"The visit of the British Royals to New Zealand seems like a symbol for the encounter between European and Polynesian culture: on one side, straight lines with precise rows of buttons, on the other, intertwining patterns. That is how they face each other: the elegant Kate, clasping her handbag as if she wanted to cover herself up with it, and the Maori greeting her in Aotearoa, the 'Land of the Long White Cloud'. A hefty Polynesian carries his ta moko, the traditional tattoo of the Pacific islanders, curling across his back. Designer coat meets indigenous body ornament. Both show the high status of those displaying them."¹

On 7 April 1773, the famous navigator James Cook stood on the beach in today's Dusky Sound on the sparsely populated South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand and rubbed noses with a Māori warrior. The latter had never seen a European, and James Cook had not met many Māori up to then.² At the start, the Māori had been profoundly intimidated, and it had been a complex operation to entice him to perform the hongi. To make himself less threatening, Cook had left his crew on board the Resolution and had laid out his handkerchief and a few sheets of white paper on the beach as an offering of friendship. In that way, he eventually succeeded in putting a positive face on the situation, so that nose­rubbing ensued.

The meeting of cultures, and what we understand as 'global' chronology, both ran their courses - a world evolved which is connected through interlocking systems, where an entire indigenous society was deprived of its historical self-determination, fell under foreign control and was realigned to the predominantly commercial interests of colonial Europeans. Subsequently, new relations and needs linked people who had until then lived geographically far distant from each other, and a sort of alienation between colonised and colonisers was characteristic and required. What was expected was a wide-ranging acculturation to the values, customs and commercial needs of Europe.

James Cook and his scientific and artistic companions initially collected flora and fauna, objects of indigenous art, made maps and lists, and everything of interest to the team of explorers was minutely registered.³ Numerous taonga (treasures) Māori had inherited from their ancestors, which were of great personal worth, possessing high status and testifying to a shared whakapapa (genealogy) wound up in Europe. As evidence of great discoveries, they were presented as gifts to members of the royal family, to aristocratic collectors and to research institutions or sold for handsome sums, given that such objects were the few documents available from distant peoples and hence highly prized.

Cook's voyages of exploration and all the subsequent social, political, cultural and commercial upheavals and catastrophes followed their drawn-out course throughout the nineteenth century and far into the twentieth. All the while, the Māori preserved their memories by associating particular ancestors with significant events in their original settings, maintaining respect for lands and waters, concluding a treaty with the colonial power at Waitangi in 1840 and by being not only warlike but also clever and adaptable.

Both forms of remembrance and preservation are still available to us today, but they have come down to us in completely different ways. On the one hand, there are museums, libraries and collections scattered across the world and, on the other, oral learning stretching over generations and preserved under the most difficult circumstances, rituals, private manuscripts and the conscious cultivation of the heritage of the past as a whole.

The photograph occasioned by the first visit of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge to Aotearoa/New Zealand displays the whole dynamic in the nexus of past and present, and it is clear how modern articulations of traditions are becoming more important, various aspects of globalisation notwithstanding. The British Queen is indeed still the head of state, and her grandchildren travel with large retinues, but Māori also go to London on an equal footing, with all their commercial sway and their culture, as representatives of their country. At the end of the twentieth century, the historical cycle of colonialism as an expression of European global dominance has closed.⁴

The traditional ceremonies and greeting rituals are not folklore performed for the representatives of the former British Empire. On these occasions, prominent state representatives greet each other, with each respecting the allegiance and culture of the other. Each of them acts according to their own cultural tradition. Over the centuries, Europeans on their travels have been Puritans, their buttons all done up, dressed in whatever was the fashion of the time and with shoes on their feet; the people who were naked or dressed in unfashionable natural products were always the savages, the foreigners, the 'Others', the ones in need of missionaries and civilising. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, traditional greeting rituals self-confidently characterise a modern country, where all areas of public life refute any monocultural sense of history. The issue here is one of your links to the past and to your lineage, of a different and shared history.

