Colin McCahon

Colin John McCahon was born on 1 August 1919 in Timaru, New Zealand, and grew up mostly in Dunedin, where his family moved when he was an infant. He attended Maori Hill Primary School and, for about a year, Waitaki Junior High School in Oamaru, before entering Otago Boys' High School in Dunedin, which he reportedly disliked. From around age fourteen he attended Saturday morning art classes run by the artist Russell Clark, and from 1937 to 1939 he studied part time and intermittently at the Dunedin School of Art, then a department of King Edward Technical College. No source confirms that he completed a formal diploma or degree there.

In 1937 he met fellow student Anne Hamblett, whom he later married, and the two were part of a circle of young Dunedin and Christchurch modernists that also included Toss Woollaston and Rita Angus. McCahon's mature work ranged across landscape, figuration, and abstraction, and became increasingly defined by painted text, biblical language, and numbers worked directly into the picture surface. He also held a role at the Auckland City Art Gallery and later taught at the University of Auckland's School of Fine Arts. He died at Auckland City Hospital on 27 May 1987; his ashes were scattered at Muriwai, near Auckland, in June 1988.

New Zealand and Australian institutions consistently describe McCahon as the most significant New Zealand artist of the twentieth century. The National Gallery of Victoria describes him as widely regarded as the country's most significant artist, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa calls him the outstanding figure in New Zealand visual art of the twentieth century. Later critical attention, including a major survey at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and his selection for the 1984 Biennale of Sydney, has focused on his fusion of landscape, language, and faith into a distinctly New Zealand form of modernism.

McCahon's auction market is concentrated almost entirely in New Zealand and Australia, and his record price has continued to climb as his historical standing consolidates. His auction high is Is There Anything of Which One Can Say Look This is New? (1982), which sold for NZD 2,450,000 at Webb's in Auckland on 18 September 2022, reported at the time as the highest price ever paid for any artwork by any artist at a New Zealand auction. It surpassed the previous record for the artist, The Canoe Tainui, which sold for NZD 1,350,000 at Art + Object in Auckland on 7 September 2016. The auction database Australian Art Sales Digest lists a somewhat different figure, 2,129,729, for the same 2022 sale, likely reflecting a different premium or currency basis than the widely reported New Zealand media figure. Collectors should treat the exact converted total with some caution even though the headline result and the work itself are well documented.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for McCahon. The Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust maintains an online catalogue of known works, which functions as the field's primary reference and the closest thing to an authentication authority, though it is not a substitute for a printed scholarly catalogue. Gow Langsford Gallery in Auckland has mounted the most recent commercial exhibitions of his work, but no source confirms a formal, exclusive estate representation arrangement. Because his market is thin and almost entirely domestic to New Zealand and Australia, individual auction results, including the 2022 record, should be read with attention to currency exposure and the small number of comparable sales rather than as a smooth upward trend.