Look Inside: Rita Angus: An Artist's Life

Spine: 32mm

CMYK: 236mm x 176mm with 100mm flaps and 12mm wrapping

Jill Trevelyan is a Wellington curator and writer. Her books include Toss Woollaston: A Life in Letters, Rita Angus: Life & Vision and Peter McLeavey: The Life and Times of a New Zealand Art Dealer.

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Rita Angus was a pioneer of modern painting in New Zealand.

More than 100 years after her birth, key Angus works are national icons, but the story of her life was little known before this acclaimed and revelatory book, which won the Montana Medal for Non-fiction at the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

In this revised edition, and drawing on a wealth of archives and letters, Jill Trevelyan brings Rita Angus – articulate, intellectually curious, pacifist, feminist and dedicated to life as an artist – to life.

R I TA A N G U S An artist’s life J I L L T R E V E L YA N

front cover Self portrait (Wanaka), 1939 (unfinished)

Oil on canvas, 480 x 420mm National Gallery of Australia, purchased 2010 with the assistance of funds from the Sir Otto and Lady Margaret Frankel Bequest

back cover Rita Angus, c. 1935

Photograph by Douglas Whillans, from the photograph album of Harvey Gresham, private collection

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R I TA A N G U S An artist’s life J I L L T R E V E L YA N

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RITA ANGUS: AN ARTIST’S LIFE

CHAPTER ONE

M A RC H 1 9 0 8 – J A N U A RY 1 9 2 7

‘I spent much of my time dreaming and drawing’ REFLECTING ON HER ORIGINS ,

Rita Angus once remarked, ‘I was born at the time Egyptian tombs were opened, and the treasures of a long, materialistic mysticism unearthed …’1 Such a coincidence held a special meaning for the highly imaginative Rita, allowing her to draw a link between her own roots and the ancient Egyptian civilisation which had fascinated her since childhood. It was entirely typical for her to see herself as part of such a broad historical continuum.

Growing up in a country where there were no full-time professional artists, she had to look far beyond her immediate environment to find models for the life she wished to pursue. It made little difference that the artists she so admired had emerged from a context so different from her own. They were her creative forebears, and she laid claim to them.

Although she saw herself as part of a tradition of artists that transcended time and place, Rita was also well aware of her identity as a New Zealand-born painter, a pioneer of modern art who was ‘sowing a seed’2 for future generations in this country. She took pride in her origins: her Scots–English descent and her heritage as a third-generation New Zealander. But most important was the belief that she had been born an artist. Rita was convinced that creativity was innate, a

Rita (right) and her sister Edna, c.1911.

Hawke’s Bay Museum

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September 1934–July 1938

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in the Slade [Art School]’s book, with its hint of caricature and its hard edges’.63 According to Weldon, when her mother, by then separated from her husband, returned to England, she tried to leave the painting behind, but a friend ran to the docks with it, just as the gangway was rising, crying ‘You left this, you left this!’ My mother said she nearly dropped it overboard, but good manners intervened and instead she told the friend to give it back to Rita. The next time she set eyes on the painting was forty years later, as a postcard from the New Zealand national art gallery.

ONE OF RITA’S MOST IMPORTANT NEW FRIENDS was the Nelson-born artist Leo Bensemann, who had arrived in Christchurch with his companion Lawrence Baigent in 1931. Working for a printing firm and taking night classes at the Canterbury College School of Art, Bensemann met the poet and publisher Denis Glover, and began to contribute illustrations to journals such as Oriflamme. In 1937 his first book of drawings, Fantastica, peopled with dragons, wizards and other Gothic characters, was published by the Caxton Press. Bensemann would go on to have a long and fruitful career as a partner at Caxton, as a typographer, designer and editor, but in the late 1930s he was a compellingly handsome young man with an exuberant wit and an anarchic sense of humour. His passion for art was rivalled only by his fast-growing devotion to Morris dancing.64 Rita seems to have known Bensemann from the mid-1930s, but in 1937 their friendship developed rapidly, and in February the following year Bensemann and Baigent moved into Sydney Thompson’s studio at 97B Cambridge Terrace.

