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When the abstract painter Milan Mrkusich died last month, at the ripe old age of ninety-three, it felt like the end of an era. The ‘big three’ of the New Zealand national-art canon—Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, and Toss Woollaston—were long gone, passing in 1970, 1987, and 1998 respectively; and Gordon Walters, Mrkusich’s fellow traveller in modernist abstraction, departed in 1995. So Mrkusich outlived them all—by almost twenty years.

In New Zealand, Mrkusich has always been the textbook exemplar of modernist abstraction—modernist abstraction and nothing but. He started working in an abstract idiom in the mid-1940s. From the outset, his work was rooted in design principles—the Bauhaus. He did modernist interior and furniture design as a day job. Then, in 1952, he built himself an award-winning modernist home, where he would live and work for the remainder of his days in splendid isolation. (Marti Friedlander’s photos of him there—in his clean, orderly studio—implied that his art and life were of a piece.)

In the 1950s and 1960s, Mrkusich worked his way through a range of art idioms and ideas. In different works, we hear echoes of Piet Mondrian, John Tunnard, Ben Nicholson, Mark Rothko, etcetera. At this time, McCahon was also considering his options, trying stuff out. While Mrkusich and McCahon would later seem to be poles apart, their works in these years sometimes seem to be caught in a dialogue, a dance. At Auckland Art Gallery, I always loved seeing Mrkusich’s cubisty City Lights (1955) hanging alongside McCahon’s cubisty Flounder Fishing, Night, French Bay (1957) in a game of visual Snap.

In the 1960s, Mrkusich’s paintings sometimes emphasised designy graphic and geometric elements, sometimes expressive painterly ones, and sometimes combined them, as if seeking some resolution between thought and feeling, calculation and intuition. My favourite example: Painting 62–19 (Little Radiance) (1962). His Emblems (1963) and Elements (1965) fused formal inquiry with metaphysical symbolism, lifted from Rudolf Koch’s The Book of Signs.

Mrkusich’s breakthrough came in 1968, when he began his radically simple Corner paintings. They were more-or-less monochrome fields—some flat as, some inflected and ‘atmospheric’. They had contrastingly hued and toned triangular ‘corners’. Resembling photo corners or blotter corners, they seemed to hold the colour fields in place and more-and-less impeded our gazes from escaping the field. In some examples, the corners were the same hue and tone; in others, the corners optically advanced and receded to different extents, torquing the fields. The best are about sixty-eight inches square—neither big nor small, dominant nor submissive. The Corner paintings were the ultimate resolution of material literalness and immaterial beyondness, the architectural and the atmospheric, without resorting to symbolism or allegory.

With the Corner paintings, Mrkusich nailed it. It was hard to see how or where the idea could be taken further. And, in a larger scene, perhaps he could have gone on making them forever. In subsequent decades, Mrkusich continued to make important, handsome works, but nothing to top the brilliance and consequence of the Corner paintings—or build on them.

It’s often said that in New Zealand abstraction was neglected—marginalised. There’s truth to this. But Mrkusich was also hugely successful. He had his Auckland City Art Gallery retrospective at in 1972, the same year as McCahon. In the 1970s, Mrkusich first, then Walters, were the big-name abstract painters. They were cornerstones in the argument of Auckland’s legendary separatist Petar/James Gallery, which championed formal abstraction and also represented young-turk painters, including Stephen Bambury, Richard Killeen, and Ian Scott.

Nothing holds. In the late 1980s, the battle lines would shift again, with postmodernism. Abstraction would be read in a new way, a ‘post-formalist’ way—less as form, more as sign. As if in response, Mrkusich softened his formalist hard line, allowing allusions to landscape and metaphysics to return in his Journeys (1986–9), Chinese Elements (1989), and Alchemical Spectrum (1990). Later, he would duet with younger post-formalist abstract artists, like John Nixon (at Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland, in 2007) and Julian Dashper (at Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington, in 2008)—despite their being fully cheese to his chalk.

In the 1990s, Mrkusich would find himself eclipsed by Walters, whose standing was paradoxically enhanced by the cultural-appropriation debate, even though he claimed his works were purely formal—as champions ran to Walters’s defence. He remains a live issue in the culture—there’s a Walters industry. Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery have just done a major Walters show, and it’s touring to Te Papa. By contrast, Mrkusich’s last public outing was rather glorious, but four years ago and in Masterton!

Mrkusich was a resourceful, intelligent painter. His works were brainy and good looking. But, while he’s a key figure in our national art history, he aspired to an entirely different context—a different conversation, which never came. The dilemma remains: what to do with an internationalist whose work is only known on these islands; what to do with him in this postmodernist, post-formalist, post-medium, post-national moment; what to make of him, now?
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