Look Inside: Rita Angus – New Zealand Modernist | Ringatoi Hou o Aotearoa

RITA ANGUS

It gives deep insights into the life and practice of a seminal artist.

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Lizzie Bisley (editor)

This comprehensive catalogue features all the works in the exhibition Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist Ringatoi Hou o Aotearoa plus major essays by Angus’s biographer Jill Trevelyan and the curator of the Royal Academy.

RITA ANGUS NEW ZEALAND MODERNIST HE RINGATOI HOU O AOTE AROA

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Lizzie Bisley (editor) 11/05/21 12:34 PM

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CO N T E N T S INTRODUCTION

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Lizzie Bisley

CONSIDERING RITA

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Jill Trevelyan

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Adrian Locke

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RITA AND ME

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‘LIVE TO PAINT’

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE E A SEL

CATALO GUE

NOTES

ACKNOWLED GEMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS IMAGE CREDITS INDEX

96 184 191 192 194 195

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‘ L I V E TO PA I N T’ R I TA A N G US Jill Trevelyan

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n a photograph taken in 1936, Rita Angus sits at an easel with an arresting self-portrait – an image of a chic, self-possessed young woman, smoking a cigarette and coolly gazing our way. This bold act of artistic self-creation declares her identity as a modern woman and a modern painter. The selfportrait makes a striking contrast to the decorous landscapes behind her – the typical New Zealand art of the period.

Angus was then in her late twenties: a talented painter with a fertile imagination, a lively wit and a powerful sense of vocation. During the next decade, devastated by the horrors of World War II, she evolved a distinctive, visionary style of painting to express her feminist and pacifist convictions. She wrote of the ‘single belief ’ that sustained her in those difficult years: ‘that artists have significance and depth of meaning in the world. To me, especially in New Zealand. Thus, I have been able to devote my energies to what I really am, a woman painter. It is my life.’1 Henrietta Catherine Angus was born in Hastings

on 12 March 1908, the eldest of the seven children of a builder, William Angus, and his wife Ethel. She grew up proud of her identity: her Anglo-Scottish ancestry and her heritage as a third-generation New Zealander. According to her mother, ‘Rita drew as soon as she could hold a pencil and never stopped.’2 A precocious and wilful child who was rather indulged by her parents, she took private art lessons and entertained her family and friends with her sketches. When she left high school, her art teacher was consulted about her future, and in 1927 she enrolled at the Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch, which prided itself as New Zealand’s leading art academy.

The tuition at the School of Art was based on the conservative model of the Royal College of Art in London, and Angus’s teachers emphasised the importance of close observation and meticulous draughtsmanship. She spent much of her first year in the Antique Room, drawing plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture; only after she had mastered that discipline was she permitted to

Rita Angus painting Self-portrait (1936–37) photograph by Jean Bertram Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

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real New Zealand is a rare find.’17 One of the problems for New Zealand culture was the exodus of talent to England and Europe: with few opportunities at home and a largely uninterested public, it was inevitable that young artists would seek a brighter future abroad. Frances Hodgkins and Katherine Mansfield were the best-known examples, earning acclaim in England in the early twentieth century.

By the 1930s, however, some were beginning to challenge the assumption that overseas training was essential for local artists. Might it be possible to study at home, and forge a career in New Zealand?

Angus and her contemporaries, who came to maturity during the Depression, were the first to take this proposition seriously. They had a sense of themselves as New Zealand artists, playing a vital

Rita Angus (c. 1935) photograph by Douglas Whillans Harvey Gresham photograph album, private collection

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role in their country’s cultural development. For Angus, the question of how a local artist should live and work in society was to become a lifelong preoccupation.

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n May 1936, Angus and two artist friends caught the train to Cass, a tiny railway settlement 116 kilometres west of Christchurch in the foothills of the Southern Alps. This was a popular excursion for local painters, giving access to a dramatic alpine landscape of tussock and scrub, flanked by steep, scree-scarred hills and snowy mountain peaks. The drawings Angus made on the trip, such as the lively Mountains, Cass (pages 110, 111), were the catalyst for her finest landscape painting to date.

Jill Trevelyan and Adrian Locke at Cass, May 2019 photograph by Charlotte Davy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

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Above: Rata Lovell-Smith, Hawkins (1933) oil on canvas board, 345 x 450 mm

Below: Christopher Perkins, Taranaki (1931) oil on canvas, 508 x 914 mm

Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

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Even today, this painting, Cass (page 113), is a startling work: an image of crisp, hard-edged form and brilliant colour, animated by rhythmic line and patterning. Angus took care to document the vegetation and characteristic features of the Canterbury hill country, while manipulating scale and distance to create a tightly structured and compelling picture. Cass, she later wrote, expressed her ‘intense interest in composition of old masters, through mathematics, e.g. geometry’.18 Angus’s choice of subject was unusual at a time when most artists were painting the empty New Zealand wilderness: instead, she depicted a landscape transformed by Pākehā settlement, with signs of modernity and progress.

Angus knew she had achieved something extraordinary with this work, and came to see it as a symbol of her commitment to painting in New Zealand: ‘ “Cass” ’, she wrote, ‘expresses joy in living here.’19 The picture attracted little attention when it was shown at the Canterbury Society of Arts in 1937, but three years later it was selected for the National Centennial Exhibition of New Zealand Art, and it subsequently came to be seen as a breakthrough work – a rejoinder to the picturesque conventions that dominated New Zealand landscape at the time.

