Artist: E. Mervyn Taylor Title: Industry Medium: Ceramic tiles Dimensions: Approx. H3005 x W3005m Date: 1964 Original location: Cable Price Downer House, 108 The Terrace (also referred to as 106-110), Wellington. CPD House is now known as BERL House. Architect: Orchiston, Power & Associates Current location: Unknown Heritage status: No known protection
Now missing, E. Mervyn Taylor’s final mural was created for Cable Price Downer House, Wellington, in 1964. Taylor may have never seen the completed mural, as he passed away suddenly in June before the opening of the building in July of 1964. Aesthetically, it seems to sit at the very cusp of what might have been a new era in Taylor’s oeuvre. Constructivist and pop art influences are apparent, possibly inspired by Taylor’s visits to both New York and Moscow in 1958. In a curious bookend to his public art practice, Taylor ended up working with the same architect for both his first and final murals: Bruce Orchiston, who had also commissioned Taylor to create the windows for the Ōtaki War Memorial Hall in 1955.
The final mural design was made in ceramic tiles by Taylor’s close friend Roy Cowan in the home kiln at his and Juliet Peter’s house in Ngaio, where many an architectural tile had been produced (‘tons of tiles’ remarked Cowan in an Evening Post article). It had become evident during the Masterton Hall of Memories work that the artist needed to retain control over the final product, and, with Cowan and the kiln only a few miles from Karori, Taylor would thus be able to check progress and colour consistency quickly.
It is likely the mural disappeared during a refit of the building in the mid-1980s. It may have been destroyed, or perhaps still exists somewhere—dismantled and packed in cardboard boxes in a storage area, or even on a wall in a Hong Kong office, where some members of Downer (after being asset-stripped by Brierley Investments) operated from in the early 1990s. What remains is a tragic loss.
Text adapted from Gregory J. Smith’s essay “A Renaissance Interrupted” in Wanted: The Search for the Modernist Murals of E. Mervyn Taylor (Massey Press, 2018).
Ceramic tile mural, Cable Price Downer House, Wellington, photograph: John J. Gray, 1964. Courtesy Orchiston Architects Ltd.
Taylor, E Mervyn (artist), circa 1964, Wellington , Industry, gouache on paper on card. Image: 381mm (Height) x 381mm (Width) Support: 420mm (Height) x 394mm (Width) . Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. Registration number: 1998-0033-8
Taylor’s unused design concepts for the Cable Price Downer House mural, gouache on card. Image: Shaun Waugh, 2017. Courtesy Estate of E. Mervyn Taylor.
Taylor’s developmental sketches for the Cable Price Downer House mural. Graphite pencil and ink on architectural film, circa 1964. Image: Shaun Waugh, 2017. Courtesy Estate of E. Mervyn Taylor.
A hole reveals the missing Cable Price Downer House mural in what is now known as BERL House. Image: Bronwyn Holloway-Smith, 2016.
Artist: E. Mervyn Taylor Title: Untitled Medium: Painting directly on wall Dimensions: Approx. H2140mm x W7315mm Date: 1963 Original location: Ground floor reception, National Mutual Life Assurance building, 153 Featherston St, Wellington Architect: Gray Young, Morton, Calder & Fowler Current location: Unknown, presumed destroyed Heritage status: No known protection
Mervyn Taylor’s mural for the interior of the National Mutual Life Assurance building in Wellington, now presumed destroyed, was commissioned in 1963 by architectural firm Gray Young, Morton, Calder & Fowler. The mural reads as a collage: images of workers, all men, most likely Pākehā but possibly also Polynesian, performing a range of white- and blue-collar tasks in a smorgasbord of crisply illustrated environments — urban, rural, suburban and a very tidy ‘untamed’ wilderness. At the centre a woman looks down at a baby in her arms while a man looks up at her, holding a piece of paper in his hand—an insurance salesman, here either to make good on the woman’s dead husband’s policy, or to reassure her (but really to reassure her husband, whose earnings will pay for the policy) that should anything happen to said husband while he is busily keeping the country ticking over, there will be some compensation. Some life insurance.
Taylor’s mural was behind the reception desk in the downstairs lobby of the building, halfway down Featherston Street, in the CBD. I say the building ‘was’ there, but that’s not entirely accurate—it’s still there, sort of, its form mutated, its purpose significantly revised. In the 1980s, National Mutual moved to another building. In 2000 the Accor hotel group opened one of its Ibis hotels in the building. Renovation plans for the hotel indicate that the mural’s wall was destroyed, although the artwork may have already been painted over or covered up in some way before this.
Text adapted from Sarah Jane Parton’s essay “Assurance” in Wanted: The Search for the Modernist Murals of E. Mervyn Taylor (Massey Press, 2018).
