The Invention of New ­Zealand Art and National Identity, 1930-1970 By Francis Pound. SCARCE.

The Invention of New ­Zealand Art and National Identity, 1930-1970 By Francis Pound.
SCARCE.

Publisher: Auckland University Press, 2009, first edition.

 EX- LIBRARY hardback with jacket in very good condition with minimal markings.
Binding firm, some minor rubbing, marks and bumping to boards, stamps to ffep and title page, library codes on publishing page, label inside back board, library stamp to top closed edges, main pages are very good.
Jacket has some light shelf-wear, tape marks to reverse side.
 224 pages, illustrated.

The Invention of New Zealand is an important study of nationalism in twentieth-century New Zealand art. From the 1930s onwards, artists, writers and critics such as Toss Woollaston, Allen Curnow, Colin McCahon, Rita Angus, A R D Fairburn, Doris Lusk and Monte Holcroft deployed art, literature and theory in the construction of a national identity, the search for the essence of New Zealand and the invention of a specifically New Zealand high culture. Francis Pound ponders, decodes, memorialises and celebrates this project from its starting moment when painters and poets became newly self-conscious about New Zealand art. He argues that in the early 1970s the framework was largely dismantled and the discourse abandoned by a new generation of artists and critics, such as Richard Killeen, Ian Scott and Petar Vuletic. Over ten fascinating chapters, Pound covers the Nationalists' major concerns, their problems with antecedents, the formulation of their canon and their various co-option, adoption and rejection of Regionalism, Cubism, Modernism and Primitivism in their quest for invention. The Invention of New Zealand is a well-illustrated and engagingly written narrative by one of our most brilliant and original art historians.

ALL PHOTOS ARE OF THE ACTUAL BOOK. 

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