Colin McCahon

Who was Colin McCahon?

Colin John McCahon was a prominent New Zealand artist. During his life he also worked in art galleries and as a university lecturer. Some of McCahon's best-known works are wall-sized paintings with a dark background, overlaid with religious texts in white and varying in size, for example, Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is, 1958/59. He was also an extensive landscape painter, inspired in part by the writings of New Zealand geologist Sir Charles A. Cotton. With Toss Woollaston and Rita Angus he is credited with introducing modernism to New Zealand art in the early twentieth century. He is generally regarded as New Zealand's greatest painter. A major retrospective of his work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam introduced McCahon 'as the first modern New Zealand painter of major international importance'. His work is remarkable for its spiritual intensity.