‘Roger was many things to many of us: a scholar, mentor, colleague, teacher, and friend. He was, like his artist-hero Goldie, a national taonga, and he will be greatly missed.’
New Zealand art historian and curator, Roger Blackley, passed away on the 15 May 2019. Here, Rebecca Rice acknowledges his legacy.
Roger Blackley, 2018
Roger and I both began our careers at Victoria University of Wellington in 1998. I was a slightly ‘mature’ student who thought I was majoring in music. He was a curator-turned-lecturer who’d come to VUW from the Auckland Art Gallery. The shift from museum to academy came easily to Roger. He was a charismatic and natural teacher with a distinctive pedagogical approach: his was an erudite and often entertaining ‘anecdotal’ art history. In the face of this talent, I’d changed my major within a year, and 12 years later I graduated with a PhD in colonial New Zealand Art History, guided by Roger every step of the way.
Through him, many of us fell in love with the art of this place and the histories that can be revealed by studying it. This love was nourished by Roger’s pastoral care, and the most productive meetings and tutorials took place over cheese scones (with plenty of spices and seasoning), banana cake (half the sugar and twice the cinnamon), and pastries (shared, because that way the calories are halved).
But it wasn’t all about the food, Roger was a pedant of the best possible kind. He insisted on engaging directly with artworks, with primary records (especially newspapers), and with keeping a keen eye on grammar and footnotes. There was no subject that was outside his realm of knowledge. His office was legendary, and scarcely any topic could be broached that didn’t involve him reaching into its health-defying depths, to recover and share a book, article or catalogue that would shed greater light upon it.
Roger Blackley, Stray Leaves: Colonial trompe l’oeil drawings, 2001. Victoria University of Wellington Press
From his earliest publications, through to his last work, Galleries of Maoriland, Roger’s scholarship focussed on those artists and artworks who history had rendered obscure, misunderstood, or simply put, plain unfashionable. From Alfred Sharpe to John Guise Mitford, from classical plaster casts in the Auckland Museum to Nelson Illingworth’s Māori busts, from carte-de-visites to Charles F Goldie’s oil paintings, Roger’s world of nineteenth-century New Zealand art was a rich and complex space.
The perfect metaphor for this world was the title work of the Adam Art Gallery exhibition and publication Stray Leaves, a trompe l’oeil painting by William Gordon, picturing a desk surface strewn with the trivia of everyday life, a painting that was at once witty self-portrait and rich social history. Keep reading…
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