations vastly more, for all the immediate impact of Walters' best work, early and late - from 1947 to 1995 - by understanding the artist's context and his continual struggle toward his own private standards of perfection, his inventive and "sumptuous" austerities, his static dynamism.

Pound makes you see Walters' works and their contexts, international, local and personal, their intense seriousness and intense but calm play. He dives deep, as Walters did, and takes us with him, further than we thought we could go. He wants "to put Walters' work before the reader in all of its variety and complexity", and he does. He could have added "and in all of its interconnectedness".