He was born in Pilsen (today Plzen), Bohemia, as the son of Hynek-Ignatz Lindauer, a gardener, and his wife Maria Schmid. For three years from the age of thirteen Lindauer was his father's apprentice, spending much time sketching flowers and plants. In 1855 he decamped, and supposedly walked, to Vienna to study at the Academy of Fine Arts under Leopold Kupelwieser and Joseph von Führich, the one-time Nazarene artist.
The Fifth Auckland Triennial in 2013 was titled If you were
to live here. An Artforum reviewer wrote: "The Auckland Art
Gallery ... remained a major hub, where Hou [Hanru, the curator]
cleverly integrated the triennial's contemporary works into the
collection ... both foreground[ing] the highpoints of the
institution's holding - the nineteenth century Photorealist [sic]
portraits of Maori leaders by the Austro-Hungarian painter
Gottfried Lindauer are worth a trip to New Zealand alone [my
italics] - and produc[ing] provocative juxtapositions of the
contemporary and the historical."1 Thus the work of Lindauer
(1839-1926), an academy-trained Czech artist, identified as
'Austrian' and 'German' in New Zealand, vied with the contemporary.
However unlikely that sounds, 49 of his paintings are now,
temporarily, in a current art capital, Berlin, where Lindauer was
previously "completely unkriown".2 Curiously though, over 70 of
Lindauer's Māori subject paintings could have come here before
World War I. Reportedly, an otherwise unidentified "Berlin Museum"
wanted, unsuccessfully, to buy the Partridge Collection (about
which more later).3 History is
not made of 'what ifs ...'; so who is this Gottfried, sometimes
called by the Czech name Bohumir, Lindauer?
Fig. 1 Gottfried Lindauer, Self-portrait, 1860s, oil on
canvas, West-Bohemian Museum in Pilsen
He was born in Pilsen (today Plzen), Bohemia, as the son of
Hynek-Ignatz Lindauer, a gardener, and his wife Maria Schmid. For
three years from the age of thirteen Lindauer was his father's
apprentice, spending much time sketching flowers and plants. In
1855 he decamped, and supposedly walked, to Vienna to study at the
Academy of Fine Arts under Leopold Kupelwieser and Joseph von
Führich, the one-time Nazarene artist. Lindauer studied there until
1861, when he joined the studio of Carl Hemerlein, a well-known
portraitist. In 1863 and 1864 he received commissions for murals in
two Moravian churches.4 It is
claimed that he also worked as an art tutor in Poland and painted
Biblical pictures for churches in Russia.5 Though he had a Catholic upbringing,
a paternal uncle who was the Bishop of České Budějovice and another
relative, Josef Cardinal Beran, who became Archbishop of Prague and
Czech primate, the mature Lindauer was agnostic or atheist. Back in
Pilsen, he established his own studio (1864-1873), specialising in
portraits of local gentry. Various reasons have been cited for his
emigration to New Zealand (though legend has it that he thought he
was going to America): for instance, to avoid further compulsory
military service, the decline in portrait commissions because of
the advances in photographic portraiture, a general economic
crisis, his encounter with Māori artefacts at Vienna's World Fair
in 1873, and his seduction by accounts of New Zealand's natural
beauty. The latter still lures Central Europeans today.
Fig. 2 Allen Hutchinson, Gottfried Lindauer, 1902,
bronze, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of Miss Isa
Outhwaite
Moving to Hamburg first, Lindauer sailed on the
Reichstag, arriving in Wellington on the other side of the
world in August 1874. In Nelson and Wellington, Lindauer began his
long, antipodean painting career. He produced hundreds of portraits
of indigenous Māori and settler colonials, notably the civically
prominent, such as Anglican Bishop Selwyn and William Colenso, a
missionary, botanist, writer and politician. He also painted genre
scenes, featuring both Europeans and Māori. Lindauer's paintings of
Māori subjects made his public name, especially after his shift
north to Auckland in late 1875 or early 1876. In a city, and
country, with a very small population, rudimentary institutions of
fine arts, and a virtually non-existent art market, Lindauer
advertised for portrait commissions in local newspapers, showed his
work in shop windows, and sold his pictures via lotteries.
Professional artists were almost an unknown species in New
Zealand.
In Auckland, a port city on the Waitemata Harbour, Lindauer met
British-born, widely travelled Henry Partridge (1848-1931), whose
tobacco business was reputedly the largest in New Zealand.6 Partridge became his main patron,
commissioning upward of eighty paintings over the next thirty or so
years. About 1879 Lindauer married Emelia Wipper (1853-1880) from
Gdansk (then Danzig in East Prussia). They met in Melbourne and
settled in Christchurch, but Emelia died soon after. He shifted to
Napier in 1881, where he was naturalised as a 'New Zealander'.
