40 years of Leo Bensemann

This group of eighteen oil paintings by Leo Bensemann (1912-1986) covers more than 40 years of his practice as painter from an untitled imaginary portrait of 1936 to the Takaka landscape River Flat (1979). Bensemann’s career extended a few years both before and after those dates (his earliest known works date from 1931, his latest from 1985), but nevertheless these works encompass most of his active span as an artist. There are six works from the 1930s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1950s, four from the 1960s and six from the 1970s. The eighteen works are also broadly representative of the various modes in which Bensemann practised as a painter (leaving aside his extensive work in a variety of graphic media): ten of the works are portraits, including several of known friends and acquaintances (Lawrence Baigent, Les Stapp, Hugh Cato) and two self-portraits (one from the 1950s, one from the 1970s), while five are what he called ‘imaginary portraits’, three from the 1930s and two which followed and grew from his first visit to Germany in 1970 (Unknown Westerwald, The Egyptian Woman).
 
Six other works are landscape paintings, ranging in date from 1944 to 1979, relating to several different parts of the South Island – Central Otago, inland Canterbury, the Kaikoura coast and Takaka Valley.  
 

The pair of Alemann paintings from 1979 are hard to classify, and are like nothing else in Bensemann’s oeuvre, though closer perhaps to still life than to any other traditional genre.

The fortuitous pattern into which this group of works falls – thick at both ends and thin in the middle like a cartoon bone – happens exactly to replicate the wider profile of his artistic career, in which prolific early and equally prolific late stages are separated by a long, less-productive middle (1940-1960) when his main energies went into book and typographical design and illustration for the Caxton Press. 

At Nelson College Bensemann won a prize for drawing, and his early impulse was towards utilising his drawing skills for caricature, fantasy, book-plate design, portrait studies and (increasingly) book illustration in a variety of graphic media, including pen and ink, pencil and (later) wood engraving, culminating in his first major achievement, Fantastica: Thirteen Drawings (Caxton Press, 1937).

As early as 1934, however, Bensemann indicated an intention to move into painting. He told Pat Lawlor (a Wellington author, editor and journalist, with whom he was corresponding about bookplates and other black-and-white graphic work): ‘The other branches of my art, as it were, gently but firmly progress. I hope to have some presentable paintings to exhibit as soon as possible.’The first of his paintings to be exhibited were at the CSA in 1935-38, prior to his joining The Group. His earliest paintings, from about 1933 onwards, were in watercolours, and were strongly influenced by Chinese and Japanese art, which he revered; he seldom used watercolours after 1937. From about 1934 he began experimenting with oil paints, undertaking self-portraits, portraits of friends, and ‘imaginary portraits’ – a mix of kinds of portraiture which he continued to practise to the end of his life. 

His friend Lawrence Baigent (who witnessed Bensemann’s career close up from the beginning) claimed that Bensemann’s earliest oil painting was an untitled and probably imaginary portrait of a darkly dressed young man wearing a jewelled pendant, evoking Renaissance connotations and possibly painted in 1934. The earliest portrait that can be definitively dated is Eugene Aubin in 1935 (see Otto, Portraits, p. 19) – Aubin was a journalist friend who later moved to Dunedin. Bensemann’s first oil self-portrait, Smiling Man (see Otto, Portraits, p. 13) was shown at the CSA and also at Nelson’s Suter Art Gallery in 1936. By late 1936, with the Fantastica drawings finished, Bensemann had become primarily a painter, telling Lawlor: ‘nowadays I spend far more time painting than I ever did with the black and white…This is not because my interest has waned at all but simply that painting, when things are sorted out, is my medium.’

The strongest point of continuity between Bensemann’s graphic work and his paintings in these early years  is the imaginary portraits. Bensemann’s early graphic work included portraits of several kinds, ranging from caricatures of friends and public celebrities to pastiches of Renaissance portraiture, such as the portraits of Doctor Faustus in Fantastica. It is a short step from such pen-and-ink portraits to imaginary oil portraits such as St Francis and St Olaf (both 1937).