This is the background against which the exhibition project Gottfried Lindauer. The Māori Portraits in the Alte Nationalgalerie should be viewed. It is a further step in coming to terms with history and in offering a new way of reading pictures and collections when we engage with them in museums. In 2010, the Nationalgalerie had already staged the exhibition Who Knows Tomorrow in four of its premises (the Alte and the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche). It dealt with the issue of the historical connections and interrelations between Africa and Europe and reflected on which and whose history is available for telling and negotiating nowadays. By presenting works from contemporary artists with African backgrounds, we tackled the question as to what contribution art does make to overcoming (art-) historical constructs and stereotypes and what it means to exhibit 'Others' and 'Otherness'. The Nationalgalerie, and particularly our work with nineteenth-century art in the Alte Nationalgalerie, stands amidst the tensions these debates generate, given, in fact, that the "construction in museal discourses and collections very closely involved the construction of 'Otherness"'.⁵

Fig. 1 Caspar David Friedrich, Solitary Tree, 1822 oil on canvas, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

 

The works of Gottfried Lindauer (1839-1926) depicting Māori are not being shown in the Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum) in Dahlem, the context traditionally devoted to this geographical area, because that is where 'foreignness' is determined and demarcations are made between 'us' and 'them' according to geographical boundaries. We regard the paintings as works of art created in the tradition of realistic portraiture and manifesting the global interconnection of a common history. Up to now, the platform for such discussions has existed in the con­ temporary context; art history is only just beginning to critically revise its view of the nineteenth century along postcolonial lines, and the multiplicity of transcultural voices still needs thorough investigation.

Fig. 2 Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise over the Sea, 1822 oil on canvas, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

 

Nineteenth century globalisation was not a purely commercial process. The images produced mingled with each other in Europe and in all further parts of the world. Pictures and objects circulated en masse and influenced artists, architects, crafts and literature. Different cultures and societies were sharing pivotal experiences of upheaval, migration and processes of integration. At the same time, the entire typology of the museum was emerging and owes its definitive form to the nineteenth century.

Fig. 3 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gothic Church on a Rock, 1815 oil on canvas, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

 

Gottfried Lindauer's paintings have a salient significance for the cultural identity and for the modern society of Aotearoa/New Zealand. They show the people living there: who they are, who they were, who they wanted, and were, to be. The works are a cultural heritage and contain the memories of a nation. For Māori, the persons represented are living ancestors and belong to their descendants spiritually and emotionally. For non-Māori, the pictures and the biography of the painter stand for the life of a settler from Europe, who, like almost all of them, had to leave his homeland because times were hard, and had to secure some sort of living for himself in order to survive in the new, foreign land. He found a niche and became the chronicler of his epoch, lending it a face. The pictures are not ethnographic portraits; they do not depict anonymous Māori with moko (tattoos), weapons of war and traditional costume, but show men and women who have names and whose life stories are widely known because they are closely connected to the history of New Zealand.

Since their creation, the pictures have very rarely left the country, and this is the first time such a large number of them have been sent on a journey. They were farewelled with traditional blessings and ceremonies from the museums in Auckland and Wellington and received by a Māori delegation in the Alte Nationalgalerie. It is only by being accompanied spiritually and personally that the works' cultural safety is assured, and they are prepared for viewing by visitors to the exhibition. As these paintings are not simply depictions of persons, but form a bridge, in Māori tradition, between past and present, particular supervision is necessary during their long absence. Ancestors are integrated into the communal life of tribes and can be consulted from a distance. The whakapapa, extracts of which are attached to each portrait in this catalogue, attests to the long succession of ancestors. This belongs to the essential education of any Māori. It has been due to these special requirements in dealing with such cultural objects that the paintings have previously not figured at all in the flows of global exhibitions and lending. The portraits do not circulate as freely available in the internet either, and the descendants of their subjects have to be consulted over any reproductions or lending, as they control the cultural administration of the artworks. The stories and their import, the hidden knowledge of relationships can only be investigated jointly and with express permission.

