was always conscious of painting for the future. Largely indifferent to her reputation in her lifetime (though fierce in defence of her work when criticised), she frequently turned down chances for sales, exhibitions and even books, but was confident of her recognition and status in the future.
“I paint for the next two generations,” she once said, and of her great painting Central Otago (1953-56), which took years to complete, she told her friend, composer Douglas Lilburn, who commissioned it, “I hope the painting has the chance of survival for a long time.”
The lauded future she envisaged for herself has finally been fully realised in 2008, nearly 40 years after Angus’s death. Of course, her reputation as one of the greatest New Zealand painters has been secure since a major retrospective exhibition of her work in 1982 but this year, the centenary of her birth, there are a number of important events that will swell her reputation to even greater heights.
First was a fine film documentary by Gaylene Preston, Lovely Rita A Painter’s Life, and now comes this splendid biography by Jill Trevelyan, and later in the year (again with Trevelyan’s editorial and curatorial involvement) will be a major touring exhibition originated at Te Papa, Rita Angus: Life and Vision, accompanied by a large multi-author catalogue. It all amounts to the apotheosis of Rita Angus.
The broad outlines of Angus’s career are well enough known: daughter of a prosperous business man (contract builder) who provided crucial financial support throughout her life; education in Palmerston North and the Canterbury School of Art (an academic training she never repudiated despite its conservatism); an early and short-lived marriage to fellow painter Alfred Cook (she painted under the name Rita Cook until the mid-1940s); involvement with the independent-minded Christchurch Group and friendships with painters such as Louise Henderson, Olivia Spencer Bower, Betty Curnow, Leo Bensemann and Doris Lusk; the creation of early masterpieces in landscape (Cass, 1936), portraiture (Self-Portrait, 1936-37, Betty Curnow, 1942), and numerous exquisite watercolour studies of flowers, trees and landscapes; her solitary residence in (successively) Christchurch, Mangonui (briefly) and Wellington; and her lifelong and unflinching pursuit of her vocation, despite illness and other setbacks.
In 1945 she wrote to Lilburn, “I have been able to devote my energies to what I really am, a woman painter. It is my life.” This remained true for the next 25 years, until her death from cancer at the peak of her powers, aged 62 in 1970.
Trevelyan has amply fleshed out the bare bones of this story at every point, through access to family papers (especially those of Angus’s younger sister Jean), by trawling the painted and published record, and above all through her discovery of Angus’s remarkable 30-year correspondence with Lilburn around 400 letters which was deposited after his death in the Turnbull Library. Not much given to public statements about her life or work, Angus left in these letters a record of her inner life to parallel that of her remarkable self-portraits that record changes in her physical appearance.
The unprecedented sequence extends from 1928 to 1968 (ages 20 to 60), 14 of which are reproduced in full-page colour in the book, often preceding each new chapter. The letters to Lilburn provide continual commentary on her inner life and most intimate thoughts and fantasies. Philip Norman has already made use of the letters in Douglas Lilburn: His Life and Music (2006), but Trevelyan has mined them further. The most remarkable revelation is of Angus’s brief love affair with Lilburn in 1942 resulting in her pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage. Trevelyan raises the question as to whether Angus realised Lilburn (deeply in the closet) was gay. She may not have. The physical aspect of their relationship was short-lived but the emotional consequences were lifelong, most directly in the series of so-called “goddess” paintings, A Goddess of Mercy (1945-47), Sun Goddess (1949), and Rutu (1951), which she saw quite sincerely as incarnating her dead child as well as embodying the key aspects of her philosophy her nature mysticism, her feminism, her pacifism, her East/West blend of spirituality. Lilburn emerges (by implication his side of the correspondence has not survived) as heroically sensitive, empathetic and forebearing of what one friend (the painter Douglas McDiarmid) called her “nutty intensity”. McDiarmid also remarked how Angus’s obsessional nature resulted in “dangers to health and balance which must attend any self-immolating hermit”. During the years when she lived alone at Clifton (near Sumner in Christchurch) in a tiny house bought by her father (and which more than any other single factor enabled her to sustain her high-minded focus on her vocation as “a woman painter”), Angus became increasingly withdrawn and malnourished until in 1949 she had a sudden breakdown. This resulted in her admission to Sunnyside Hospital and her exposure to at least a dozen treatments of ECT (just a few months after Janet Frame had been similarly treated in the same institution). In time, Angus fully recovered and even saw her hospitalisation as a positive experience.
Although the Lilburn relationship is at the centre of this book, Trevelyan also illuminates many other phases of Angus’s life. Her early marriage to Alf Cook is something of a mystery. It is even possible, Trevelyan suggests, that the union was never consummated. Retrospectively Angus claimed she ended the marriage because she was dominated and suppressed by her painter husband, though Cook seems to have been the mildest and most reserved of men, so Angus’s account needs to be treated with caution. After her marriage ended (to choose another key episode) she spent a couple of years flatting in Cambridge Terrace, Christchurch, with Bensemann and Lawrence Baigent, an artistically and socially gregarious period marked by many portraits, when she became imbued with the pacifism and socialism common in her circle and which she bravely maintained throughout the war, by refusing to submit to official efforts to force her to work in war-supporting industries.
Although in many ways an admirable person, warm and witty, and a “golden person to be with” (as Bensemann described her), Angus could also be somewhat paranoid and easily slighted, often reacting furiously when even her closest friends and family upset her. She was forever cancelling subscriptions and memberships on the slightest of grounds, sorely testing the patience of those who knew and loved her.
Trevelyan strikes a careful balance in this impeccably researched book. She is always sympathetic and admiring but does not suppress information that shows Angus in a less favourable light, thus steering a judicious path between the extremes of hagiography and hatchet job.
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