The studio and Rita’s flat opened on to a shared kitchen, and Baigent recalled, ‘Doors were never locked or shut. They became the unofficial headquarters for The Group – a year round saleroom for many of the members.’65 With their links to the Caxton Press, Canterbury University College and the Press, the studios attracted writers, musicians and intellectuals as well as artists. At Cambridge Terrace – ‘that famous meeting place’66 – Rita met Colin McCahon for the first

Fay and Jane Birkinshaw, 1938

Oil on canvas, 532 x 692 mm Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, purchased 1998 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds

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RITA ANGUS: AN ARTIST’S LIFE

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RITA ANGUS: AN ARTIST’S LIFE

Rita also exhibited portraits at the 1938 Group show, including an oil of her sister by firelight entitled Portrait of Jean Angus.16 Jean was a striking and stylish model with her elfin features and bobbed hair, and Rita, who declared that she had the looks of a ‘screen star’,17 painted her on several occasions. The two sisters retained a close bond, despite their differences. Rita could be bossy and domineering, and her advice sometimes seemed never-ending: Jean should pluck her eyebrows, study harder, wear yellow, but never green. Jean’s supposed passivity also came in for criticism. On one occasion Rita analysed their personalities and announced that they were opposites: Jean tended to take the docile female role, while Rita naturally assumed the assertive male role.18 ‘I do not know whether Rita knew,’ Jean wrote in 1938, ‘but often with her little lectures, for my good I presume, she left me limp & terribly unhappy …’19 When pushed too far by her sister, Jean vented her feelings in an eleven-page journal entry: ‘[Rita] makes statements & expects me to believe them blindly. I do not like being told to do things, especially not [by] Rita. Rita makes me rebel inside … She is definitely not everything to me in the world.’

By the late 1930s Jean had completed five years at art school, specialising in sculpture; she had her own circle of friends and was emerging as an independent young woman in her own right. She shared her sister’s unerring faith in the power and importance of art, and her belief in Rita as a painter would be a crucial support in the years to come. Rita continued to be condescending on occasion, but she was coming to appreciate Jean – and, increasingly, to rely on her.

Just as Rita’s bond with Jean was documented in her art, so too was another key relationship. Among the works she exhibited ‘not for sale’ at The Group Portrait of Jean Angus, 1937

Oil on canvas, 462 x 384 mm Martin and Catherine Spencer collection

Harvey Gresham, 1938

Pen and ink, 290 x 240 mm Eastern Southland Gallery, gift of Paddy Gresham, 2012

Jean Angus in the Modelling Room, Canterbury University College School of Art, 1937 Alexander Turnbull Library, Rita Angus papers, MS-Papers-1399-4/3-1-001

Betty Curnow, c.1940

From the photograph album of Betty Curnow, Wystan and Susan Curnow collection

August 1938–June 1941

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CHAPTER NINE

S E P T E M B E R 1 94 5 – J U LY 1 94 7

‘The second Sun Goddess is born’ of the middle to late 1940s include a remarkable series of ‘Goddess’ paintings: the two oils, A Goddess of Mercy and Rutu, and a watercolour, Sun Goddess. Complex, deeply personal and intensely felt, these works grew out of the turbulent events of the previous years, and symbolise a much longed-for state of peace and serenity. Closely linked to other key pictures of the period, such as Dona Nobis Pacem and Douglas Lilburn, they rank among her most powerful and enduring works.

Convinced that women had a vital role to play in averting war, Rita envisaged her goddesses as a merging of East and West, European and Polynesian – the harbingers of an era of peace and co-operation between the peoples of the world. In 1947, in one of her few public statements, she wrote, ‘My paintings express a desire … to create a living freedom from the afflicting theme of death.’1 This ostensibly puzzling comment echoes her statement to the Manpower Committee: ‘I believe that in living, is the task of peace, and not killing, which is war.’2 The goddess figures stand for life, celebrating a mythical female world – creative, compassionate and peaceful – in opposition to what she perceived as the destructive and authoritarian male culture of wartime.3 RITA’S ‘L ARGE C ANVA SES’

Rutu, 1951

Oil on canvas, 715 x 561 mm Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, purchased 1992 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds

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Boats, Island Bay, c.1962

Wellington/Napier sketchbook (Day 633), c.1968, p. 11 Coloured pencil, 188 x 274 mm Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, on loan from the Rita Angus Estate

Boats, Island Bay, 1962–63

Oil on hardboard, 610 x 610 mm Private collection

Her skin is layer upon layer of yellowing paper. Freckles in Times New Roman. Rita is a stern photograph. She is watching you from fifty-five different frames.