Nevertheless in the early 1880s Lindauer sold all his possessions,
intending to return to Europe. He was persuaded to stay longer in
New Zealand by his close associate Samuel Carnell (1832-1920), the
leading Napier photographer well known for his portraits of Māori
.7 Carnell was assisted by New
Zealand-born Walter Buller (1838-1906), lawyer, art connoisseur and
ornithologist, now primarily identified by his much reprinted A
History or the Birds or New Zealand (1872/73).8 Both men were important for the
directions Lindauer's painting took. They worked for the itinerant
Native Land Court, and this connection provided many opportunities
for further portraits of Māori. In the 1880s in particular Lindauer
travelled extensively around the North Island offering portraiture
services. His output was prolific. For instance, according to his
notebook, he painted or sold 46 portraits in Wellington in 1877, 22
in Cambridge and fifteen in Palmerston North, small rural towns, in
1883.9 He made a good income.
The Wellington portraits fetched £1,034, and his 1885 sales of 115
portraits £2,729; his larger portraits going for at least £50
each.10
Fig. 3 H. E. Partridge & Co., Queen Street,
Auckland, 1912, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland
Libraries, 4-4414
After Partridge, Buller was Lindauer's most important patron for
Māori subject pictures. The bird-watching lawyer was also a
commissioner of the New Zealand displays at the grand Colonial and
Indian Exhibition in London in 1886. He included twelve Lindauer
paintings that he commissioned in the Māori Court at South
Kensington, otherwise a display of indigenous arts and artefacts.
This was one of the big successes of the Exhibition, which overall
was designed to showcase the 'fruits' and the power of the British
Empire. According to a "London correspondent", "Lindauer's
'pictures of Maori life' were a never failing source of interest to
the British public".11
Another painting of a young Māori woman by Lindauer featured in the
general New Zealand Court at the Albert Gallery: "The beautifully
expressive features are remarkably well executed in every
detail[...]. This style of art[...] would do much to rescue
interesting Maori types from oblivion", asserted one
reviewer.12
Lindauer and his second wife Rebecca visited Britain for the
occasion, returning to New Zealand at the end of 1886, finally
settling in late 1889 in Woodville, a speck of a town in the
provincial Hawke's Bay, his home for the rest of his life. He had
met Rebecca Petty (1849-1944), an English immigrant, in 1881, and
their marriage in September 1885 kept him domiciled in New Zealand.
That she was a cordon bleu cook probably helped, while the births
of their two sons, Hector in 1887 and Victor in 1888, finalised his
choice of country. That Hector's other first names were Carnell and
Partridge presumably testifies to how important those eponymous
friends were for Gottfried Lindauer. Hector (d. 1928), a talented
musician, was trained at the Leipzig Conservatory before World War
I, while Victor (d.1964), initially a teacher, became an
internationally renowned phycologist, a scientist specialising in
seaweeds.13 Indeed Victor was
probably much better known in the world of science than his father
was in the world of art.
Lindauer did not abandon Europe. He and his family lived in
Europe, mainly Germany, in 1900-1902 and 1911-1914, with visits to
Bohemia. Several of his Māori portraits were placed in public and
private collections there. Lindauer was closely associated with a
number of fellow Czechs, both in New Zealand and Bohemia - notably
a leading naturalist and collector, Václav Frič, and ethnographer
Vojtěch Náprstek together with his wife Josefa, founders of the
Náprstek Museum in Prague. This Museum holds two of Lindauer's
Māori portraits and two of his rare drawings of moko (tattoo)
designs, as well as Māori artefacts and photographs of Māori
subjects that he gifted to the Náprsteks. A Czech writer and global
traveller, Josef Kořenský, encountered Lindauer in New Zealand in
1900, having written an article on him for the Czech periodical
Vesmir.14 Kořenský
described the collaboration of the Czech artist and Māori as
"incredible" in his 1904 book on his travels in Australia and New
Zealand.15 He recognised how
much Lindauer's portraits were valued by Māori - at a time when
this was generally ignored by Europeans in New Zealand.16
Lindauer's long relationship with Partridge was the most crucial
for his public reputation. Besides his portraits of eminent Māori,
both living and deceased, in either traditional Māori or European
costume, Lindauer made large-scale depictions of traditional Māori
practices, as well as pictures of everyday life and of the
legendary Arawa heroine, Hinemoa, for Partridge.17 They aimed to commemorate Māori at
a time when it was widely, though mistakenly, believed that Māori
would die out, whether literally or as a distinct cultural
collectivity. Partridge loaned 24 of the portraits to the 1898
Auckland Exhibition art gallery in the still standing
Choral Hall.18 Then from 1901
to 1912 his Lindauer collection - initially forty portraits and one
depiction of a Māori custom - was exhibited in a gallery above his
tobacconist's shop in Auckland's main street, Queen Street.
