Boats in Wellington Harbour

This painting of Wellington wharves at night is a significant upshot of Day's experience of studying the work of modernist artists such as Pablo Picasso and George Braque, while he was living in Europe. The Cubist practice of interlocking planes was still, even in mid-20th century New Zealand, a radical form of visual practice. This moody painting's industrial subject was innovative for the period and shows how conventional definitions of 'beauty' were being overcome by a more rigorous search for pictorial meaning. The gritty parallel of cranes with hills shows how much expertise Day had for relating geometry to place.

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