A Book in the Hand


Book Description

As we find ourselves in a technological revolution and the computer screen takes over the printed page, the history of the book has become a subject of study throughout the world. This collection of 15 essays looks at at a wide variety of topics from the history of the printed word in New Zealand.




Arts in New Zealand


Book Description




Letters of Frances Hodgkins


Book Description

Letters of Frances Hodgkins is a generous selection of letters written by New Zealand's most internationally well-known artist. It shows that Hodgkins deserves not only her considerable reputation as a painter, but also that of a brilliant and engaging writer. The letters reveal Hodgkins' changing moods, impressions and fortunes and provide vivid sketches of the people and landscapes she came across. Spanning from colonial Dunedin to her travels across Europe and North Africa, the letters continue through her final flowering in her 60s and 70s. Linda Gill's careful scholarship and sensitive appreciation of Hodgkins' talents and personality make her introduction and notes the perfect framework for the artist's own words. A chronology, an in-depth bibliography and an index of letter recipients complement the work. Extensively illustrated, with eight pages of color reproductions of Hodgkins' paintings, Letters of Frances Hodgkins is central to understanding Hodgkins as artist and woman.







Picking Up the Traces


Book Description

The story of the generation of New Zealand writers who came of age in the 1930s and who deliberately and decisively changed the course of literature is told in this book, shedding important new light on the key participants, including Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, and Robin Hyde. The movement is traced through small circulation magazines and small press publications from 1932 to 1941. The repudiations and loyalties by which the movement defined itself are explored, including its opposition to the literary establishment and to late Georgian verse, its naming of its precursors and allies from the 1920s, and its choice of overseas models such as the British Moderns and the new American short-story writers for the creation of a new literature. oppose the cultural myths supported by the literary establishment and the writers' responses to the world-wide social upheavals of the period -- the Depression, the international crises of 1935 to 1939, and World War II.




Len Lye


Book Description

Len Lye: A Biography tells for the first time the story of a unique, charismatic artist who was an innovator in many areas&– film, kinetic sculpture, painting, photography and poetry. Born in New Zealand in 1901, Len Lye gained an international reputation in the arts and had friendships with many famous people&– including Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, Gertrude Stein, John Grierson, Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Laura Riding, Stan Brakhage, and the artists of the New York School. A colorful bohemian, Lye lived in London from 1926 to 1944 (where he made highly original hand-painted films for John Grierson's GPO Film Unit), then moved to New York for the last 36 years of his life. Describing Len Lye as a "trailblazer" and a "one-man modern art movement" in Sight & Sound, Ian Francis also celebrated this superb biography as "the definitive piece of Lye scholarship."




New Zealand Painting


Book Description

Completely revised and updated. Chapters have been rewritten. Also added in a substantial new chapter on contemporary Maori and Pacific Island painting, as well as an acknowledgement of the coming wave of Asian artists.




Knowing Differently


Book Description

This book offers a bold and illuminating account of the worldviews nurtured and sustained by indigenous communities from across continents, through their distinctive understanding of concepts such as space, time, joy, pain, life, and death. It demonstrates how this different mode of ‘knowing’ has brought the indigenous into a cultural conflict with communities that claim to be modern and scientific. Bringing together scholars, artists and activists engaged in understanding and conserving local knowledge that continues to be in the shadow of cultural extinction, the book attempts to interpret repercussions on identity and cultural transformation and points to the tragic fate of knowing the world differently. The volume inaugurates a new thematic area in post-colonial studies and cultural anthropology by highlighting the perspectives of marginalized indigenous communities, often burdened with being viewed as ‘primitive’. It will be useful to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, linguistics, literature, and tribal studies.




Art New Zealand


Book Description




Rita Angus


Book Description

Jill Trevelyan won the Non Fiction Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2009 for this magnificent biography of one of New Zealand's leading 20th century artists. Now back in print, this revised edition brings the book up to date with new assessments of Angus and in the context of the Rita Angus exhibition to be held at Te Papa late in 2021. Rita Angus was a pioneer of modern painting during the 1930s and 1940s. More than 100 years after her birth, works such as Rutu (1951), Central Otago (1940), and Portrait of Betty Curnow (1941-1942) are national icons. While Angus is perhaps New Zealand's best-loved painter, the story of her life remained little known and poorly understood before this acclaimed and revelatory book. Jill Trevelyan traces Angus's life, from her childhood in Napier and Palmerston North to her death in Wellington in 1970. Drawing on a wealth of archives and letters, she brings to life Rita Angus the person: highly articulate and full of zest, intellectually curious and forthright in her attitudes and emotions, powerfully committed to her pacifist and feminist beliefs and dedicated, above all, to life as an artist. Rita Angus: An Artist's Life is generousl