Cass has its antecedents, however, and suggests the influence of Rata Lovell-Smith and the English migrant painter Christopher Perkins. Like them, Angus adapted some of the tenets of modern art, including bold design, simplified form and highkeyed colour, to revitalise a local tradition and evoke the qualities of a particular landscape. This style came to be known as regionalism, due to its concern with place and identity, and Angus was one of its leading exponents in New Zealand until the 1940s, when her work took a new direction.

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ate in 1936, Angus moved to an old wooden house, divided into artists’ studios, at 97 Cambridge Terrace in central Christchurch.

This was a popular meeting place for her contemporaries, attracting painters, writers and musicians who would drop in for coffee and a chat.

Jean Angus remembered the musical evenings and ‘lovely parties’, when her sister and friends would dance to music on the gramophone.20 At Cambridge Terrace Angus completed her strikingly assured Self-portrait of 1936–37 (page 115), picturing herself as a ‘New Woman’ – a glamorous Greta Garbo type, who holds her own in a man’s world and challenges gender stereotypes.

This Rita Angus is remote and untouchable, her arms crossed in protection, and her body concealed

Rita Angus, Leo Bensemann and Peggy Bensemann at Cambridge Terrace (c. 1938) photograph by Lawrence Baigent Alexander Turnbull Library, Jean Jones collection

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R I TA A N D M E

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M ATA R I K I W I L L I A M S

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Rutu oil on canvas, 1951

struggle with this image. I know she is beloved, and to a certain extent I get it. Rutu is every sunscreen advertiser’s dream with her tanned skin and flowing blonde locks, cheekbones to slice a watermelon, eyes to pierce any admirer.

She is idealised, but is she ideal? Some like to claim that Rutu is Angus’s imagining of a multicultural future. What am I meant to infer from her rendering of this future? That a Pacific identity (whatever that means) can run skin deep? Beyond her skin colour, what makes this portrait Pacific, Polynesian, or Māori?

Rutu’s name is in part inspired by a te reoification of Rita. The other part is drawn from Ruta Te Rauparaha of Ngāti Raukawa. There is little publicly available knowledge about Ruta, who, with her husband Tāmihana Te Rauparaha (son of the famed Ngāti Toa leader, Te Rauparaha), were said to have lived a life of privilege resplendent with the markings of having ‘made it’ in Pākehā society.

What was it about Ruta that so compelled Rita to name Rutu for her? Tāmihana was influential in the establishment of the Kīngitanga and was invested in ensuring a harmonious future between Māori and Pākehā. Was this the peaceful future Angus was trying to capture?

Ruta and Tāmihana commissioned portraits of themselves that reside at Te Papa, where Ruta is styled as Ruth. To compare Ruta/Ruth of the 1860s and her counterpart Rutu, who came almost a century later, is incomprehensible to me. When I look at Ruta, all I see are her playful eyes boring

into me, asking whether I’ve solved the Rita/Rutu/ Ruta/Ruth riddle yet.

Beyond that comparison, I remain stuck. Still unsure of how to take Rutu. She is a beautiful, incongruous mash-up of cultures, of symbols that have been plucked out of their meaning-making contexts to serve as shrouded winks to future art historians and critics. As much as I don’t want to claim her as representative of any sort of future for myself and my uri, I also want to know her lip colour. She is no goddess of mine, but I want to be captivated by her, lean towards her and hear her intensely whispered tales. Rutu is the gorgeous nightmare of Sinead Overbye’s reckoning.

Encompassed in my struggle with the image of Rutu is my struggle to write about her. When there are so few Māori writing about Māori art, and so few resources written about Māori artists, giving my time to a well-covered Pākehā artist feels like a betrayal. Reading around Rutu, I was struck by how various Pākehā writers have stated that she represents feminism, assimilation, Pacific futures.

None of these attributions come from Māori or Pacific writers, however, yet the claims to our culture remain. Rutu is the most visible and well-known exemplar of a person of colour in Angus’s catalogue, and with that hyper-visibility should come more scrutiny. Given all that Rutu is claimed to represent, and all that Angus has appropriated (names, skin colour and iconography), Māori perspectives must also be included when discussing her, if only to say: ‘Rita, she is not my ideal. Why is she yours?’

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Rita Angus, Rutu (1951) oil on canvas, 707 x 548 mm Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Purchased 1992 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds

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Rita Angus, Leo Bensemann (1938) oil on canvas, 360 x 300 mm 122

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Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Gift of the Rita Angus Estate, 1998

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Rita Angus, Marjorie Marshall (1938–39/1943) oil on canvas on plywood, 557 x 480 mm Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Purchased 2019

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RITA ANGUS - NEW ZEALAND MODERNIST | RINGATOI HOU O AOTEAROA Lizzie Bisley RRP: $35.00 ISBN: 978-0-9951338-4-6 PUBLISHED: December 2021 PAGE EXTENT: 224 pages FORMAT: Limpbound SIZE: 250 x 190 mm

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO ORDER https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/te-papa-press/art-books/forthcomingbook-rita-angus-new-zealand-modernist-ringatoi-hou-o