Brown and Hamish Keith’s revised edition of An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1839–1980, published in 1982. Tellingly, one of Hanly’s Torso paintings was chosen to replace a McCahon as the cover image of Gordon H. No New Zealand painter before him had embraced painterly expressionism and American action-painting with quite the same degree of sheer joy-an emotion not often associated with pÄ�kehÄ� high culture of the earlier McCahon/Baxter/Fairburn era. While it is certainly an exaggeration that Hanly single-handedly launched New Zealand painting out of its “brown and green period” into the light of brilliant high-key colour, there is an element of truth to the claim. Of his human subject works, Hanly writes in 1964, “Non individuals leaving no sign or mark… People are too new here and nature absorbs them.” Written over a decade before the Torso series, we sense an anxiety about his figurative works that by 1977 has clearly been put to rest. This offers rare insights into the personal thoughts and feelings of a New Zealand artist of this period in a strikingly direct way. He kept a hand-written journal from the early 60s until 1971, excerpts from which featured in an Auckland City Art Gallery exhibition in 2000.

A homage to his wife Gil on one level, it is as much an expression of his admiration for Francis Bacon and even more so for the work of the American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, whose Woman series from the 1950s it evokes without descending into pastiche.īut Hanly’s choice of such a traditional subject was in no way backward looking. Instead, Hanly chose the classic European subject of the female nude in all her voluptuousness. Hanly’s Torso series from the late 1970s burst onto the New Zealand painting scene and changed it forever.

Signed Hanly, dated 77 andinscribed TORSO V in brushpoint upper left

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