The Goddess and Rita Angus
New Zealand Landscape Artist Precursor of Gaia Movement
Now recognised as a pioneer of New Zealand modern painting, Rita Angus was known for landscapes with hard edges, unusual colours and lighting that gave them a surreal aspect. For example, Cass 1936 is an oil painting of a solid, isolated railway station against a flowing background of mountains and clouds. The effect is one of modernity against a natural background in a state of flux or change. She was also a distinguished watercolorist and created memorable, vivid images of flowers.
Portraits of Strong Women
What is less known about Rita Angus is the sheer diversity of her portrait art. At an exhibition (Rita Angus: Life and Vision)at Te Papa Museum in Wellington celebrating the anniversary of her birth, there are many of her more than 50 self portraits, and a number of paintings of other women whom Angus admired. An example is The Aviatrix (1933), an oil painting of Angus’s sister Edna in her flying suit and goggles. Jill Trevelyan (Rita Angus: An Artist’s Life. Wellington, Te Papa Press, 2008) describes this as “a celebration of ‘modern’ androgynous woman”.
Faye and Jane Birkinshaw (1938) is a difficult to interpret painting. Two chubby-faced little girls have been lined up in immaculate clothes in front of toys arranged in perfect rows. Exhibition notes recount that the girls’ mother tried to “lose” the painting after it was given to her because she thought the children were portrayed as caricatures. But Fay (later the writer Fay Weldon) would observe: “we were more real and lasting on the canvas than we were in real life”.
In her many self-portraits Angus displays her “capacity for self-invention”. In one case she appears in vivid Joan-of-Arc-style smock as a warrior against the hills of Wellington, her weapon a paintbrush.
Celebrating Gaia
According to Trevelyan, in the three “goddess” paintings created in the 1940s, Angus “anticipated by some 25 years the women’s movement of the 1970s”. There is a water colour, the Sun Goddess, rich in flowers and natural symbols, and two oils, A Goddess of Mercy and Rutu (a Maori transliteration of the name Ruth).
Rutu is striking in its vivid colours and the unusual features of the goddess: she has blonde hair and blue eyes, but dark Polynesian colouring. Trevelyan considers that Angus was symbolically bringing together cultures to advocate for peace and cooperation in a world still reeling from the Second World War.
Ronald Brownson notes that (anticipating the emergence of the Gaia movement in the seventies), the goddess portraits were “organic” in nature. “Environment is commonly recognised as the background to a portrait, but in these paintings the artist reveals that what surrounds the women signifies an essential growth in their identity”. (In Rita Angus. Auckland: National Art Gallery, 1983).
Artists’ Plea for Peace
Perhaps the Angus painting that delivers the most straightforward social “message” is Dona Nobis Pacem (1944). The work features a portrait of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who had been a teacher of Angus’s close friend Douglas Lilburn and who composed a well-known cantata on the theme of peace. In the painting, mini-scenes seem to evoke Angus as a child, and the commune near Nelson where, as a dissenting pacifist during the war, she spent time apple-picking.
Trevelyan relates that Angus never quite considered her paintings completed, and would go as far as recovering them from the homes of friends to continue her work. Today, the finished paintings stand as a legacy to an artist who was in many ways ahead of her time.