Fig. 4 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Castle by the River, 1820 oil on canvas, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

 

The paintings and the historical photographs on view as adjuncts to Gottfried Lindauer's pictures are not being presented in their own separate exhibition area. The two galleries, where the works of Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel have their customary place in the Alte Nationalgalerie, maintain their usual configuration. Friedrich's pictures Solitary Tree and Moonrise over the Sea (both 1822, Figs 1 and 2) as well as Schinkel's Gothic Church on a Rock (1815, Fig. 3) and Castle by the River (1820, Fig. 4) belong to the gallery's art-historical treasures. They formed the core holdings of the Nationalgalerie's collection, which was founded in 1861 with the donation of works from the private collector and banker Joachim Heinrich Wagener and opened in its own premises, the accentuated temple structure built according to the plans of the court architect Friedrich August Stüler on the Museum Island in 1876.

In the neighbouring rooms, the Māori portraits are providing what amounts to a framework for the paintings by Friedrich and Schinkel that are key-works to German Romanticism and German Idealism respectively. As we have decided, as curators, not to isolate the pictures, we are directing the viewer's gaze to the complex network of a fluid order of different cultures and societies, and we are inviting discussion on identity and belonging. In the first instance, the mixture of local and global history fundamental to Lindauer's paintings conveys an impression at once familiar and exotic. The contrast to Karl Friedrich Schinkel's ideal image of humanity, schooled on antiquity, and to the inwardness and transcendence of a Caspar David Friedrich brackets the various developments in Europe with the world, which was, from a European standpoint, 'discovered' in the nineteenth century. It has become clear that any assessment of this art can only succeed, if not exclusively correspondences are sought and dubious quality standards applied.

The museum will, in a manner similar to the photograph showing the greeting and the encounter between royals and Māori, present works with equal status, which should be integrated into a mutual historical narrative and cannot just be assessed according to the European categories of style evolved over centuries. Thus, it appears sensible to ask what is specific and characteristic in Lindauer's portraits, as differing conditions for producing portraits do not negate a shared history. The dignified rendering of the great heroes of Māori culture by a European artist indicates how complex the intercultural relations are, when a representation in the traditional European sense is something that appears at first sight strange and requires a very different mode of reading. Lindauer's work attests to a genuine and rare bicultural interaction and demonstrates the fruitful meeting of very different people, societies and cultures.

Gottfried Lindauer, the painter of these pictures with their capacity for establishing identity, was an immigrant from the Habsburg Empire, who had studied in Vienna, where he had altered his name from 'Bohumir' to 'Gottfried' in response to the pressure to conform. He left his homeland Bohemia above all for economic reasons, and it was only in his new home, as far distant from Europe as was possible, that he got to know and to respect the local indigenous culture and its proud heroes.⁶

When he arrived in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1874, he found a dominant European culture, which was doing everything to convert the indigenous populace to the proper Christian faith, was denying it possessed any culture, was using all means to get rid of it, was stealing its land, introducing diseases and provoking wars. Lindauer initially earned his living in this country by painting mainly European settlers including some famous personalities. These commissions did not, however, suffice for a well­ founded existence. The settlers lived in a land rich in natural beauty, with some raw materials and more suitable for whaling and agriculture, so that surviving there at first meant working hard. Photography additionally furnished a quicker and cheaper medium, with which you could have your portrait taken and easily send it back home. At this time, there was not a lot of energy, time or capacity for developing the fine arts in the European sense in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

A considerable number of immigrants and travelling researchers did, however, recognise very well how Māori culture was changing and how the Māori were being forced to conform to the new realities and living conditions in the community of the day.⁷ This change was happening quickly and dramatically. It almost destroyed the entire Māori culture and populace. There was much said and written about a dying culture - and, logically enough, that often came from precisely those researchers and travellers who were dealing extensively in indigenous cultural objects, founding or expanding rich collections in Europe, or were involved in the vigorous trade in the severed heads of Māori and were turning them into successful exports throughout the world, where some of them still remain today.

