Painted Histories: Early Maori Figurative Painting

Roger Neich

Auckland University Press, 1993 - Art - 330 pages

Neich’s highly successful Painted Histories is now reprinted in paperback. It explores the flowering of figurative painting in Maori meetinghouse decoration in the nineteenth century. Not practiced traditionally, figurative painting was a response to missionary criticism of Maori church decoration. Decoration of the meetinghouse was transformed in striking, beautiful ways to display new tribal histories based on Ringatu teaching and the experience of land alienation. It was later superseded by a government-sponsored return to orthodox art forms. Neich analyses the theory and practice of this art and describes more than 80 meeting houses, including many now disappeared. Richly illustrated.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• Painting in Traditional Maori Culture: 16
• Traditional Kowhaiwhai: 29

About the author

A distinguished anthropologist specializing in Maori art, Dr Roger Neich BSC, MA, PhD, was born in Petone, Wellington, New Zealand in 1944. As well as prodigious activity in researching and writing, he currently divides his time between two formal roles – Curator of Ethnology at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. Dr Neich has carried out fieldwork in the Pacific, notably in Papua New Guinea, Samoa and New Zealand. He was the Ethnologist at the National Museum, of New Zealand 1969–1986. In 1980–1982 he undertook research at the University of California, Berkeley after being awarded a National Research Advisory Council Postgraduate Research Fellowship. He was co-curator of the Maori exhibition at the British Museum, London, in 1996, and is co-curator of the proposed Maori exhibition in Rome using the Italian collections. He has been curator of Ethnology at the Auckland War Memorial Museum since 1986 and was awarded a personal chair in Anthropology at the University of Auckland in 2001. Author's affiliation (college and/or business): In the US: University of California, Berkeley - Research Fellow there in 1980-1982 In NZ: Auckland (lecturer; personal chair 2001); Victoria University of Wellington

Bibliographic information

• Title: Painted Histories: Early Maori Figurative Painting
• Author: Roger Neich
• Edition: 2, illustrated
• Publisher: Auckland University Press, 1993
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Jun 16, 2010
• ISBN: 1869402782, 9781869402785
• Length: 330 pages
• Subjects: Art / Australian & Oceanian; Art / General; Art / History / General; Social Science / Indigenous Studies