Toss Woollaston

Sir Mountford Tosswill "Toss" Woollaston (11 April 1910 – 30 August 1998) was a New Zealand artist.

He is regarded as one of the most important New Zealand painters of the 20th century.

Born in Toko, Taranaki in 1910, Woollaston attended primary school at Stratford, and then Stratford Technical High School.

In 1931 he studied art at the Canterbury School of Art in Christchurch where one of his teachers was Margaret Stoddart.

He became interested in modernism after moving to Dunedin to study with R N Field at the art school attached to the King Edward Technical College.

As Woollaston noted in his autobiography Sage Tea, Field’s work ‘conveyed directly, without the intervention of subject, the excitement of the act of painting'.

While at art school Woollaston met Rodney Kennedy and the two became lovers and remained life-long friends after Woollaston’s marriage to Edith Alexander who had also been an art student in Dunedin.

Kennedy went on to become a driving force of avant garde arts in Dunedin and one of the country’s leading drama producers.

He was an early supporter and collector of Woollaston’s work and became the long-term partner of Charles Brasch, another passionate collector of contemporary New Zealand art.

In 1934 Woollaston and his family settled at Māpua, near Nelson, but remained part of a close circle of local artists and writers which included Colin McCahon, Ursula Bethell, Charles Brasch and Ron O'Reilly.

Between them they provided ongoing,moral, critical and financial support.

He found it in 1935 in the teachings of the German Cubist painter Hans Hoffman via the artist Flora Scales.

Scales had kept notes from her lessons with Hoffman when she had been in Germany and Woollaston made a copy of them for his own study.

Hoffman had analysed the work of Cezanne and the rotation of planes and foreshortening of foregrounds this revealed appealed to the young painter.

Woollaston had deeply admired Cezanne since he had seen reproductions as a boy in The Children’s Encyclopedia by Arthur Mee.

In 1936 Woollaston was invited to exhibit with The Group in Christchurch for the first time, becoming a member in 1940.

After the War, in 1950, the family moved to Greymouth and the landscape of the West Coast became a major feature of Woollaston’s work.

He earned his living as a Rawleighs salesman, although the pressure of the job gave him little time for painting.

Concerned at Woollaston being side-tracked by his art, the Rawleighs management once cautioned him, that while ‘art might be the cream on your coffee Rawleighs is your bread and butter’.

An annual Fellowship awarded by the Federation of New Zealand Art Societies in 1958 enabled him to travel to Australia where he studied old Master paintings at the National Gallery of Victoria.

The Gallery was impressed by Woollaston’s work and purchased the painting Edith with a Lamp along with a number of drawings he had made of works from the Gallery’s collection including Analytical study of Poussin's 'Crossing of the Red Sea'.

In 1959 Woollaston took the unusual step of publicly supporting McCahon by reviewing his friend’s work in the exhibition Eight New Zealand Painters III in The Star (Christchurch).

Woollaston commented that, ‘The artist is indeed often lonely when his vision stands up in contrast to the horizontal will of the public…for things already assured by repetition…’  The same year McCahon dedicated the painting Toss in Greymouth to Woollaston.

Woollaston publicly supported McCahon again the following year when the younger artist’s work Painting won the Hay’s Art Competition.

The public outcry including The Press art critic’s comment that it was, ‘… not a picture of anything,’ was strongly rebuffed by Woollaston’s review in The Press.

By the 1960s Woollaston was finally able to paint full-time and earn a living from his work assisted by a second Fellowship grant.

In 1962 this second grant allowed a trip to Europe and the United States.

In 1968 the Woollastons moved to Riwaka near Nelson and built a house.

It was a location with ‘romantic associations’ as Woollaston had lived there briefly as an eighteen-year-old at a time when he was bent on becoming a poet.

Philip Woollaston, the youngest of Woollaston’s four children, kept up the family associations with the area.

He went on to participate in 27 exhibitions of The Group and was included in the 1977 retrospective.

As a full-time orchard worker Woollaston was exempted from enlistment in World War II and spent most of the forties in the Māpua area.

After her death, Woollaston became a close friend of Anne Martindell who had been the United States Ambassador to New Zealand from 1979 to 1981.

They spent time travelling in the United States together.

McCahon first saw Woollaston’s work while he was at high school.

In his essay Beginnings in Landfall McCahon recalls, ‘I met the artist himself some years later; I saw the actual Nelson landscape and better understood the discipline imposed by the painter on his subject…I still remember the revelations of that first exhibition’ It was the beginning of a long association and friendship but, as the two men were rarely in the same place at the same time, much of  it was conducted by mail.

Much later, in 1980, McCahon referred directly to a connection with Woollaston in the title of a major black and white work A Painting for Uncle Frank named after Woollaston’s deeply religious uncle.

Although committed and talented, after leaving art school Woollaston was still searching for an independent way to express himself.

He was the (Labour) Member of Parliament for Nelson from 1981 to 1990 and currently manages the Toss Woollaston Trust.

Edith Woollaston died in 1987 following a severe stroke, aged 83.