Melvin Day: Artist

Author(s): Gregory O'Brien

Art | Aotearoa New Zealand Non-Fiction | Aotearoa | Artist Monographs | Painting

There were many Melvin Days, but the term Artist encompasses all of them. During a career spanning seven decades, he produced some of the most intellectually astute, yet often visceral, paintings in New Zealand art history. Born in Hamilton in 1923, Day was a radical but also a great believer in tradition.
In recent years, his early Cubist-inclined paintings have reinstated him as a key figure in mid-20th century New Zealand art. In London during the 1960s, he was a vital and talented figure in an expatriate scene. By later that decade he had become the most highly-qualified art historian in New Zealand and had returned home to spend a turbulent, but creatively rich, decade as director of the National Art Gallery.


It was a past he never put behind him. From the late 1970s until his death in 2016, his investigations into still life, landscape and art history continued with undiminished fervour. Melvin Day-Artist is one of the great hitherto-untold stories of New Zealand art and its history. With essays by five writers who knew and understood Day-Vincent O’Sullivan, Tony Mackle, Gregory O’Brien, Mark Hutchins-Pond and Julia Waite-this book brings to light a wide-ranging yet intensely focussed life’s work.


Melvin Day produced some of the most intellectually astute and visceral paintings in New Zealand art history. Day’s life is a colourful and fascinating one, from studying at the Elam School of Art at the age of eleven, to graduating from the Courtauld Institute of Art after serving in World War Two. Considered a radical, a traditionalist, a painter and an art historian; Day had an illustrious career which included being appointed the director of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand.  His works are to be found in many national and international public and private collections including Te Papa Tongarewa, The Dowse Art Museum, the Rotorua Museum of Art & History, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the Auckland Art Gallery, and the New Zealand Portrait Gallery. 


Author Biography: Gregory O'Brien is an independent writer, painter and art curator. He has written many books of poetry, fiction, essays and commentary. His books include A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy (Auckland University Press, 2011) and the multi-award-winning introductions to art for the young and curious: Welcome to the South Seas (Auckland University Press, 2004) and Back and Beyond (Auckland University Press, 2008), which both won the Non-Fiction Prize at the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. His book Always Song in the Water: An Oceanic Sketchbook was published in 2019, and a major work on the artist Don Binney will appear later in 2022. Gregory O'Brien became an Arts Foundation Laureate and won the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2012, and in 2017 became a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit and received an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington.

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Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781776562923
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : November 2019
  • : {"length"=>["31"], "width"=>["26"], "units"=>["Centimeters"]}
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Gregory O'Brien
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 759.993
  • : 224