It was through Samuel Carnell (1832-1920), well known for the quality of his photographs of Māori, which he took at the behest of the Native Land Court, that Lindauer became interested in depicting them and got to know his two patrons, the English­born business man Henry Partridge (1848-1931) and the ornithologist and lawyer Walter Buller (1838-1906). Both had gained the trust of Māori. They wanted to document their culture through images, or even to rescue it, and commissioned large numbers of portraits. In the 1880s, Lindauer became a specialist for depictions of Māori. These paintings smoothed his path to reputation and success. The two patrons and collectors, together with the artist himself, developed a very close working relationship. Thus, Partridge and Buller also found their places in the nation's history: Henry Partridge as the patron of the significant museum collection incorporated into Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and Buller, whose collection is held in the Whanganui Regional Museum, as a magistrate embroiled in many illegal land sales and dealing extensively in Māori artefacts, tattooed heads, greenstone weapons and so on and becoming very wealthy in the process. The legendary bird huia (an extinct native bird whose tail feathers were prized) was driven to extinction by him selling it to natural history collections worldwide.

After a few leading Māori first saw Lindauer's pictures in the shop window of Henry Partridge's Auckland tobacco business, they were overwhelmed by the precision and dignity of the reproduction, and so rangatira (chief) rapidly became clients of the painter. The years of bitter fighting between Pākehā (people of European descent) and Māori had just come to an end, and there was a great need to immortalise the redoubtable heroes, in order to integrate their memory into the community. Those Māori who had engaged with British-dominated Aotearoa/New Zealand by mounting political initiatives and becoming members of Parliament to improve their people's living conditions, also commissioned work from Lindauer.

Lindauer did not paint for a European market. He did not just superficially document the skin tones, the intricate moko, the traditional clothing, decorative adornments and the possession of significant cultural, ritual or traditional weapons. Out of respect for each individual's achievements, he tried to capture the physical and psychic characteristics of his models precisely. He was able to combine the depiction of social rank with personal achievement and found expression for the status each Māori had within his own community. In the main, he applied his quite particular accuracy to rendering bust and half-length portraits. He worked with both photographs, as was the custom in Europe as well, and with subjects in his studio. He did not just represent the personality of the rangatira in vivid detail, but he also depicted the insignia of their rank, their weapons, jewellery, feathers and ear ornaments with extreme acuity. After the English had introduced muskets at the beginning of the century, these had rapidly become sought-after commodities, and the numbers of traditional weapons had reduced considerably. We can admire them today in the collections of ethnological museums all over the world.

The precious, soft garments made from feathers, flax and other materials, with their richly ornamented borders, in their turn became trophies distinctly coveted among ethnographic collectors, and Lindauer brought out the brilliance of their texture. As Christian missionaries had made significant inroads by the time the painter began working, the indigenous people were required to dress in European style, and precious traditional clothing was about to die out. Lindauer (or his patrons) had a stock of accessories, with, among other things, traditional korowai (woven cloaks), which had, however, different ornaments and fashionable innovations insinuated into them under European influence.

Lindauer devoted particular attention to representing the moko. Men carried them predominantly on their faces, their thighs and buttocks, and women on their chins. Moko played its greatest role on faces. The fine lines were etched into the skin, following the form of the physiognomy and emphasising it. Lindauer achieved a particularly sculptural effect in accentuating the visible grooves and the deep lines resembling reliefs.

As moko endowed those bearing them with strength or power, representing them took on a particular significance. They were a symbol for inner strength and potency and are a sort of visiting card, revealing the bearer's role and status in the social hierarchy and his spiritual guardians. As Lindauer spent many hours with his models in his studio, he could probably decipher moko.

Because the head represents the most sacred part of the body for Māori, a fastidious and realistic rendering was highly prized and rewarded by Lindauer's patrons. The significant recognition value, which lends portrayal of the person the aura of authenticity, perhaps enables us to even perceive the painter's enthusiasm and empathy as he investigated and re­ corded the indigenous history of his new home through his portraiture and genre painting. Like his models, he had himself experienced the upheavals of colonial times.

