Transcript

Track 2: ‘A woman painter’ gallery

I have been able to devote my energies to what I really am, a woman painter. It is my life.
Rita Angus

Feminist, political, unconventional. Rita’s work grappled with what it meant to be a New Zealander, a modern woman, and an artist. The 1920s and 1930s were a time of social upheaval and change – she responded fearlessly to this new age in both her life and work.

In this gallery, we see Rita establishing herself as an artist, and developing her distinctive, graphic style of oil painting. She painted and drew herself constantly – self-portraits are important in her practice.

Rita was a third-generation New Zealander of Scots–English descent, fair-skinned with grey-brown eyes. Her friend Betty Curnow said, ‘She had lovely wavy golden hair in the ’forties, worn long, down on her shoulders. In Wellington as it grew whiter she had it cut shorter each time I visited: but each style always seemed just right for her face.’ 

Rita’s honest self-portraits often emphasise the lines of her facial features, her prominent nose and cheekbones, the cleft in her chin and the philtrum – the indentation above the top lip – in an almost sculptural way. 

I’ll begin by describing the first self-portrait she exhibited.

Self-portrait, 1929 

This oil painting on canvas is 38cm wide by 47cm high. It’s on loan to Te Papa from the Rita Angus Estate.

Rita painted this when she was 21 years old, a third-year art student in Christchurch.

It’s a three-quarter-length work. She stands with her left shoulder nearer us and her head turned our way. The background is a light brown. The paint has slightly cracked on the canvas over time.

She’s casually clad in her artist’s working clothes, and gazes out with quiet confidence. Her mouth is closed, lips warmed with soft red colour. 

Her orange beret is a splash of bright colour. The beret’s thin little stalk sticks jauntily upwards. 

Her hair has been tucked up inside the beret at the back, and at the front held clear of her fair-skinned forehead. Some blonde curls escape alongside her ears. 

She wears an open, blue, long-sleeved working shirt with a soft collar. Rita uses blue tones with whiter patches to capture the light along her left side and show the loose form of the shirt as it drapes around her. Underneath she wears a green, round-necked top. 

There is a forthright independence to this portrait of herself as an artist, which captures something of what makes Rita distinctively modern, and a woman of her age.

Cleopatra 

is an oil painting on canvas, painted in 1938. It’s part of Te Papa’s art collection. It’s 38cm wide and 46cm high.

Rita once wrote that she had been born at the time the Egyptian tombs were opened. She was fascinated by the ancient Egyptian civilisation, and intrigued by Cleopatra specifically as a woman wielding power.

In this three-quarter-length portrait, painted when she was 30 years old, Rita is a Cleopatra for the modern age. She takes the Egyptian queen’s name, and theatrically positions herself as if she is a flat figure on an Egyptian mural. Her body is almost front-on to us, but her head is in profile, facing to her right. 

Rather than painting herself exactly as we would see her in person, this portrait is very crisp and sharp. Rita’s figure is flat, almost outlined, with distinctive clear colours. This is a very modern style of portrait – it feels fresh and powerful. 

The background is a bright, fresh green, showing something of the texture of the canvas. 

Rita glances our way with a somewhat quizzical, amused expression. Her eye looks both out at us and straight ahead. Her mouth is closed, darkened by bold red lipstick, and emphasised by a slight shimmer of lighter green in the background close by.

In another nod to the classical Egyptian pose, her right arm bends up at the elbow and back at the wrist, holding her hand out towards the edge of the frame, palm upwards. Her little finger and one other curve back in over her palm, but that’s all. The others are cropped off at the edge of the canvas. Our Te Papa conservators noted the paint in this area, usually so smooth in Rita’s oil paintings, looked a bit rougher. They examined the painting under infrared light and saw her initial drawing in charcoal or pencil, in which Rita’s hand seems to be holding a smoking cigarette. The artist had painted this part over.

Rita’s browny hair hangs to neck length. Paint in darker and lighter tones shapes and sculpts its wavy texture. One curl flicks high over her fair forehead to her left brow. A narrow, lighter green glow in the background sweeps around and accentuates the shape of her head and the colours in her hair.

She wears a pale green, sleeveless dress that’s cut sharply back from the underarm to the high collar line. The crescent curves of her bare shoulders stand out against the background, and darker skin tones create light shadows that highlight her clavicles.

