By the time I arrived in Auckland, winter had descended. The North Shore beaches were raw and windswept, the seaside shops vacant. As I opened the gate of a home that I had arranged to rent, the landlady appeared in an open window. What, she asked, had possessed me to come all the way from New York at this time of year? I told her that I was visiting Susan Te Kahurangi King, the artist who grew up down the road. “Don’t reckon I’ve heard of her,” she said, and disappeared behind a curtain.
The Kiwi sensibility, like the flightless kiwi bird, is funny, bashful, and a bit forlorn. Some New Zealanders admit embarrassment at living so far away from everything—the real world, they suspect, is happening elsewhere. But life on an island also inspires a scrappy, home-town camaraderie. A native who finds fame abroad is sure to return a national hero. It is therefore surprising that so few New Zealanders know of King, who, at seventy-five, may be the country’s greatest living artist. King has work in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and MOMA; the artist KAWS, a collector of folk art, told me, “They’re some of the best drawings. Period.” Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York, has compared her to Willem de Kooning. In 2019, when a suite of King’s drawings was shown at Andrew Edlin Gallery, in Manhattan, the critic Sanford Schwartz wrote, in The New York Review of Books, “Were I the head of a drawings department at a museum, I would make a pitch for the purchase of all of them.”
King’s career has had a curious shape. She made her first important works in the nineteen-fifties, when she was very young. During the next thirty-four years, she drew prolifically; then, sometime around her fortieth birthday, she stopped. Her family recalls that she spent the next sixteen years at home watching television. In 2008, she started to draw again. It was only in this second phase of art-making that the world noticed what she was up to. Artists and curators saw pictures of her work on Facebook, and in 2009 Peter Fay, a collector in Sydney, arranged for her to have a show. It was King’s first solo exhibition, and her first time on an airplane. She was fifty-eight years old.
Critics pointed out King’s affinities with Pop art. In the sixties, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Peter Saul had plundered lowbrow visual culture for elemental materials. At the same time, on a remote mountain in New Zealand, a little girl was running similar experiments, sublimating the language of cartoons into a supple personal vernacular. King is the governor of teeming underworlds, where pig-faced people are tickled, fondled, and poked; ducks in diapers are sucked down the drain; and “Looney Tunes” characters endure ludicrous dental work. Even as a child, she was relentlessly reinventing her style. At ten, the drawings were bold and clean, like tattoo flash from an alien planet. In her teens, they turned dark and minerally—she chiselled the paper with her pencil, filling it edge to edge with melancholy landscapes and anarchic towers of bric-a-brac. In her twenties, the compositions began to rise and fall on the page like ocean swells. Humanoids march down the paper in suspended motion, like Marcel Duchamp’s descending nude, and condense into agate bands of color. Some wear bathing suits; some wear stilettos; others have meat grinders for heads. They crush through middens of surreal debris: propeller hats and bunny ears, bull noses with brass rings, a famous mouse’s gloves signing farewell. The drawings are terrifying, hilarious, lewd, and ornery. King’s eyes gather the world’s hodgepodge, and her hand records with a sensitivity that can come only from fondness. Remarkably, she does not plan her compositions or use an eraser. “The image has already been born,” Phong H. Bui, the publisher of The Brooklyn Rail, told me. “All she has to do is follow it.”
It’s a riotous œuvre. In counterpoint stands the artist herself, who does not read, write, or speak. This is one reason that she is not more famous. The promotion of her art depends entirely on other people. She cannot give an interview or tell you what her drawings mean. The only way to get to know her, besides looking at her work, is to be next to her in a room. And so I found myself in Auckland.
If you want to meet King, you will first have to meet her sister Petita Cole, a compact woman of sixty-six, with round cheeks and a laugh that could knock down a set of bowling pins. Cole is King’s manager, communications director, and registrar. She has more energy than most, on less sleep than advisable—helpful, given that gallerists in other hemispheres ring her at “unearthly hours.” Two of five bedrooms in her home, in Auckland, now hold her sister’s drawing archive. A third bedroom is for King to sleep in. King lives an hour away, in the city of Hamilton, with another sister, Wendy, but travels to Cole’s about once a month to spend time with her old work.