Fig. 5 Gottfried Lindauer, Paratene Te Manu, oil on canvas, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of H E Partridge, 1915

 

In her 2011 novel, Rangatira, Paula Morris gave a literary account of the life of her ancestor, Paratene Te Manu (Fig. 5). Lindauer certainly painted his portrait from a photograph, but the fictional conversation between the two reproduces the situation in his studio very vividly, something also reinforced by the fact that Lindauer's portraits do not depict unalloyed reality, but the painter instead frequently 'documented' the way people imagined the old tradition: "'Perhaps you will wear this pompom cloak?' the Bohemian says. Like the English, he wants to see us Maori in a cloak, not a coat. He drapes a ngore around me, and it's soft against my skin. I don't mind wearing this, as he requests. [...] The Bohemian is named Mr Lindauer, and he wants to know what I should be called. Do I prefer Paratene or Te Manu? This question takes me some time to answer, because I never really think about this. Te Manu is the name I was given at birth, and Paratene is the one suggested by the minister, Mr Williams, all those years ago, I think it was 1838, or perhaps 1839, when I finally agreed to be baptised. [...] 'When I was a child my name was Bohumir,' he says. He tells me about walking to Vienna when he was a young man. Vienna is an enormous city, like London, and it took him six days to walk there from his father's house. 'I go to study to paint, at the Academy. In Vienna everyone speaks German. My teachers. The students. The people who will pay me to paint their pictures. So I change my name to a German one, Gottfried.'

These two names of his mean the same thing, I discover. The greatness of God, the peace of God. I wouldn't mind having a name that meant the greatness of God. Instead I'm named for a bishop who's been dead for a long time. Soon no one will have heard of him, and it will be so much for the name of Paratene Te Manu. 'Please, will you look here?' the Bohemian asks me, and I oblige him by fixing my gaze on a picture on the wall, fastened just be­ hind his head. [...] The important thing is sitting here, looking straight ahead. In this painting I will not crouch on the edge of things, or avert my eyes. People will look at it, and see my moko, and know who I am."⁸

Paratene Te Manu had already fought in the 1820s, when the Māori waged wars among themselves over the resources vital to their survival. He was converted to Christianity, witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, was photographed without his permission, and his image circulated widely in Europe, because it exactly suited the image Europe wanted to see of the 'Other', of what people suspected were cannibalistic Māori. Queen Victoria, ruler of New Zealand, knew very well what effect photographs could have.⁹ In 1863, Te Manu travelled with a group of prominent Māori to England. He had an audience there with the Queen, was received by members of the aristocracy, causing among them various speculations on his history, culture and society. Later, however, he was 'exhibited' at public events and became an attraction and a source of finance for those organising such spectacles. When he came back to New Zealand, he founded the Ngunguru School. He and his tribe had their land taken from them. Paratene Te Manu died in 1897.

Pictures have always presented ways of looking at the world. Art history's view of New Zealand has oriented it towards Europe and has, for a long time, banished Lindauer's works into their own niche and regarded his art as unimportant. In the main, the criteria behind this dismissive assessment were his static formal language, his colour palette and his borrowings from photography. People only considered the social and historical significance of his paintings and so attributed an unimportant form of 'Otherness' to them, whilst denying their capacity for connecting with Modernity. It has only been in the last thirty years that Lindauer's unique work has come in for a fundamental reassessment and has attracted the interest of subsequent generations of artists. In the 1970s, cultural issues entered more strongly into a wider political forum, so that the official mono-cultural concept of history was questioned, and still is. Given the huge social change and new departures in critical and theoretical thinking, it is not surprising that people have come to engage extensively with issues from the controversial fields of representation and identity. The potential in numerous of Lindauer's paintings to connect to a contemporary and vital art-scene cannot be ignored. His pictures offer a bridge to a completely different artistic past and are intermediaries and symbols for a living Māori culture and a shared past.

Many Māori and non-Māori artists choose their path by way of traditional media, and carry over time-honoured patterns and traditions into the present, renew long-established ornaments and revitalise them by applying them to clothes, bodies, installations and accessories. The conditions governing reception have shifted into the foreground, coupled with a more acute conscious­ ness of political, cultural and theoretical questions. A large proportion of the vital and progressive production from contemporary artists refers to the colonial heritage. Over and above their spiritual value for descendants, Lindauer's pictures are open to every encounter, comparison and shift in meaning; they can be addressed, interpreted and adopted. Māori and non-Māori are engaging with the questions and problems of belonging, identity and homeland in an urban setting, and the Lindauer portraits form a precious and lasting reservoir in this respect.