Another of Lindauer's close associates, James Cowan (1870-1943),
a popular writer on New Zealand history, compiled a Descriptive
Catalogue of Partridge's collection in 1901.19 This was revised, updated and
republished with reproductions in 1930.20 Cowan, whose second wife was
Māori, was the first Pākehā (European settler) writer for whom
Māori achievements and activities were as essential for colonial
history writing as those of European settlers.21 That orientation is particularly
noteworthy, in that the Partridge Collection was described as
"practically a pictorial history of the colony since its earliest
days".22 Nine of the Māori
subject pictures were borrowed by the New Zealand Government to
help represent the country at the Louisiana Purchase
Exhibition in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904. In 1913 the
Collection, by then 62 portraits and eight big pictures of Māori
practices and customs, attained even greater public visibility when
loaned to the Auckland Art Gallery. And in 1915 Partridge
permanently gifted all the paintings to the Gallery, provided a
large sum of money was raised to assist Belgian war refugees. The
Collection quickly became a centrepiece of the Gallery, popular and
celebrated, even if for different reasons, by local Europeans,
visiting tourists and Māori alike.
Clearly Lindauer respected and empathised With Māori people and
culture. For many Māori, especially the families and descendants of
his subjects, his paintings were, and are, experienced as
materialisations of the presence, spirit and mana (respect,
prestige, authority) of the depicted people, as links between the
past and present, and as taonga (treasures) that require
protection. Māori visitors' responses to Lindauer's paintings,
inscribed in the Auckland Art Gallery Visitors' book, show the high
regard in which the artist and his paintings are held.23
Māori people had also commissioned portraits from Lindauer from
the mid 1870s on. An exhibition of nine of his portraits in
Wellington in 1877 attracted business from Māori chiefs. Attendance
at the Native Land Court in the 1880s could be "perceptibly
thinner", if Lindauer's travelling studio, "which has been
literally thronged with Māori visitors", was in town.24 Many of these portrait subjects
were otherwise little-known outside their extended families or
tribes; 'ordinary' people, usually portrayed in European clothes,
as they wore in daily life.
Yet while Lindauer's paintings were celebrated in New Zealand
during and after World War I, it was not always pleasant for the
artist and his family then. During the War people of German and
Austrian descent in New Zealand frequently faced suspicion,
hostility and social ostracism. For instance, a prominent academic
and official Government translator, Professor George von Zedlitz
(1871-1949), a New Zealand citizen, whose mother was English and
father German, lost his university job after the Alien Enemy
Teachers Act was passed in 1915.25 People changed their names from
German to English ones: Schmidt to Smith, and Schneider to Taylor,
for example. Lindauer was affected too. He was frequently
misidentified as German, which carried derogatory associations.
Such experiences were very hurtful for him, his wife and sons.
Nevertheless, while his last years were shadowed at times by his
co-nationals' xenophobia, only his deteriorating eyesight
eventually ended his painting career about 1919.
There is little reliable documentation about Lindauer's
personality. His diverse travels, responses to adversity and career
generally suggest that he was resilient, independent minded, open
to difference and new experiences. Lindauer appears to have chosen
to remain on the margins of mainstream settler colonial society;
rarely exhibiting in urban art society shows, spending most of his
life in small provincial towns, his personal public profile low
once he was settled in Woodville. Yet his artistic legacy is
enormous.
Along with the New Zealand-born and Paristrained Charles F.
Goldie (1870-1947), Lindauer was, and still is, the best-known,
most admired and popular painter of Māori subjects. His paintings
are complex interweavings of features from diverse cultures and
societies - Māori, Czech, German, Austrian, English, French, and
emerging Pākehā. In this respect an artist, whose work was
sometimes criticised as conservative, old-fashioned, past its
use-by date, was ahead of his time. Instead, picture Lindauer as a
cosmopolitan individual, an internationalist, at a time when
exclusive nationalisms and notions of 'pure' ethnic and cultural
identity were increasingly prevalent and dominant in Europe and
elsewhere. The tragic consequences, like the blood-letting
disasters of World War I, with worse to come, do not need to be
spelt out. In such a climate Lindauer now seems like a man for a
better future.
Leonard Bell
First published in Gottfried Lindauer: die Māori-portraits
for the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in
collaboration with Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; edited by Udo
Kittelmann und Britta Schmitz. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther
König, 2014. Reprinted online with the kind permission of the
author and publishers.