Bloomsbury south

In 1930s Christchurch a trio of young people shared a house and a passion which would forge a new direction in art. Arts editor LINDA HERRICK surveys an exhibition which captures the moment.

It says something about the way we treasure our cultural history that an important artistic site in Christchurch is now a police station carpark. But back in the late 1930s, 97a Cambridge Tce was the hub of the city's art scene during the brief halcyon years between the Great Depression and World War II.

In the extreme conservatism of Christchurch at the time, some radical ideas and practices flourished at Cambridge Tce as a triangle of three intense young people forged new directions in art amid an atmosphere of experimentation in life, art - and morris dancing ...

Two of the three people at the centre of what their curator Professor Peter Simpson has called the "Cambridge Terrace Years" were artists Rita Angus and Leo Bensemann. The third, an English teacher called Lawrence Baigent, was Bensemann's lifelong friend, and the subject of many photos, drawings and paintings.

Those form part of The Cambridge Terrace Years exhibition, curated by Simpson of Auckland University's English Department, following seasons in the Hocken Library and Wellington City Gallery in conjunction with curator Vita Cochran's Angus by Angus self-portrait show.

The remainder of the Cambridge Terrace show comprises a series of self-portraits by Angus and Bensemann, as well as studies of each other, book plate drawings, sketches and Caxton Press first editions from that period - a legacy of Bensemann's 40-year tenure at the publishing house and Simpson's 40 years of book collecting.

The trio's friendship started when Rita Angus moved into Cambridge Tce in 1937, her studio flat one of several on the property owned by impressionist painter Sydney Thompson. When he moved to France in 1938, Bensemann and Baigent became Angus' neighbours. The two men - both aged 25 - were best friends from schooldays in Nelson, explains Simpson.

"Leo came from a working class family in Takaka, while Lawrence was a very well set-up young man, multi-talented, a very good writer and pianist. In a sense, Leo came to Christchurch on Lawrence's shirt-tails. Lawrence came down to university in 1931 with his mother, and Leo came and stayed with Mrs Baigent as well and worked as a commercial artist. When the old lady died they went out into a flat of their own and eventually to Cambridge Tce.

"Rita was a few years older and had left her husband, Alfred Cook, in 1934 after just a few years of marriage. She lived in boarding houses on her own for a while, until she moved into Cambridge Tce."

Angus and Bensemann were immediately energised by each other, and formed a strong attachment, artistic and personal. Previously, she had been preoccupied with landscape painting, of which her 1936 Cass is considered an icon of New Zealand art.

Bensemann, on the other hand, was already involved with Caxton Press, and had published an extraordinary collection of ink drawings in 1937 in the book Fantastica (Simpson reprinted Fantastica in 1997 from the original blocks for Auckland University's Holloway Press). Now, at Cambridge Tce, the two started to paint themselves, each other, Baigent and their friends.

"I'm interested in the works because aside from being good likenesses, there's an element of theatre and masquerade and acting out roles," says Simpson, pointing to one of the central portraits by Bensemann, Portrait of Rita Angus.

"Rita in her black wig looks like some sort of desert dominatrix. My theory is that Rita being slightly older, drew Leo as a younger person than he was, while he drew her as older."

Photos reveal Bensemann and Baigent as intense young men, self-consciously "artistic" in paint-smattered smock, pipe in clenched mouth.

Baigent, says Simpson, was "famous for his diaries, rumoured to be a 'full and frank' record of the period's personalities." [The diaries are under embargo at Canterbury University.]

While Bensemann never studied art at tertiary level, he took drawing classes at the Canterbury College School of Art, where he met sculptor Francis Shurrock. "Shurrock," says Simpson, with a laugh, "taught Leo morris dancing ... "

Bensemann's elevation in artistic circles came about through Angus, who invited him to join the arts collective known as The Group, with Toss Woollaston, Louise Henderson and later Colin McCahon, W.A. Sutton and Doris Lusk; they aimed to move away from the style called "regional realism" into something more imaginative.

Cambridge Tce became The Group's social centre and Bensemann printed all Group catalogues at Caxton Press, founded by poet Denis Glover and publisher of the first works by the likes of A.R.D. Fairburn, Frank Sargeson, James K. Baxter and Charles Brasch.

"Leo worked there for 40 years as printer, calligrapher, designer and manager after Denis became unreliable through drinking," says Simpson, who first met Bensemann and Baigent when he was a student at Canterbury University in the early 60s. "I can remember as a young bloke getting interested in New Zealand poetry and starting to build a collection, going into Caxton Press to see what they had in the way of old stock. I bought James K. Baxter's first book for six shillings, and that was when I met Leo.

"I can also remember when I was doing my MA and Lawrence Baigent was teaching. As far as Cambridge Tce was concerned, Rita had left by the beginning of 1939 and Lawrence and Leo stayed on at the flat until 1943 when Leo got married to Mary Barrett, who he'd met through the art school.

"But they continued to be firm friends all of their lives. Lawrence, in the 60s, was suave and handsome, and an excellent teacher, particularly of Shakespeare. He was very generous to his students and would invite us around for dinner and parties - it all seemed very sophisticated to me at the time. One night, Leo turned up at one of these parties, a charismatic barrel of a man compared to the slender youth of 1938."

Angus' portraits and Bensemann's own studies of himself bear this out. "People said of Leo that he was extraordinarily handsome, humorous and intense," says Simpson. "And some of the paintings in this collection suggest emotional turmoil.

He makes Lawrence look rather priggish and proper in some, but in one of them [see below] he looks rather demonic. It suggests some emotional agitation, you start to realise there was a bit of a drama going on here. On the other hand, the pose may be literally theatrical, an exercise in expressionism."

That sense of agitation was subtly expressed in Fantastica, where the text from diverse sources such as Dr Faustus, Arabian Nights, Till Eulenspiegel and the Brothers Grimm accompany images of a prince in the process of mental disintegration.

In each drawing the face of the prince is a Bensemann self-portrait. "Fantastica told a story but a secret one," says Simpson.

"It has a wide range of pictorial and literary styles but my theory is that under the surface they are all linked. It is a story of possession and metamorphosis. Dr Faustus, the brave prince, is reduced at the end to madness by infatuation, rendered pathetic by his obsession."

Angus continued to travel and paint until her death in 1970; Bensemann also continued to paint steadily, adding landscape as a dominant subject in later years. Baigent and Bensemann died within a year of each other in 1985-86.

The dynamics of the relationships of the Cambridge Tce trio live on in the collection curated by Simpson, who intends to write a book on Bensemann's life. But the whole story behind the trio, he agrees, would also make an absolutely fabulous movie, working title: Bloomsbury South.

* Rita Angus and Leo Bensemann: The Cambridge Terrace Years; and Angus by Angus: 23 Self-Portraits at the Auckland Art Gallery, to July 28.