The collar falls in long, thin triangles. It’s fastened with one of three large white buttons, evenly spaced down the front of the dress. 

Fay and Jane Birkinshaw 

is an oil painting on canvas, painted in 1938. It’s part of Te Papa’s art collection. It’s 69cm wide and 53cm high. 

The two girls of the title – young, fair-skinned, bright-eyed, and fresh-faced, hair off their foreheads – sit side by side, elbows almost touching, against plumped blue cushions on a high-backed cane sofa. 

Fay, who’s around 7 years old, on our left, has blue eyes and short, bouncy fair hair, tied with a thin red ribbon high across her brow. Jane, about 9, has brown eyes and short, straight brown hair, tied in the same way with a green ribbon. 

A pale flush lights the sisters’ faces, as if someone has given them a quick dab with a warm facecloth. Their closed mouths are smiling enough to dimple their cheeks.

The sisters wear identical red and white checked dresses, with wide, soft, curved white collars. Their skirts flare out across their laps and the sofa – there’s no line to show where one starts and the other ends between them. 

Each wears a green cardigan. These are really similar, though not exactly the same in shade or style. 

Together, the girls support an open book across their laps, each holding it with her outer hand. Most of the book is out of frame, but there’s a bit of a picture low on one page.

Three dolls are displayed on a shelf up behind the sofa – evenly spaced, one seated at either side, and one standing between the girls’ heads. They’re all quite different. Rita dressed and draped them in dolls’ clothes and material. 

The doll to the left seems to be a hard plastic. Her arms and a foot that sticks out under her skirt reach forward in a fixed position. She has black skin, and white dots for eyes. There’s a piece of blue material over her head, tied in a bow below her chin, and she wears a white apron over a red dress.  

The middle doll is standing. Its head could be porcelain – it’s very white, its features and edges uneven, maybe chipped. Seams on the arms reveal its body as fabric. It’s got wide eyes with something of a surprised expression. A yellow, flat hat lies angled over the top of its head, with black and red detail at the centre. A piece of blue material draped across its shoulders is held in place at the front by a long silver pin. Its lower clothing is green.

The doll to the right is sitting. Her brown skin is fabric. Her bare arms stick out from her sides. She wears a tight blue cap with red tassel trim, a blue and white top, and green and red lower clothes. Her red shoes stick out towards us.

Arranged at the top of the painting, a few pieces of a green tea set seem to hover in the air against a light-brown wall. There’s an angular-style jug at each side, and two cups and a plate holding a layered iced biscuit float across the centre. 

Marjorie Marshall 

is an oil painting on canvas. It’s part of Te Papa’s art collection. It’s 48cm wide and 56cm high.

This is a mid-length portrait of a friend of Rita’s, who she met at art school. The portrait is set in Central Otago, near Lake Wānaka, where Rita and Marjorie sketched together. It was painted over two years when Marjorie was in her late 20s – in 1938 and 1939 – and then parts of it were repainted in 1943. 

The painting combines the two main strands of Rita’s work – portraiture and landscape – with particular boldness and intensity. It has a warmth of colour and tone that reflects Rita’s affection for her two subjects: her friend and the landscape. 

Marjorie, with fair skin and brown hair, stands in the centre of the frame. Her body is almost full-on to us, her head is slightly turned to her right, and her bright brown eyes look away in that direction as if she’s seen something interesting. She’s smiling – her lips turn up though her mouth is closed. 

A soft yellow scarf with thick fringes sticking out along its sides, almost with a life of their own, drapes over her head and ties in a wide knot under her chin. She wears a tailored green jacket. Underneath there’s a richly warm-orange top, almost blazing in the centre of the painting. Marjorie’s warm clothes, the brightness of the colours, and the jaunty angle of her scarf suggest that a stiff spring wind might be blowing through the valley where she stands. 

The landscape that frames her stretches from narrow strips of tilled field at the bottom of the work, across bare land with bare trees, to a line of low hills and two sets of higher ranges.

At the top of the painting, the artist signalling their distance with shades of soft blue, the angular shapes of bare, rocky mountain peaks stand against the blue sky with high, scudding clouds. It’s hard to tell where the mountains end and the sky begins.

