Art Gallery Lecture - ‘Threads of Modernism - Ilse Von Randow’ Kathryn Tsui

I went to listen to Kathryn Tsui talk about Ilse von Randow, ‘the New Zealand Anni Albers’. Arriving in NZ from Shanghai in 1950’s she was a German national who moved here after her divorce and set up the weavers guild in NZ. She won the commission to produce a set of curtains that would hand dividing two gallery spaces in the gallery.

Take aways from the lecture:

She used Madder root and indigo to dye her wool.

Book recommendation: A Handweaver’s Pattern, Marguerite Porter Davison.

Ruth Buchanan’s work: The Curtain 2013. Note that the gallery did not originally advertise who made the curtains as they were not regarded as art but functional items.

Collaborative work with Colin McCahon ‘Woven Kauri’ 1954. This artwork has been lost by the gallery. Perhaps because it was a weaving and perhaps because it was made by a women, but it was not taken care of and is now missing.

Bronwyn Lloyd, ‘The Search Party’,2022. - in search of the missing artwork. Kathryn Tsui wove background weave for this work to sit on. Badges with peacock feathers stuffed inside.

Check out IVR’s ‘Wood Bay Window screen’ 1960. Frayed woven work.

North & South magazine article on the missing artwork https://northandsouth.co.nz/2022/11/20/missing-mccahon-art-ilse-von-randow-weaving-new-zealand

Victoria Carr can’t remember much from when she was seven years old, but she can still picture the loom. It stood, solid and imposing, at the top of a spiralling staircase on the upper floor of Auckland Art Gallery. She would often clamber up those stairs with her father, the man many regard as the country’s greatest ever artist. While he would consult with the loom’s owner, a diminutive, dark-haired German woman Carr wasn’t interested. She just loved the loom. It reminded her of the stories she read about Sleeping Beauty and the spell-wreaking spindle.

Seventy years on, Carr now realises the slumbering princess was distracting her from one of the country’s most elusive pieces of art history. Her father, Colin McCahon, had just moved her family the length of the country for a job that didn’t exist. He arrived at Auckland Art Gallery thinking he would join its leadership team. There’d been a misunderstanding. Only a cleaning role was available, and he found himself mopping the tiles. The McCahons moved into a small bach in the west Auckland suburb of Titirangi. The space was barely big enough to house the family of six. The toilet was outdoors. McCahon had to work in the garage. But the new setting was an inspiration. Over the next seven years, he finished hundreds of paintings. Most of his major works are catalogued bar one: a weaving of a kauri that he collaborated on with the German artist Ilse von Randow in his early days in Auckland.

Their collaboration was called Woven Kauri, and it was likely created on the loom Carr remembers from the tower room of the gallery. The design historian Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins, who wrote his master’s thesis on von Randow, calls it “one of the most important missing artworks in the country”. At the time it was created, von Randow was in her 50s and McCahon his early 30s. They’d been brought together at the urging of the art gallery’s director Eric Westbrook, who commissioned them to work on something to hang in the building’s research library. Lloyd-Jenkins imagines the pair working into the night, with McCahon sitting beside the loom, drinking, talking, and, learning.

Von Randow’s loom, part of an exhibition of her work at the Auckland Museum in 1998. She gifted it to another textile artist when she left NZ in 1966 to live in London.

It’s unclear how much the process of making Woven Kauri influenced von Randow, who created the much-loved “Auckland City Art Gallery Curtains” (now part of the Auckland War Memorial Museum collection) and is remembered as one of the country’s best modernist weavers. Lloyd-Jenkins says it was one of the first wall hangings she made, and likely opened up artistic pathways which culminated in some of her most respected works in the 1960s. But he also remembers her as a person of sharply defined tastes, a deeply -committed modernist who took her own counsel. “I was very fond of Ilse and knew her in her last years. Not to disparage her at all, but she had her own ideas,” he says. Her grandson Daniel von Randow echoes that observation, saying she could be withering about artistic styles she didn’t respect.