Christopher Henry Bower Wright
A personal tribute
HAMISH KEITH
Kim Wright was one of the most vivid men I have ever met. So much about him seemed to balance impossible alternatives. A restless and sometimes troubled soul: but often just to sit with him was one of the calmest things to do in an anxious city. He was determined and single-minded - characteristics which he inevitably expressed in the most gentle of ways. Full of enthusiasms and discoveries, Kim was nonetheless a good and tolerant listener to the most trivial concerns and complaints of his friends.
It is hard then to put aside the feeling of personal loss at his sudden death last month, and measure the man's contribution to New Zealand art. It is even harder, perhaps, because of Kim Wright's instinctive diffidence and the fact that he never cared to think of his activities in that way. He shared his collection with the rest of us because it would not have occurred to him to do otherwise and it would have appalled him to store his paintings away like stocks and shares in a safe deposit box.
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| Kim Wright with a screen by Gordon Walters |
As Barry Lett has written elsewhere, Kim Wright did not set out to put together a 'collection' of New Zealand paintings: but he was perceptive enough to realise how others might view the works he acquired and he made it possible for them to do so. When, in 1974/75, his collection toured galleries around the country Kim was, at first, surprised that people might want him to speak to them - to explain himself - he hated doing it, but he made the effort and eventually, I think, it amused him to consider the foresight they attributed to him.
If foresight did not inform the putting together of a collection of New Zealand art which many public galleries might envy, then something did. Kim acquired paintings, sculpture and prints not because posterity (or some future art auctioneer) was peering over his shoulder, but because he could not do without them. He made a personal commitment to the work and there was no cold commercial transaction involved in that. He would not have imposed his taste or choice on anyone else although, as a dealer, he would share his own response with anyone who sought it: much to his credit he would emphasise the value of any particular work and not its future price.
Nobody had cajoled, pushed or persuaded Kim into his own experience of art - he had found his own way there and I think this attitude of discovery was really the only approach to art he could approve of. He was impatient with theories and pretension: works of art did something to you - it was never the other way about. His appetite for art was never jaded or half-hearted and he felt that he owed art something in return.
It is a not insignificant fact, that, only two years after buying his first painting in 1964, Kim Wright became a supportive partner in Barry Lett Galleries and has been since a tireless worker for the cause of New Zealand art and artists. As a collector he was more a Victor Choquet than anything grander - a friend of many of the artists whose works he acquired- an able reporter on experience.
Three years ago, writing on Kim's collection for its touring catalogue, I though that Pat Hanly's portrait of him summed up 'a life in which real values are measured by the imagination, in which works of art represent experience not investment'. That life has proved to be tragically short. It was, though, to quote Modigliani on his own aspirations, 'a life brief, but intense'.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 6 June/July 1977