Image from article clipping An artist who calls himself a craftsman, by Leah Newick (publication unknown), in file “Black and white artists”, Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref: 80-063-011
Taylor’s lost mural for the National Mutual Life Assurance building, Wellington. Photo: Duncan Winder, 1963. Courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, DW-1259-F
Developmental sketches showing Taylor’s adjustments to his design for the National Mutual Life Assurance mural. Graphite pencil and ink on paper and architectural film, 1963. Photo: Shaun Waugh, 2017. Courtesy Estate of E. Mervyn Taylor.
Taylor’s lost mural for the National Mutual Life Assurance building, Wellington. Photo: Duncan Winder, 1963. Courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, DW-1260-F
National Mutual Life Assurance building, Wellington. Winder, Duncan, 1919-1970 :Architectural photographs. Ref: DW-1168-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22874922
Taylor, E Mervyn (artist), 1963, Wellington , Insurance, gouache on paper on card. Image: 175mm (Height) x 670mm (Width) Support: 317mm (Height) x 710mm (Width). Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. Registration number: 1998-0033-6
Artist: E. Mervyn Taylor Title: First Kumera Planting / Kia Kitea Te Waewae Tangata Medium: Painting directly on concrete wall, using a PVA matt latex paint from Resene Dimensions: H1850mm x W2750mm Date: 1962 Original location: Entrance foyer, New Zealand Soil Bureau, 182 Eastern Hutt Rd, Taita, Lower Hutt Architect: F. G. F. Shepard, Government Architect Current location: In its original location, hidden under layers of paint Heritage status: No known protection
In the early 1960s Government Architect F. G. F Sheppard and the Director of the New Zealand Soil Bureau commissioned E. Mervyn Taylor to create a mural for a new modernist building they were developing for the park-like grounds of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research agency in Lower Hutt.
As his subject, Taylor chose the Māori kō ceremony associated with kūmara planting, and spent many hours familiarising himself with this ritual. The painting depicts a carved stone taumata-atua (stone representation, lit. ‘resting place of the gods’) placed at the head of the plot while a cloaked rangatira (chief, high-ranking individual) performs his early morning ceremony turning the first sod with his kō (wooden implement for digging). Lined up, waiting to carry on preparing the plot, are further diggers with their kō at the ready. Other workers use the timo (wooden grubber) to further break up the soil.
As Bryan James writes: ‘Ceremonies associated with [kūmara planting] were still being performed by Maori, and Taylor spent many hours familiarising himself with tribal life and ritual. […] Nothing like these murals, where Maori featured so prominently and were given equal status with European New Zealanders, was being created in New Zealand at this time; nor had they previously been sought for large public buildings. As a contemporary remarked, Taylor could if he had wished have chosen to depict a Pakeha farmer driving a Massey Ferguson tractor; such an image would have been far more widely accepted by Pākehā as typically New Zealand. […] His knowledge, already extensive, of Maori art and tradition continued to expand and he found his reputation and standing growing in both Maori and non-Maori communities.’
In its contemporary setting, Taylor’s intent for this mural was to connect two worlds: that of the Maori horticulturist, who knew the soil resource intimately, and that of the soil scientist, whose task was to extend learning and knowledge of the soil resource for the benefit of the people.
With the restructuring of Government departments in the early 1990s the Soil Bureau was rolled into a Crown Entity. The building was tenanted by a new group and at some stage the mural was painted over. This was confirmed when conservators from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa examined and tested paint samples from the wall in 2016. While removing the paint to uncover the mural was not possible at this point in time, technological advances may enable it to be uncovered in the future.
Pictorial Parade No. 128: Hutt Science – Patron of the arts, features footage of E. Mervyn Taylor at work on a mural (National Film Unit footage):
In April 2016 the E. Mervyn Taylor Mural Search & Recovery Project team visited the former site of the Taita Soil Bureau with paint conservators Linda Waters and Tijana Cvetkovic from Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand.
The conservators used infra-red technology to scan the wall on which Taylor’s mural was painted, hoping to find traces of the work. A paint sample was also taken, and later analysis has revealed promising signs that the mural is still there, hidden under layers of whitewash.
Callum Davies and Max Schleser made a short video of the visit. Callum is a former student, and Max a former Senior Lecturer, at Massey’s Te Rewa O Puanga – the School of Music and Creative Media Production. View the video below:
The team revisited the site in October 2016, and Lynn Freeman of Radio New Zealand National. The building is now home to The Learning Connexion Art School and TLC had kindly moved some large display cabinets to allow us to access the full wall where the mural was once visible.
Linda Waters has also written two blog posts giving detail around some of the techniques used in hunting for the mural. The second post explains that the mural is unlikely to be recoverable with present-day paint removal technologies:
E. Mervyn Taylor painting the mural. Image: Interior, Ministry of Works, Soil Bureau building, Taita, Lower Hutt. Winder, Duncan, 1919-1970: Architectural photographs. Ref: DW-0733-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22689740
The mural site, photographed in 2016.
