Milan Mrkusich at 100

I met Milan Mrkusich (1925–2018) several times and talked to him at gallery openings and once visited him in his studio and house where I was taken by painter James Ross. Two memories remain: one of the order and precision, the careful filing of completed work, the protective plastic and the pristine surface of his worktable (no paint splashes or dribbles here); the other is of a copy of Saint Augustine’s City of God open on his nearby work desk. Readers of Augustine’s book will know that it is voluminous and it was clear to me that Mrkusich’s copy had been much read and thumbed through. There exists a photograph of Mrkusich taken by Adrienne Martyn in 1987, that is remarkable for what it suggests about Mrkusich’s character and his art. Heavy-lidded, silver-wisped eyebrows, long arms crossed, a crumpled white linen shirt, the sitter exudes a certain coolness and elegance: this we soon realise is a lover of fine clothes, refined design and skilled workmanship. While the raffish Mrkusich is seated at an impersonal distance — which his crossed arms reinforce — there is something sensuous (the dark circles under the eyes, the full mouth, the large yet delicate hands — painting is a medium of the hand) that draws you in. And enigmatic: is the meticulously stapled canvas to the reversed stretcher visible on the right a record of work completed or an intimation of work to come? It might seem a little facile to suggest Mrkusich’s painting is like his character but uncannily it is. Mrkusich believed in his art; his dealers (like Peter McLeavey and Sue Crockford) and he believed that art was serious. His paradigms of seriousness were also architecture and design. In 1949 together with three architects — Stephen Jelicich, Des Mullen and Ron Grant — Mrkusich set up Brenner Associates, a one-shop stop for the modernist homes they designed. Operating initially from an office in Queen St and then moving to Vulcan Lane where a shop was opened to retail their own and other designers work, local and overseas. In 1951 Brenner Associates, with Mrkusich’s considerable input, designed his outstanding home in Arney Road: an open design of three floor levels on a steep hillside section unified by a roof-plane at a twenty-degree pitch. Mrkusich also designed the aesthetically integrated furniture and fittings. Today, unless the city council or a patron purchases it, this local modernist masterpiece risks being bowled for a new terrace of nondescript townhouses.

Although he had never left New Zealand, Mrkusich seemingly embodied the Bauhaus. Whereas Gordon Walters’ ‘modernist shift’ entailed the mentorship of ex-Bauhaus protégé Theo Schoon, Mrkusich seemingly did it on his own with the help of magazines like Art and Architecture and books from the Auckland Public Library. (1) His colleague Jelicich wondered at his “inventiveness and natural application of design principles.” (2) Perhaps the best way of defining Mrkusich’s particular talent is to compare him to some of his contemporaries who were also concerned with abstraction. McCahon seized pictorial space on a similar scale, confronting the beholder with the sheer physicality of painting, but always with internal suggestions of hazy religious portent. That was part of his poetry. Mrkusich’s style instead is more of an august prose. Perhaps he found justification for his high ambition — for himself and for painting — in St Augustine? I am reminded of Augustine’s words: “Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”(3)

Mrkusich was born above a fish and chip shop in Dargaville and moved to Auckland in 1927 when he was two. Of Dalmatian descent his parents came to New Zealand from Podgora after World War 1. Mrkusich’s father initially worked in the Northland gumfields. Does Mrkusich’s painted surface embrace the simultaneous operation of two apparently divergent value systems, a double-sided modus vivendi that marks the condition of Dalmatian immigrants in New Zealand? The one side embraced Epicureanism in the nobility and enjoyment of food, wine, life and family; these were the tarara, Dalmatian ‘fast talkers’ who integrated so well into Māori society. The other exemplifies austerity, piety, the vanity of the restrained, industrious work ethic of the gumfields; the sobriety of the successful immigrant intent on carving out a successful niche in the new world. But rather than these opposing norms guaranteeing a permanent condition of schizophrenia for Dalmatians they came eventually to function together within a single overarching community. To stand in front of a Mrkusich painting, I want to argue, is to experience this ambivalence.

In 1942 Mrkusich took up an apprenticeship in Writing and Pictorial Arts with Neuline Studios — an early New Zealand film studio founded by Robert Steele an Australian-born producer — while also attending night courses at Seddon Technical and taking separate lifedrawing classes. Though he returned to the commercial art studio after painting full-time for two years, those two years laid the groundwork of his geometric painting style. His early work, like the 1946 Constellations, consisted of networks of black lines that double back on each other and capture floating coloured shapes. This work recalls both Alexander Calder’s mobiles and Ben Nicholson’s painted reliefs. Derived from other artists the shapes all sit on the surface regimented and flat and decorative, and there is little here that could be recognised as a later Mrkusich (although his subsequent Arc paintings of the early 1980s brought back the curving line). Then, influenced by Paul Klee (who himself was for a time a teacher at the Bauhaus), and by the many mosaic murals he had been commissioned to complete around Auckland, Mrkusich’s paintings became accumulations of tiny patches of colour that colonised his canvas surface. The most famous of these is Auckland Art Gallery’s City Lights (1955). After that comes one of those apocryphal stories often told of artists: one day in 1959 in his studio Mrkusich carelessly knocked one of his freshly-painted patch paintings off the easel and as it slid across the floor he found that the surface tiles had all smeared. (4) He had discovered what would become his ‘programme’: the construction of the surface. As he later specified: “The surfaces … and their uniqueness, I think, is my own uniqueness.”(5) With his next group of works known as Emblems the painting is no longer the result of a previously conceived design, now in rough rectangles and blobs his brushstrokes fight with each other, and a transition seems to have taken place with an ease that beleaguers what must have been Mrkusich’s struggle. It was a kind of painting that seemed easy, but it wasn’t easy for it was intensely skillful too. Everything now depended on the physical presence of a surface on which brush marks and variations of tone and colour
worked their magic.

