Carving Into History

Dutch immigrant Theo Schoon cast himself as an outsider, but his true legacy – to build a bridge between European and Mori art – is revealed in a definitive new biography.

- Sally Blundell

Insufferable. Inflexible, intolerant and frequently insensitive. Indonesian-born Dutch artist Theo Schoon was relentless in his denigration of a Pkeh culture he saw as “ignorant, provincial, derivative”; he was dismissive of women and critical of contemporary Mori artists. But he was also generous, inspirational and, argues art historian Damian Skinner, one of the most influential figures in the story of 20th-century New Zealand art and culture.

“While he was truly awful at times, he was also mesmerising and charismatic and filled with the kind of generous knowledge that people could really profit from. He is a genius, if you believe in that word, but he is a flawed genius and he is not consistently a genius. He offended almost everybody, but his generosity and excellence as an artist mean you just had to look over that.”

Skinner does. His new biography is a compelling and decisive overview of Schoon, who died in 1985. It begins in 1915 in Central Java, where Schoon was born into a privileged colonial Dutch household in a city infused with Javanese culture. Sent back to the Netherlands for “proper” schooling, including a formal arts education in Rotterdam, Schoon experienced the outsiderness that would become part of his identity.

He and his family fled to New Zealand as Japan entered World War II. In Christchurch, Schoon gravitated to the group of artists and writers driving literary journal Landfall, including Charles Brasch, Rita Angus, Leo Bensemann and James K Baxter. By now an accomplished artist, elegant and openly gay, Schoon added an element of exoticism to the inward-looking nationalist project of New Zealand art and letters, giving lectures on Indonesian art and architecture and dramatic performances of classical Javanese dance.