Shaken and Deserted

In the 1930s and 40s, British Neo-Romanticism and Surrealism converged as artists reimagined the landscape as a realm of mystery and subconscious expression. British artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland transformed familiar scenery into dreamlike visions of national identity and nature’s strange vitality, a sensibility echoed by Christopher Perkins, Eric Lee Johnson, and E. Mervyn Taylor in New Zealand. Combining Romanticism’s poetic sensibility with Surrealism’s symbolic language, the New Zealand artists used ruins and natural forms, including the iconic ‘dead tree’ motif, to evoke a sense of spirit and psychological depth. Stewart Maclennan’s Shaken and Deserted (1962) reflects these ideas, its collapsing building overgrown with vegetation suggesting both decay and renewal. Maclennan was the director of the National Art Gallery when he painted the work which won first prize for watercolours in the 1962 Hays Art Competition – Peter McIntyre was the winner of the oil section.

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