Mark Forman's Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist is a compelling and meticulously researched biography of one of Aotearoa’s most complicated artists of the last century. Forman begins, logically enough, with Fomison's early years, his birth in 1939, highlighting his youthful fascination with maps, diagrams, and Renaissance art. This early interest in visual storytelling laid the foundation for his later strange, surreal, muted, shadowy paintings, which often drew on themes of history and Pacific mythology.

The artist's life took a tumultuous turn fairly early on. He was one of the troika of enfants terrible mentored by Rudolf Gopas at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts – alongside Philip Clairmont and Allen Maddox – all of whom succumbed to addiction and mental illness. Forman paints a vivid picture of Fomison's life in the 1960s and 1970s, including his time on the streets in Paris, his stay in a European mental hospital, stints of incarceration, his bisexuality – or a largely closeted homosexuality compromising with the times, and his struggles with his mind and drugs. These experiences essentially constructed the dark underworld from which his paintings emerged through a multilayered chiaroscuro of glazes.

One of the peculiarities of Forman’s book is the lack of reproductions of Fomison's paintings, which is rather jarring but understandable. The late artist’s sisters, who hold the rights to his art, withheld consent, likely objecting to the frankness of the biography (they say “inaccuracies” but if that was the case it would have been easy enough to fix by noting their version of events in the text). Despite this, Forman succeeds in conveying the power and significance of Fomison's work through detailed descriptions and contextual analysis. While it is annoying to have to google the images, it doesn’t overly detract from the overall impact of the biography, and I commend Auckland University Press going ahead with the book. Many an artist biography has been scuttled for similar reasons.

Forman does an excellent job of exploring Fomison’s engagement with Māori and Pacific cultures, and his deep connection with New Zealand’s Samoan community. This immersion ultimately led to Fomison receiving a traditional Samoan pe’a tattoo – a testament to his commitment to cultural understanding, written in excruciating pain and blood. Even there he was an outsider, 'out of place, uncertain of what is expected. … the implicit unease that Tony would always feel as a palagi among Samoan families'. The Pākehā mainstream didn’t really know what to do with him, and he gravitated to the margins, the downtrodden, the rejected. His art, as a challenge to polite, middle-class sensibilities, reflects that.

Like Caravaggio, Fomison painted with genius but was most comfortable in the shadows of the underworld, depicting the transcendental in the grotesque. Perhaps that is why critic Francis Pound described Fomison’s paintings as 'akin to that of a seventeenth-century primitive', and another critic, Hamish Keith noted an 'old master complex'. Based on the stories from artists who knew him, Forman accurately reveals the paradox of Fomison – his switch between feral cruelty and socially committed outsider at the drop of a hat – but his love of Pacific culture and people is undeniable. Unfortunately, as Fomison himself noted in a 1989 letter to artist friend Llew Summers, he was 'living on borrowed money and borrowed time'. Fomison died the following year.

Forman's research is meticulously thorough and impressive, drawing on archival material and interviews with over 150 people, including Fomison's family, friends, and contemporaries. There is the odd exception, for example there is no mention of artist Lonnie Hutchinson, who knew Fomison well in the last five years of his life. The depth of research creates an uncompromising, nuanced, and revelatory window into the artist’s life. It would be useful to know how the author's interest in Fomison came about, but the biographical blurb about the author is rather gnomic:

'Mark Forman is a writer based in Onehunga, Auckland. His doctoral thesis formed the basis of his first book, a scholarly work published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press. Forman’s personal interests in New Zealand contemporary art, biography, and social history were the drivers for this project, for which he has been awarded a Whiria Te Mahara New Zealand History Grant, the 2024 Marti and Gerrard Friedlander Charitable Trust publishing grant, and a runner-up placement in the CLNZ / NZSA Writers’ Award.'

This tells me precisely nothing.

Reviewed by Andrew Paul Wood