Melvin Day: Artist

Author: Gregory O'Brien

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 70.00 NZD
  • : 9781776562923
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
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  • : November 2019
  • : {"length"=>["31"], "width"=>["26"], "units"=>["Centimeters"]}
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  • : 70.0
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : Gregory O'Brien
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  • : Paperback
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  • :
  • : English
  • : 759.993
  • : near fine
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  • : 224
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Barcode 9781776562923
9781776562923

Description

There were many Melvin Days, but the term Artist encompasses all of them. During a career spanning seven decades, he produced some of the most intellectually astute, yet often visceral, paintings in New Zealand art history. Born in Hamilton in 1923, Day was a radical but also a great believer in tradition.
In recent years, his early Cubist-inclined paintings have reinstated him as a key figure in mid-20th century New Zealand art. In London during the 1960s, he was a vital and talented figure in an expatriate scene. By later that decade he had become the most highly-qualified art historian in New Zealand and had returned home to spend a turbulent, but creatively rich, decade as director of the National Art Gallery.


It was a past he never put behind him. From the late 1970s until his death in 2016, his investigations into still life, landscape and art history continued with undiminished fervour. Melvin Day-Artist is one of the great hitherto-untold stories of New Zealand art and its history. With essays by five writers who knew and understood Day-Vincent O’Sullivan, Tony Mackle, Gregory O’Brien, Mark Hutchins-Pond and Julia Waite-this book brings to light a wide-ranging yet intensely focussed life’s work.