Rita Angus, renowned for evocative paintings of the New Zealand landscape, was born a hundred years ago, but the first biography of her life has just been published.
Jill Trevelyan’s Rita Angus: An Artist’s Life (Wellington: Te Papa Press 2008), provides new insights into the work and times of the hard-edged, driven painter who helped to introduce modern art to New Zealand. This centenary year is also being marked by screenings of a feature documentary by Gaylene Preston (Lovely Rita: A Painter’s Life); and a major exhibition at Te Papa museum in Wellington, Rita Angus: Life and Vision.
Trevelyan observes that Angus was protective of her own image and “would never have countenanced a biography in her lifetime”. A woman artist maturing when there was little infrastructure and almost no market for New Zealand work, lacking a patron, she learned to nurture her creative talents largely outside of the public eye.
Destiny as an Artist
Angus believed that creativity was born, not made, and her belief in her own talents required pushing against societal expectations of the 1930s and 1940s. An early marriage ended in divorce. Janet Paul comments that “Rita Angus was early to recognise the creative woman’s dilemma and unusual in her determination to protect the painter in herself”. (In Rita Angus. Auckland: National Art Gallery, 1983).
After the marriage ended, Angus briefly earned a living as a free-lance commercial artist and then as a fashion illustrator. She would on occasion live with married friends (a “Mary Magdalene”, in her words), trading child-care duties and housework for room and board. Wanting to prioritise her own work, over the years she developed a moral belief in living frugally.
Pacifism and Artistic Vision
Angus was among a group of artists in the early 1940s (including Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston) who lived in Pangatotara, at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. Today it seems strange that artists of conscience would do seasonal work on a tobacco farm, but at the time people opposing the Second World War felt obliged to earn a living at activities that did not directly support the war effort. Angus would later live picking apples at Riverside Community, a cooperative for Christian pacifists. She was required to appear before the Industrial Manpower Committee for refusing to do war service.
In later years Angus opposed New Zealand involvement in the Vietnam war and the testing of nuclear weapons in French Polynesia.
Rita Angus and Douglas Lilburn: Breaking Away from Colonial Art
Angus met Douglas Lilburn, later to be New Zealand’s pre-eminent composer, at the French Maid Coffee House in Wellington, (which would feature in her painting along with other city meeting-places). The artist and the composer shared a strong sense of forging new artistic ground in a colonial country and were briefly lovers, with Angus conceiving and losing a child. According to Trevelyan, at one stage Angus devoted herself to studying the physical characteristics of herself and Lilburn, seeking “an ideal male and female type”. In a letter to him she wrote: “I have wanted to make a work of art of our relationship”.
The Last Years
As she aged and despite encroaching illness, Angus grew if anything more convinced about the significance of her work and her social and artistic vision. She may have experimented with fasting to access a higher consciousness; at one point she was admitted to Sunnyside Mental Hospital with “toxic exhaustive psychosis”. Angus continued an outpouring of work, centred on views of the steep hills and harbours of Wellington, until late in her life. She died of cancer in 1970.
A companion article on Suite 101, The Goddess and Rita Angus, describes the painter’s unique style and work that was ahead of its time in the way it presented her ideas about women and global society.
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