Connections — with and between — artists, friends, colleagues and benefactors.
Those many, different and varied connections between artist Rita Angus, her friends, fellow artists of the time and some of Otago-Southland’s most important art collections — the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Hocken Collections and Eastern Southland Art Gallery — have been drawn out in the latest iteration of "Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist - He Ringatoi Hou o Aotearoa".
Hocken curator art Hope Wilson says it has been fascinating not only to see the works of the touring exhibition which charts Angus’ (1908–70) life and career in the flesh but also to see the connections with the works by Angus held by the local institutions and her friends.
"You get that connecting in with people who've given works to the collection, artists who've had a hand in developing it. And then the portraits which are quite a cool connection."
The Te Papa exhibition includes many of Angus’ portraits including ones of close friends and fellow artists Leo Bensemann (1938), Marjorie Marshall, with a backdrop of Central Otago mountains (1938-39/1943) and Douglas MacDiarmid (circa 1945).
So in the far end of the gallery where the "local" works are showcased, Wilson has included works by those artists.
It was through good friend Marshall that Angus came to Central Otago, often visiting her fellow artist and her husband in Wanaka. The pair were known to go on sketching trips throughout the region which resulted in some of her most well-known works such as Central Otago (1953-56/1969), a composite landscapes featuring recognisable landmarks such as a church at Naseby, a wind-tossed tree beside Lake Wakatipu, the Kyeburn diggings, and the main street of Arrowtown layered together. It was almost 15 years before she gave Lilburn the work.
In a letter Angus described the work. "I’ve painted at least half of Central Otago — mostly high hills, with more detail than what remains to be done. After the one festive week or two of the year is over I’ll settle again to oil painting."
A similar composite Central Otago Landscape (ca.1940), from the Hocken Collection, is also included in the Te Papa exhibition. The work was purchased from Betty Curnow (writer Allen Curnow’s wife) with assistance from the Willi Fels Memorial Trust & Hocken Library Endowment Funds in 1973. Curnow was another person Angus painted a portrait of and included the landscape painting in the background.
"It's very closely tied up in that friend group that Rita was part of at the time."
As the Te Papa exhibition takes viewers to about the 1950s, the "local" works are from a similar time period. The Hocken has 10 Angus works in its collection.
"The provenance of each work also tells you an interesting story about the development of the Hocken art collection."
"That's a really significant gift to the Hocken art collection that sort of changed the direction slightly and introduced a lot more New Zealand modernism by artists like Rita Angus. But other works by Rita Angus that have been gifted to the collection came from the Charles Brash bequest in 1973, which is again another significant gift that determined the course of the collecting and also really augmented those holdings of modernist works."
Other themes that run through the Te Papa exhibition include Angus’ pacifism, her feminism and her engagement with nature, so Wilson has picked these themes in the local works including three works on paper featuring plants, birds and dogs.
Others include a couple of works which have a more "fractious, cubist lean" to them and four works on loan from Eastern Southland’s John Money Collection.
The pacifism theme is reflected in a book plate drawn by Angus for Bruce Godwood in the 1940s. Apparently Godwood, who was a significant donor to the Hocken Collection, did not like it so it was not often seen.
"Bruce Godwood was a conscientious objector and so there's this connection again between pacifism; a group of friends, mostly the artists from the group in Christchurch would have regarded themselves as pacifist and many of them were conscientious objectors, including Bensemann and Rodney Kennedy is another significant figure in the Hocken Collection."
In another link is a photograph by Ann Hamblett of Angus’ garden in Sumner, which looks like it was taken the same day as a photograph in a biography of the artist by Jill Trevelyan featuring Angus and Colin McCahon in the garden.
The portrait MacDiarmid did of Angus, Rita Cook [Rita Angus] (1945) echoes that of Angus’ portrait of MacDiarmid, Figure Allegory (circa 1945) in the Te Papa collection.
"They really speak to each other and they date to the same year as well. I think that's the really fun, or the amazing part about the Hocken Collection being so full of that cast of characters, is being able to make the connections and see the works alongside each other."
The Te Papa exhibition also includes an audiovisual component featuring photographs and video of Central Otago that is overlaid with a soundtrack of work from composer Douglas Lilburn, who was a good friend of Angus and a fan of Central Otago himself, and commissioned her to paint what became Central Otago. Lilburn gifted the work to Te Papa.
Other significant works in the show include The Aviatrix (1933), one of Angus’ most important early works – a striking portrait of her sister Edna, the first woman pilot in the East Coast Aero Club, wearing her flying costume — Rutu, 1951, and Cleopatra, 1938.
TO SEE
"Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist — He Ringatoi Hou o Aotearoa". Until December 7.