Rita is the flattest shade of ocean.

Her smile is the thin-lipped curve of a passionflower. She is, in primary colours and hard lines, a straight-backed canvas with strict rules for the careful application of speech.3 After three months at Te Papa, where it broke attendance records, the exhibition toured to Dunedin and Christchurch and then to Auckland, where it opened in the spring of 2009.4 By then it had been seen by over 300,000 visitors. As art critic Wystan Curnow noted, ‘Rita Angus was New Zealand’s first local blockbuster’.5 Gaylene Preston’s film Lovely Rita: A Painter’s Life, which premiered late in 2007, was often shown in association with the exhibition. It featured interviews with the artist’s friends and family, including Christine Cole Catley, Pauline Angus and Jacqueline Fahey. Preston’s interest in Rita had a long genesis. Returning to New Zealand in 1977 after eight years in London, she had encountered Rita’s 1966 Self-portrait at the National Art Gallery and had been astonished at its bold assertion of female creativity and independence. Why, she asked herself, did she not know more about this extraordinary artist?

Since 2008, Rita’s life and art have fuelled a number of creative projects. In 2014 Dave Armstrong, who had studied classical music and composition at Victoria University with Douglas Lilburn in the early 1980s, wrote a play based on Angus’s letters, Rita and Douglas, featuring Jennifer Ward-Lealand as Rita and Michael Houstoun playing Lilburn’s music for the piano.6 In the same year, young composer Salina Fisher created ‘Unfinished Portrait’, a piece for flute, Jennifer Ward-Lealand as Rita Angus in Dave Armstrong’s play Rita and Douglas, 2014 Dave Armstrong collection

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RITA ANGUS: AN ARTIST’S LIFE

Epilogue

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only overseas trip as an adult – that influential year of study in 1958–59.

Of course, Rutu made it to London even before Rita. In 1952 it was one of two paintings selected by Helen Hitchings for her pioneering exhibition ‘Fifteen New Zealand Painters’ at the Irving Galleries. Writing about the exhibition, the London critic Maurice Collis described the dilemma, as he saw it, for a colonial artist: should they adopt a current European style ‘and become an artist in a cosmopolitan rather than a native sense?’18 Or should they look inward, finding inspiration in the artistic traditions and landscape of their own countries, evolving a style which, although influenced by Europe, ‘is differentiated in feeling from the ordinary level of cosmopolitan painting?’ In Angus, he found an example of the latter.

She is not affected by Oceanic traditional art but by a visionary feeling for New Zealand psychology. Her ‘Rutu’ has a strange tenseness. The woman depicted, as if animated by the saintly vision of a Siennese Madonna of the quattrocento, seems to brood over the distant future of the New Zealand race and to find it solemn, beautiful and free.

When the Royal Academy announced in September 2019 that it would showcase the art of Rita Angus, none of us had heard of Covid 19. A year later, with the virus continuing to spread and no prospect of travel restrictions easing, the Academy cancelled the exhibition ‘Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist’.

It was unfortunate that Rita would not have her moment of international recognition in London, but the exhibition will be still shown at Te Papa, where a new generation of New Zealanders will have the opportunity to discover her work. And the Royal Academy episode shows the potential for the art of Rita Angus to reach a wider audience. Who knows what may eventuate in the future?

Rita Angus knew she had a vital role to play as an artist. She saw her paintings as a form of praise, honouring the beauty and mystery she found in the world around her, but at the same time she longed to communicate a message of peace that would reach far beyond her own era. Today, with new opportunities for her art, her audience is greater than ever.

Adrian Locke and the writer at Cass, May 2019

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, photography by Charlotte Davy

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RITA ANGUS: AN ARTIST’S LIFE

RITA ANGUS: AN ARTIST’S LIFE Jill Trevelyan RRP: $60.00 ISBN: 978-0-9951338-2-2 PUBLISHED: April 2021 PAGE EXTENT: 448 pages FORMAT: Flexibind with jacket SIZE: 230 x 178 mm

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