Paint cross-section 40X showing yellow paint from the mural. Taken by Linda Waters, Te Papa Tongarewa, 2016.
Paint cross-section 40X showing mushroom coloured paint from the mural. Taken by Linda Waters, Te Papa Tongarewa, 2016.
E. Mervyn Taylor painting the mural. Still from Pictorial Parade No. 128, New Zealand National Film Unit, 1962.
Paint cross-section 40X showing terracotta coloured paint from the mural. Taken by Linda Waters, Te Papa Tongarewa, 2016.
E. Mervyn Taylor discusses his mural design with Norman Taylor, Director of the New Zealand Soil Bureau. Still from Pictorial Parade No. 128, New Zealand National Film Unit, 1962.
Paint cross-section 40X showing blue paint from the mural. Taken by Linda Waters, Te Papa Tongarewa, 2016.
Interior, Ministry of Works, Soil Bureau building, Taita, Lower Hutt. Winder, Duncan, 1919-1970: Architectural photographs. Ref: DW-0733-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Image featured in article Soil Bureau, Taita, Hutt Valley in the Journal of the NZ Institute of Architects, Sep 1963; v.30 n.8:p.172-175; issn:0000-0000.
E. Mervyn Taylor, First Kumera Planting mural in situ, Taita Soil Bureau building, Lower Hutt. Image courtesy of New Zealand Society of Soil Science.
Artist: E. Mervyn Taylor Title: Untitled Medium: Painted wall partition Dimensions: H3500mm x W3160mm Date: 1961 Original location: Centennial Library, 212 Marine Parade, Wairoa, Hawkes Bay Architect: Porter & Martin (A.A.) Current location: Found. Currently at an undisclosed location. Heritage status: No known protection
The Wairoa Centennial Library was opened in July 1961. Photographs of the opening convey the mid-century optimism of a town at its peak and detail the building’s bright modern lines. Taylor’s mural, adorning a two-storey central wall, is the centrepiece. Ladies in hats and furs bely a provincial conservatism that was confirmed by Taylor’s son, who remembered being reprimanded by a local policeman for working on a Sunday while helping his father complete the mural.
E. Mervyn Taylor’s Wairoa library mural does not function at all as a picture of the town (missing, after all, is Wairoa’s eponymous river), but rather presents a stylised textural quilt of the journey inland toward the bush. Notes written on Taylor’s initial designs for the library mural confirm this interpretation of the mural as a journey both inland and toward the past: ‘Red Heads,1 Early Maori, Whalers,2 cattle and sheep, country mostly hilly, heavy bush, big trees, Moa, cabbage tree, flax, travel on horseback, early fruit centre, wattle & daub huts, wheat, timber.’ The layering is both spatial and temporal.
There is an ancient, primordial quality to that inner landscape that exerts a powerful attraction. The very fact that something older and wilder persists in this place, despite the overwhelming economic pressures of modern agriculture on the New Zealand landscape, is a direct result of local Māori leaders’ concerted resistance to land cessions and confiscations in the 1860s and 1870s. Taylor seems to gesture at this tension in his mural, which was commissioned, along with the building that housed it, to mark the centennial of the establishment of Wairoa township, at the height of colonial confiscations and escalating conflict.
The mural depicts two family groupings facing off: a Māori rangatira is armed only with a taiaha, while four Pākehā men bear two rifles, a whaling spear and an axe. In reality, the local conflict between Māori and Pākehā was far less asymmetrical than this image implies, with Māori embracing all the legal and technological tools of their time to wage a highly innovative and effective guerrilla campaign against the colonial forces. Almost 150 years ago the final chapter of New Zealand’s land wars played out largely in the Ruakituri Valley, inland from Wairoa, against the background of Te Urewera.
The events are more complex and polarising than can be done justice here.
Between 2001 and 2002, Taylor’s Wairoa mural disappeared, quietly and without fuss. How could an artwork that was two storeys high and built into the wall of a public library vanish without trace? During a 2001 renovation it was noted that the steep, narrow stairs that provided access to the library’s upper mezzanine were not up to current building code. Their replacement required the removal of the wall on which Taylor’s mural was painted. The panels were removed and put into storage at the old fire station in the hope that a replacement site in Wairoa would eventually be found.
Shortly thereafter, a woman claiming to be a family member came into the library looking for the mural and expressed her dismay at finding that it was no longer there. If the mural was no longer in use by the library, she asserted, it should be returned to the family. With no foreseeable future site for the mural, it appears that council staff honoured her request, either sending the mural to an address she provided or allowing her to take the work.
