There seems to be an asymmetry between the development of modern art and modern architecture in New Zealand in the early part of the 20th century.
I had the pleasure of attending a lecture recently at the Otago Museum given by Michael Findlay. His topic was domestic architecture here, mostly in southern New Zealand in the period 1920 to 1950.
In fact, he cast the net a bit wider and we had some much more recent examples, but the period between about 1920 and 1960 is where you really see the asymmetry.
In fact, it looks even more emphatic if you go back to the beginning of the century.
That period had been covered by an earlier lecture in the same series, given by Gary Blackman that many in Mr Findlay's audience had also attended, so it wasn't far from our minds.
Mr Findlay's thesis is that while there is widely supposed to be a gap, a time-lag, between architectural developments overseas and their arrival in New Zealand, his examples show there really wasn't.
He was pretty convincing but I'm not sure it would be quite so if his topic had been non-domestic building. No doubt, he will now produce another lecture proving me wrong.
Dr Blackman had set out to identify a type of house specific to the ''transitional'' period here, that is 1900-1920, and that was fairly convincing.
It wasn't a type that reflected avant-garde developments that were occurring in the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere, although little was happening in Britain. But it was distinctly different from the earlier colonial development, the bay villa, about which your columnist had spoken in a still earlier talk in the series.
Mr Findlay showed us places like Anderson Park, built in the 1920s and now the Invercargill Public Art Gallery. I wouldn't have picked this as a very good example for his case, because it is so clearly a revived kind of Georgian building.
But he pointed to the spareness and simplicity of its interior as a portent of the changing times.
More convincingly, he illustrated Greenslade House in Vauxhall, here in Dunedin. It was designed by Frank von Sturmer in 1935 and built in 1936 for a member of the Dunedin brewing family.
I would call it moderne rather than modernist, because it is like the streamlined houses then becoming fashionable in America rather than the more austere designs of Europe, but it is certainly up with the times.
Even more strikingly so is the Sidey House in Tolcarne Ave, designed by Arthur Salmond in 1934, shortly after he returned from Europe.
He had visited buildings by Le Corbusier, one of the most innovating and influential modernists, and the Sidey house is like this at this very early date.
There are three houses in Heriot Row, near the intersection with Pitt St, designed by Miller and White, that were also abreast of contemporary European developments. Mr Findlay tells me it was T.K.S. Sidey's wife who was most keen to have a modern house but Salmond was willing to oblige.
The Heriot Row houses were more driven by the client and even the progressive partner, Eric Miller, may not have been so enthusiastic.
The Humphrey Hall House in Timaru, designed by its architect owner, Humphrey Hall, in 1938, seems almost a text-book example of the things Le Corbusier advocated, such as pilotis - pillars - under the bedroom wing and a first-floor roof garden. It's a bit awkward but there's no denying its modernism. I could go on into the 1940s and 1950s but space doesn't permit.
All this seems in remarkable contrast to what was happening, or mostly not happening, in art. A kind of Impressionism arrived in New Zealand at the end of the 1880s, a few years after the last Impressionist exhibition in France in 1886.
A. H. O'Keeffe seems to have had some awareness of Postimpressionism after a Paris sojourn in 1895. But in the 20th century there was no reflection here of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism as the decades ticked by.
Although R.N. Field and W.H. Allen had been touched by things like Pointillism and non-descriptive colour before they arrived in 1925, it was an elderly and fairly weak impulse they passed on to their students.
Toss Woollaston's exhibition in Broadway in 1936 can be pointed to as the first solo modernist exhibition in New Zealand, he using a kind of German Expressionism derived from Hans Hoffmann and still current in Europe.
This was passed on to such artists as Colin McCahon, but the latter developed a kind of Cubism in the 1950s, 40 years after its emergence in Europe. McCahon got up to date later and the gap closed. But art's earlier spell in a time warp seems odd, compared to architecture's development.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