Fig. 6 Gordon Walters, Kura, 1982, screenprint, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

 

I would like to mention two very different artists to indicate the impetus these works offer for a vigorous approach to the past. Wellington-born Gordon Walters (1919-1995) lived in the 1940s and the early 1950s in Europe and Australia - many New Zealand artists of his day, most of them Pākehā, continued to suffer right up to the mid-twentieth century under their isolation from Europe. They were aware of the discussions and directions in Modernity, which were having a radical influence on the development of the fine arts. Individuals, therefore, decided to undertake the long sea voyage to the centres of the art world. On his return, Gordon Walters, who had been influenced by the op-art of Piet Mondrian, Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, discovered Polynesian culture as a huge source of inspiration and integrated traditional Māori patterns or ornaments respectively into his abstract pictures (Fig. 6).

The motif used most often in Māori indigenous culture is the koru (fern frond pattern). In it, groups of several lines are shaped into spirals, imitating an unfurling fern frond. The motif stands traditionally for a new beginning and a rebirth. In his koru series, Gordon Walters modifies the curved form of the received, highly symbolic motif into precise geometrical abstractions, the basic form of which he connects in each case with a dividing line, which can be read as a gap in the story. Walters has re-interpreted the old ornamental motif in the pictorial language of the twentieth century and integrated it into a contemporary narrative. His works denote a new beginning in dealing with Māori culture. His works are held in numerous collections and museums.

Lisa Reihana (born in 1964, Ngapuhi, Ngati Hine, Ngai Tū) is an artist living in Auckland, who cannot be pinned down to one artistic medium and thus also avoids any final definition. She has Māori and British forebears and is a member of Haerewa, a Māori group of scholars and artists who are cultural advisers to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and guardians of the country's cultural heritage. In her work, Lisa Reihana engages with central questions of contemporary Māori culture, characterised as it is by hybridity. She displays the multiplicity of cultural references and suggests that many identities have accommodated themselves to several contexts simultaneously and that a vital indigenous culture can only be understood and accepted from the standpoint of a shared past. Lisa Reihana has marked out a wide field, in which her works operate beyond their local reference and are, at the same time, deeply rooted in it. She always locates her works deliberately in an exotic, or perhaps better, in an exoticising sphere. That is what makes them so provoking.

Fig. 7 Lisa Reihana, Dandy, 2007, photograph, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the Patrons, purchased with assistance from the Auckland Art Gallery, 2010

 

In the multiple sequence of the ongoing project, 'Digital Marae', begun in 2007, Lisa Reihana is making reference to the spiritual and cultural meeting-places, called marae in Māori and possessing a central significance for their communities. Numerous Lindauer copies and originals are still today held in these locations as living memorials to ancestors and to a proud history. Lisa Reihana re-stages situations and pictures in the tradition of early European photographs, with which the image of the 'Other' was constructed. She reveals relationships and attributions, which were dominant between the 'cultures in those days and still represent a central problem for identity today. The artist does not just reflect the complexity of her own background, but uses her interdisciplinary approach to blend a theoretical and conceptual way of working with indigenous and Western cultural practices. In the photograph of the Dandy (Fig. 7), she combines cultural badges of recognition from both Māori and European culture. The large-scale photograph shows a well-dressed, proud gentleman, who seems privileged simply on the basis of his European clothing alone, itself possibly pointing to his background. However, at the same time, he confidently carries his traditional moko on his face and thus shows where he comes from, where he belongs and what identity for him we can construct here.

Gottfried Lindauer's portraits are not just historical pictures; they belong to a living society of today and they influence the work of contemporary artists. The writer and storyteller Joe Harawira, born 1956, put it this way: "We [Māori] walk into the future backwards." ¹⁰

Britta Schmitz

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.