Fifteen years later it has been discovered that Taylor’s family know nothing of this incident. Those who might have been involved with returning the work to the ‘family’ have since passed away, and no records of the circumstances of its return have been found. In late 2016 a reward of $5000 was offered for information leading to the mural’s rediscovery and one year later, in late 2017, it turned up. The people who have it wish to remain anonymous — but it is found, and it is safe. Its story, however, resonates with a theme that has emerged across the journey of this project: that New Zealand’s historic public art is in need of serious attention.
Text adapted from Joyce Campbell’s essay “Layers Upon Layers” in Wanted: The Search for the Modernist Murals of E. Mervyn Taylor (Massey Press, 2018).
Interior, Wairoa centennial library. Winder, Duncan, 1919-1970 :Architectural photographs. Ref: DW-0302-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22675657. Image featured in article Centennial Library, Wairoa in the Journal of the NZ Institute of Architects, May 1963; v.30 n.4:p.62-63; issn:0000-0000.
The Wairoa Centennial Library in 2017. Photo: Shaun Waugh.
The Wairoa Centennial Library in 2017. Photo: Shaun Waugh.
Taylor, E Mervyn (artist), 1961, Wellington , Wairoa Centennial, gouache on paper on card. Image: 381mm (Height) x 285mm (Width). Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. Registration number: 1998-0033-2
Artist: E. Mervyn Taylor Title: Untitled Medium: Incised tōtara panel Dimensions: Approx. H1380mm x W1210mm Date: 1958 Original location: New Zealand Meat Producers’ Board boardroom. Massey House, 126-132 Lambton Quay, Wellington. Architect: Plischke & Firth Current location: Unknown Heritage status: No known protection
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In 1958, E. Mervyn Taylor delved into the iconography of the New Zealand vernacular to create a wall panel for the Meat Producers Board in Wellington’s most glamorous new building, Massey House, designed by Viennese expatriate architect Ernst Plischke (1903–92). Meat was money in 1950s New Zealand, and in his choice of imagery Taylor emphasised the prosperity that meat exports were bringing to New Zealand.
Surviving photographs of the panel, and pencil rubbings that Taylor took from it, show that he was able to experiment skillfully with multiple scenes in the same composition while satisfying the client’s demands for a coherent narrative. Resplendent in its nationalism (and sanitised in its view of meat processing), Taylor’s panel was intended to take pride of place in the Plischke-designed interior scheme for the seventh floor of Massey House on Lambton Quay.
According to an Evening Post article, the mural ‘was commissioned by the Meat Producers’ Export Board through the architectural practice of Plishke [sic] and Firth’, and completed by Mervyn Taylor for installation in April 1958, six months after Massey House was finished.
After many sales and refurbishments of Massey House over the past sixty years, the Massey House mural is now considered one of Taylor’s missing works. The artwork’s characteristics are best understood from the negative in the Evening Post archives which shows the finished panel upright on the floor, leaning against a workbench in an attic. Cropped to eliminate the extraneous background details, the Evening Post reproduced this photograph to accompany a story on the Massey House commission. In it the writer describes the panel’s content and style: ‘The finished work resembles a large woodcut, and fine technique has been used. The incised lines have been coloured off-white to contrast with the rich polished surface of totara.’
Bryan James reports that Taylor took two months to produce a preliminary sketch for Massey House, and then a further two months to complete the piece for installation, being rewarded with a payment of £200 (a third of his income for the year) for the work.
Taylor’s Massey House mural is a bucolic, prosperous and busy artwork designed using recognisable elements of the New Zealand vernacular to promote nationalistic pride: mountains, cabbage trees, colonial buildings, sheep and cattle. His work as art editor and illustrator for the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education and his concomitant involvement in wood engraving developed his style and incising technique. However, the composite of scenes in this design and their vertical orientation are unique in his oeuvre, and represent a singular response to the story of selling New Zealand’s meat successfully to the world.
Text adapted from Linda Tyler’s essay “From Paddock to Port” in Wanted: The Search for the Modernist Murals of E. Mervyn Taylor (Massey Press, 2018).
Taylor, Ernest Mervyn, 1906-1964. Totara panel showing iconic scenes of New Zealand, carved by Mr E Mervyn Taylor. Negatives of the Evening Post newspaper. Ref: EP/1958/1271-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
Massey House on Lambton Quay, Wellington. Negatives of the Evening Post newspaper. Ref: 1/2-061276-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
Incised tōtara panel, boardroom, New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Massey House, Wellington, 1958. The image of the missing carved panel has been digitally inserted into this photograph, which was taken in 1958 when the room was close to completion. Courtesy Plischke-Nachlaas/Plischke Estate. Digitally inserted image of carved panel: Evening Post collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, EP/1958/1271-F
Taylor’s panel rubbings of the Massey House panel. Graphite pencil on paper, circa 1957. Image: Shaun Waugh, 2017
Public Art Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand 