Michael Smither 'Huntley and Palmers Cracker Biscuit'

In 1973, when the artist was just 34 years old, art critic Patrick Hutchings described Michael Smither as a leading young contemporary New Zealand realist. Smither was mostly self-taught, although he had begun a Diploma of Fine Arts at Elam in 1959, leaving in July of the second year to work towards his first solo exhibition at Moller’s Gallery in Queen Street in 1961. Recognition was instantaneous, and he was curated into the Auckland City Art Gallery exhibition “Contemporary New Zealand Painting”.

Flush with success, he headed south to the isolation of Patearoa in Otago, to hone his skills on his own for most of 1962 before returning to his hometown of New Plymouth to marry and have a family. By 1970 he was back in Otago as the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University. The late curator Ron Brownson called the period from 1964 to 1978 the “wonder years” of the artist’s career, characterising the work of this era as magic realism. “I paint what’s in front of me,” Smither said, exhibiting the works painted between 1966 and 1973 under the title “Domestic Realism” at Peter McLeavey Gallery.

Even though he once told The Taranaki Herald that “overseas art is irrelevant”, this work indicates international influences. As a faithful rendition of a water cracker topped by a crinkle cut piece of cheddar, it recalls American Pop Art, a movement much concerned with consumption. In 1964 a New York gallery grouped works by Andy Warhol (Campbell soup cans), Wayne Thiebaud (display cakes) and Roy Lichtenstein (hot dogs) in an exhibition titled “The American Supermarket”. Depicting food was a way to achieve one of the aims of Pop Art: to bring popular culture into fine art practice.

Like Warhol, Smither has chosen to depict a product associated with an iconic brand in his bold composition. If there is a slightly mournful tone to this orphaned biscuit, it could be because news had reached Smither in 1972 that Huntley & Palmers, a Quaker bakery that had been operating for 150 years, was closing its Reading factory. Was the era of the after-school cracker and cheese coming to an end? Reassuringly, the cream cracker survived. It is still on the menu in many kiwi homes, its dimpled surface embossed diagonally with the Huntley & Palmers name. Its continuity of manufacture is a reminder that these were the sustaining biscuits taken to the South Pole by Robert Falcon Scott in 1910.

Smither endows this cracker with the same special treatment as it gets on the traditional product packaging: it is viewed from above and dramatically foreshortened, making it loom up from its fashionable orange background. As a young painter steeped in Catholicism with its doctrine of transubstantiation where a communion wafer symbolises the body of Christ, Smither is able to transform this humble snack into a symbol of heroic fortitude and endurance.