In front of these, a line of ranges in a rich brown, with dark shadows outlining their steep faces, stands strong and sharp in a triangular block behind Marjorie’s scarf-wrapped head. Softer, lighter brown hills curve across in front of these on the far side of icy blue water, which crosses the painting just below halfway, its lightness framing the line of her shoulders. The shoreline, on her side of it, is fenced off with a line of battens and wire.

On either side of Marjorie, a tree grows from the brown earth and stretches out bare branches. 

Landscape (Wanaka) 

is a watercolour on paper, painted in 1939. It’s part of Te Papa’s art collection. This work is 28cm wide by 23cm high.

The artist shows her accomplished control of the delicate medium of watercolour to create both clearly defined lines and forms with vivid colour, and softer shapes washed with gentler shades. 

A field of low green plants, scattered with white flowers, fills the bottom half of the painting. From midway, there is pasture, then low hills, then a valley cuts through angled planes of mountainsides towards one distant central peak, beneath a pale sky. 

The plants would be about ankle height should we wander through. Rita brings this foreground foliage to life with precise flicks of paint in vivid greens, leaving some of the unpainted white paper to shine through. The luminous field seems to be almost rippling in an unseen breeze.

Perhaps that’s what has darkened the waters of a small pond or large puddle in the front centre. Rita streaks black lines across the surface, as if it’s rippling or reflecting a chill sky. It feels like it would be cold if you walked through it. 

A thin, light-brown line traverses the centre of the picture, as the ground starts to rise to a low green hillside. The artist marks straight, tiny, silhouetted battens of a fence line that march along the top of the hill. They’re not the only indications of people in this place – beyond the fence, there’s a stretch of ploughed land on the left, and low golden hillsides have swathes cut across them, as if crops are being harvested. On top of another hill to the right, there’s a stand of dark trees near two blocky farm buildings – tiny rectangular forms, straight-edged like the fence line. 

Rita works with the flowing wateriness of watercolour, with soft-washed changes in colour and tone, to signal the distance and forms of the hills as they give way to the mountains across the top half of the painting. A low purple ridge reaches right across the frame behind the golden hills, with a few tiny trees along its heights.

Beyond this, the land divides into a valley, set between mountains that loom as high triangles on either side, soft in colour but firm in form against the sky. Away in the central distance, a rounded blue peak stands sentinel and alone.

Cass 

is an oil on canvas painting, on loan from Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. It’s 37cm wide by 46cm high. 

A little, red, boxy, weatherboard railway station stands on a platform in the middle of the painting. It’s barely a station – more of a shed. It stands, almost waits, while shadows are cast across it, in the centre of a powerful Canterbury high country landscape. There’s tussock in the foreground, rumpled hills and towering mountain peaks across the back. White clouds scudding across the sky show the air is on the move above.

‘Cass’, announces a small sign on the front of the little building. And ‘Cass’, says another small sign on the station’s right wall. 

Rita painted Cass in 1936, after she’d caught the train to the remote rural area with some friends to find things to sketch and paint. 

The station building sits on a concrete platform running across the lower third of the canvas. It has one open door facing us, and one that’s shut. A man sits alone on the platform to our right, wearing a heavy coat and a hat and smoking a pipe. 

To our left at the end of the platform, there’s the open side of a large corrugated iron shed, and to the right, there’s one end of a red freight car. 

Sandy tussock spikes up across the foreground, growing untamed over bumpy ground. In front of the station, there’s an irregular pile of cut planks. Poet Denis Glover, writing about Cass in the late 1970s, said, ‘Rita saw it with utter directness … though the stack of timber looks like a batch of bad cheese-straw.’

A row of trees forms a dark triangle behind the station, the tallest ones at its peak. Through these to the left, there’s part of a farm building, in farm building red with a black roof. It sits at the base of rounded hills, two sets of which lie like lumpy duvets, softly coloured in warm reds and browns. Rita builds on the geometry of the triangular trees, forming these rolling hillsides as soft triangles too, their wider edges by each side of the frame angling down towards the centre as the trees grow up from it. 

Behind them, the imposing flanks of higher mountains form the same angled shapes in from the edges of the painting, those on the right darkened purple with shadow. 

Above the V-shaped valley between the mountains, and over the line of their slopes, white clouds seem almost to dance.