Cole invited me over during one of these visits. As she led me down a hallway, she told me that she had been up since dawn, when she awoke to the sound of King in the next room, drawing in the dark. Cole had risen from bed, turned on the light by her sister’s desk, then left her alone.
Now King remained at the same desk, still as a mountain. Only her left arm moved. She drew serpentine lines on a creased piece of paper. For every mark on one side of the crease, she made a similar mark on the other. Her pencil produced a soft scrubbing sound, filling the room with a sedative rhythm. In the course of seventy years, King has generated a staggering number of drawings—perhaps twenty thousand, though no one has done a precise count. Cole has spent the past two decades organizing the drawings in binders. She showed me to a row of shelves and told me to pick any binder I wanted. I chose one at random and was ushered to another bedroom, where I sat on the bed.
The works in my lap were dated 1962. My eye landed on a jalopy with entomological headlights, flatulent exhaust, and tires so fat that you could serve them with coffee. In another drawing, a Cubist mess of igloos and sandcastles lay in a heap. I did some math. This was the art of an eleven-year-old girl. I sensed a presence in the hallway. King walked into the room with impersonal frankness and sat on the bed beside me. Though she faced away, her mouth formed a faint smile. Her eyes darted around, and I felt that she was pleased, maybe as curious as I was to review what she had made all those years ago.
King has a broad face, a mop of salt-and-pepper hair, and crinkly, bright eyes that are hard to catch, as she is expert at dodging the gazes of others. She is around five feet tall but gives an impression of largeness. When I first met her, I was struck by what seemed like a staunch constitutional abstention: King does not emote, does not participate in group activities, and does not broadcast an inner life. I soon learned that this was not to be mistaken for a lack of inner life. Her personality is gigantic, but it’s detectable mostly in her eyes, which are sometimes bewildered and other times ablaze with a teasing, wicked humor. She does not communicate with gestures or devices. (“Too set in her ways,” Cole said.) Besides sneezes and occasional grumbles, she does not make much sound at all. Cole’s husband, Bryson, who has known King for half a century, told me that he’s heard her laugh once, in 2008, when he dropped his dinner on the ground.
On the day of my visit, King drew until the afternoon, then got up, put on her glasses, and hovered by the front door—her way of saying that it was time to go out. The three of us piled into Cole’s car. Cole apologized that she could not offer me the passenger seat; King enjoyed looking out the window but would not turn her head if she were riding in the back.
We drove to the Auckland Zoo. Cole had recently completed treatment for ovarian cancer and had lost all but a few strands of hair. She improvised a hat using an old fur collar that had belonged to her grandmother and a head scarf that her son had worn in a Bible play. “We mustn’t scare the kiddies,” she said. King wandered the grounds at a funereal pace. She wore a bucket hat and sunglasses, held a walking stick in one hand, and hooked her free arm behind her back, like a scrupulous exam proctor. She stared down the nose of a New Zealand longfin eel that hovered in its tank like a thick black ribbon.
When we crossed a footbridge, Cole urged us to look down. “Crocodiles, Susan! The big ones kill and eat people.” King smiled. “Reptiles and her own exhibitions,” Cole said. “The two guarantees.”
It is hard to say much about King’s self-concept as an artist. For most of her life, she had little contact with the art world. She drew, it seemed, for personal reasons. Still, the people around her appreciated her work, and this likely motivated her. In a photograph from 1965, she poses in the back yard with one of her drawings and projects serene, quiet pride. In her long period of inactivity, she was sullen, anxious, and withdrawn. Her work’s recognition by international curators and her decision to start drawing again were more or less simultaneous events. Afterward, King’s family noticed a change in her demeanor. “The light came on,” Cole said. King tends to diminish herself physically, curling her shoulders in a dramatic hunch. At exhibitions, however, she stands up straight.
King was born in 1951 in Te Aroha, about two hours’ drive from Auckland. During the water-cure craze of the late nineteenth century, Te Aroha was a thriving spa town. Some thirty thousand tourists visited annually to soak in the mountain’s mineral springs and sip from a geyser of warm fizzy water. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, most of the spas were defunct, and Te Aroha had diminished into a sleepy hideaway, a place, perhaps, for getting a tire fixed on the way to somewhere else. A single highway splits the town in two, then bends around an alluvial plain, past tumbledown sheds and herds of cattle that drink from Victorian bathtubs dragged to pasture.
