Bridget Hackshaw’s The Architect and The Artists is both a personal tribute to her father and a valuable record of an important moment in our cultural history. The book, accompanying a yet to be released film, shines a light on a wonderfully fruitful collaboration which saw the architect James Hackshaw working with artist Colin McCahon and sculptor Paul Dibble on a series of religious buildings and private homes.

The impetus for the collaboration came from the Catholic Bishop of Auckland, Reginald Delargey (1914-1979). Inspired by the Second Vatican Council’s call for a more outward looking church, he placed much of the Diocese’s building programme in the hands of James Hackshaw, a talented young architect and founding member of the influential practice known as The Group. An essay by Julia Gatley details how his designs brought Le Corbusier inspired elegance to the DIY ethos of the Kiwi shed.

As a Catholic with a strong interest in contemporary art, Hackshaw established a strong bond with McCahon who was well into his mature period with works like the Gate Series and the Elias paintings, though his significance was still largely unrecognised.

Their first and best-known collaboration was a convent in Upland Rd, Remuera, built in 1965 for a small community of teaching Sisters. Hackshaw’s design centred around an austere box-shaped chapel with clerestory windows popping-up above the roofline. Working largely in situ, with 20-year-old Richard Killeen as his assistant, McCahon painted directly onto the clerestory glass. His glorious east-facing windows above the altar were echoed in a narrow Way of the Cross mural running down a high balcony corridor at the western end of the chapel.

These works are beautifully presented with full page photographs matched with McCahon’s explanatory notes and excerpts from his letters. The chapel windows and the Way of the Cross mural probably stand as McCahon’s most sophisticated use of religious symbolism. An essay by Peter Simpson contextualises the work and meticulously traces how the forms and symbols from the Upland Rd Chapel recur constantly in McCahon’s work throughout the late 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps the most striking contribution to the book comes from Sister Maria J. Park who lived in the convent and through long hours of prayer and contemplation became finely attuned to the spiritual meanings of the art. Her essay reveals how McCahon approached the commission with an intensity that recalls the medieval icon tradition. Every aspect of the work, from choice of materials through to compositional design and tonal modulation is imbued with profound religious significance.

Alexa Johnston details how McCahon’s windows were transferred to Auckland City Art Gallery in 1989 after the convent was de-commissioned and she describes the heroic restoration job which gave a new lease of life to the glass panels from above the altar.

It was only a fortuitous sequence of events that resulted in the preservation of the Upland Road glass and the book describes the shameful neglect of many of the other art works commissioned by Hackshaw.

Some intriguing sculptural works McCahon created for a small convent in Otara were lost when the building was demolished and his intricately constructed glass panels for McKillop College, Rotorua, languished for years in a drama department storage room before they were recovered and relocated in 2019.

While the Upland Rd Convent clearly deserves a place among McCahon’s most significant work, the later commissions throw a revealing light on his under-appreciated prowess as a colourist.

In several of the churches, the painter’s notoriously sombre palette is cast aside for what McCahon himself describes as, “a blast of colour.” At the Liston College Chapel in Henderson, stunningly vibrant blocks of yellow, red, purple and blue are arranged within Mondrian-esque grids and at St Ignatius, St Heliers, a blaze of ruby red is set alongside a huge slab of cool blue. The luminous colours are modulated by foliage outside the building and the effect is something akin to the mysterious emotional resonance of a Rothko painting.

Bridget Hackshaw’s superb photographs sensitively capture the way the coloured glass floods the church interiors with an ethereal radiance. At St Ignatius the impact is so overwhelming a child entering the church was overheard asking his mother “are we in heaven?”

McCahon inevitably overshadows Paul Dibble’s contribution to these buildings and Dibble himself acknowledges that unlike McCahon, he did not see the commissions as an integral part of his artistic practice. His bronze candle-holders, crucifixes and tabernacles exude a ‘hobbity’ charm and the account of how he constructed a bronze casting foundry in the backyard of a Mt Eden student flat is an endearing testimony to the Kiwi-can-do spirit.

The book does not offer much interpretation of the art but the documentation, with carefully chosen excerpts from supporting texts, certainly lays the groundwork for a revisionist study of McCahon’s practice.

The fragments from McCahon’s letters are both amusing and instructive, highlighting the benefits that would accrue from a scholarly edition of his correspondence. He comments to Peter McCleavey on his “inbuilt vulgarity” and while acknowledging he doesn’t fit within any of the available “God boxes,” he writes with humility and eloquence on how these commissions allowed him to form a connection with communities that shared his religious convictions.

Reviewed by Paul Simei-Barton