Despite many changes in the work (after the Emblems come the Elements then the Corners and the Meta-Greys and the Journeys) what counts now is the surface. A painting like Chromatic Circle 62–15 (1962–64), painted over a two-year period, marks a transition from the mélange of brushstrokes back to geometric form: the unruly chaos of the coloured circle collapses down into the semi-geometricised, brushstroke-like debris at the bottom of the composition. However, the entire effect still depends upon a brushed and stippled surface. And though even from a short distance away the surface of many Mrkusich paintings looks uninflected and impersonal, as though the paint had been laid on with a roller brush, step up close to a later painting like Blue Squared (1967) and you see that it is stippled on and alive. You see how much of the artist’s touch is visible in the way the underlying colour peeps through a paint surface covered in dabs and splotches of paint perhaps applied with a short brush held in a clenched hand.

To create the matte surface that makes the painting as sensuous and vulnerable as soft skin, Mrkusich jettisons story, myth, and illusion, and with them representation and spatial depth. At the time of their making these paintings were seen as arid and cerebral, nailing a spiritual vacuum at the core of an increasingly secular society. Now, of course, we understand that the strength of Mrkusich’s best work has always been its winning combination of perceptual subtlety and sensuous immediacy. It is this odd alliance of the rational (the scaffold of the painting shape — its frame and the geometric elements it contains) and the ascetically luxuriant (the tantalising vortex of colour we must lose ourselves in) that has made Mrkusich such an awkward fit for the canon of New Zealand modernism, where too often the elemental purity of his work has been mistaken for jejeune intuition or otherwise blankness. At one end of the opinion spectrum, critics nervous of pure shape have tried to square his singular manner with the standard categories of art historical convenience — minimalism, high formalism, colour-field abstraction — none of which actually suit. No foreign modern movement or style actually ‘suits’. At the other end, are those who peer at the paintings and see nothing but flat geometric shapes and blank spaces. What these critics don’t perceive is that Mrkusich’s art is about receptivity and reflected responses to the phenomenal world. It appears for us, as it shines forth and shows itself, and we incline our attention towards it; or tilt our head to see as it rushes up towards us. “Colour is a life-force,” he responded to a journalist quizzing the logic of his coloured, enamelled glass spandrels for the façade of Te Papa in Wellington. (6) There is something both effusive and inscrutable about the visuality of his work. As I have suggested, the evident fullness of his painting has a sense of the ‘too much’ and often their blankness may seem a deliberate ‘opting out’. But this refusal or turning away is consistent with notions of the ineffable as the unrepresentable, formless chaos that underlies the familiar structures of our habitual world. This is perhaps because within the sphere of colours, Mrkusich’s chromatic hues marked by the achromatic (if that is what they are) are themselves often treated as abstractions, and thus open to more generalised statements about their meaning or symbolic value. Nevertheless, colours are often felt by way of metaphor and association — in terms of what they are like: warm, cold… — whereas colour is often discussed in relation to what it may be distinguished from, in terms of what it is not like. We cannot touch colour, even though it constantly surrounds us and we are in some ways always touched by it.

One of the paradoxes of colour is that it is at once truly universal and unaccountably particular to each painter, each viewer; it is something vividly experienced by almost all people almost all of the time, and yet our understanding of the nature of this experience remains rudimentary and contested, perhaps unshareable (for all of us are colour-blind). Above all, it is almost impossible to put the experience of colour into words in anything but the most bland and general ways. For, as Bauhaus colourist Josef Albers once luminously declared, “colour deceives continuously.”(7)

