Andrew Paul Wood at EyeContact reviews Theo Schoon: A Biography.
‘So many people, including myself, have wandered down the rabbit hole of trying to write the biography of one of New Zealand’s most important and least known artists, but finally here is the book we’ve been waiting decades for. Caveat: I provided access to my archives and gave feedback on an earlier draft of the text. Damian Skinner has done a splendid job weaving together the life of this extraordinary character. Schoon, born to Dutch parents in the Dutch East Indies in 1915, trained in Rotterdam in the painstaking traditions of Dutch Art while being exposed to the cutting edge of European modernism, and then coming to New Zealand with his family to escape the Japanese invasion of Indonesia. Here he would become a strangely influential figure on artists as diverse as Gordon Walters and Rita Angus.’
Read the full review here.