The first thought now, a hundred years after his birth, is that Mrkusich has been vindicated. He has become one of New Zealand’s ‘old masters’ along with Walters and McCahon, recognisable, inimitable, ‘grand’ even. The accompanying thought is that in achieving this place Mrkusich’s work now loses something of its power, it is now accepted, sublime, calm and unclouded by a sense of questioning. So, it loses the edge it once had. Have those of us who like his work let him down in an obvious sense when we find his work easy and now expect to see his paintings alongside those of McCahon and Walters in public gallery collections? Somehow, he deserved to reverberate in the work of subsequent artists in Aotearoa but he doesn’t. Mrkusich was the first to use the corner wedge that McCahon later exploited as did Walters. His ‘Corner Paintings ’of the 1960s and 70s are some of his best. Painting Red (1974) is one of the finest of these. Here his cloudy red with its corners — variants of red — beguiles us with its power. For red is the sign of supremacy: the traffic light that commands us to stop; the teacher’s pen that corrects your essay; the Ferrari speeding in the wind you lust after; the Cardinal’s robes. Mrkusich’s corners operate like the stones you might place at the corners of a loose page to stop it lifting in the breeze. Like a graphic mat the corners hold the image down, isolating it for purely visual contemplation. But few other younger artists have found a way to pursue the implications of his work and none of his younger contemporaries was particularly close to him — although he did for a short period join the meetings of an informal group of Walters, Killeen, Scott and Thornley centred around Petar Vuletic’s Auckland gallery.

Perhaps Mrkusich’s seriousness — St Augustine again — is still there to be pursued? There is a general unwillingness to engage with what we might call his ‘intelligence’ and the fact that whatever it is that takes place between the viewer and the painting has a phenomenological dimension. We now tend to think of the colour, the depth of focus, the painterliness as nostalgic, as if Mrkusich were somehow the last painter who could be painterly before the expressionistic turn to figuration in the late twentieth century. But whatever medium or methodology Mrkusich employs, whatever meticulousness attends his production, I always encounter his art as a form of poetic detachment and distraction; he makes paintings that seem made while looking elsewhere, but works that nevertheless suck me into their surface in a kind of trance. Mrkusich’s work prompts me to seek its significance somewhere off-stage, off to the side, through an inclination to the oblique and phenomenally ephemeral.

So, where does Mrkusich’s art sit on the continent of knowledge? Although it may depend upon the gestural mark, it is not on the continent of the physical, in the bodily sense of the term, where we might place Pollock. Nor is it on the continent of psychology, where one might place Warhol. Maybe it is on the continent of metaphysics where Mrkusich has a place? An important series of works is titled the ‘Meta Greys’. Mrkusich first embarked on them in 1969, they then mutated into the Chromatic Meta Greys, Meta Grey Lights and the Meta Grey Darks in 1970. They were all produced and relate closely to the Corner paintings of the same period. The paintings’ grey rectangles and corners are rich, relatively uniform, and uninflected by the use of brush marks; in contrast, the equally proportioned square coloured panels offer an intense chromatic experience with inflections of texture. Sombre, steely colour seems to engulf you with tenderness and then infinitely to recede. In Chromatic Meta Grey No. 1 (1970) the static image is eloquent of volatility and mutability: alchemical. It captures a world where everything literally flows and seeps into everything else. One colour mutates into the next with the help of its tiny corners. Background becomes foreground and foreground becomes background. The grey palette is chosen deliberately for this interstitial world, creating both emotional and intellectual spaces for viewer. Mrkusich’s canvas lives and breathes in a space of uncertainty, his grey is enigma, instability, contradiction. Mrkusich’s steely greys recall the ungraspable nuances of Velásquez. He shows us that, as the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer has argued, “The truth is always grey.”(8)

Mrkusich’s starting point with his paintings was the experience in his studio of standing or sitting and looking at them for a long time. It must be ours too. They seem to ask for time. The experience of looking tells you what is happening in the work. You go on being engaged by the physical presence of a surface on which brush marks (produced by traditional brushes and those used by interior decorators) and variations of tones and colour do their stuff. Some of Mrkusich’s canvases are very lovely things. They are particularly sensitive to the surrounding space, the ambient light and the distance you stand away from them. If you stand close so that they fill your entire visual field your mind does not float off; there are still a myriad of things to be found in them. Mrkusich, I think, would have endorsed Mark Rothko’s statement: “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token.”(12) Much of what is said about Mrkusich, including what I write here, rarely does more than expand on the themes of emotion and spirituality. (The exception is Peter Leech who writes of Mrkusich from a resolutely philosophical position).(13) However, the shift from mood to mood that takes place in front of his paintings is possible because we must interrogate them — they are not just sentimental or even full of emotion — they are painting at work. They call for interpretation and at the same time defend themselves from it.

Art cannot be used to explain the mysterious; art uncovers the mysterious. And when noticed and uncovered, it becomes more mysterious. Perhaps, a hundred years after his birth, the innate mystery of his painting can again persuade us to give Mrkusich the rapt attention he deserves? Despite its sharp bends and swerves his career followed remarkably consistent principles. The American critic Harold Rosenberg once declared: “The modern painter begins with nothingness. That is the only thing he copies. The rest he invents.”(14) Mrkusich’s parents came with nothing from Podgora in Croatia to Dargaville. In a real sense, Mrkusich’s art is an emigrant art, seeking, as only emigrants do, the unfindable place of origin, the moment before everything began.