Joanne Drayton: Rhona Haszard - an experimental expatriate New Zealand artist

By PETER WELLS*

I always feel as if a brain cell is being returned to my head when I read a good piece of New Zealand history. This is partly because history in New Zealand is so important in creating a sense of who we are, or have been, as New Zealanders. It's also because we live in "a sandcastle culture", as Michael King says. This means we live in a culture which creates things, then lets them disappear, so somebody new has to reinvent the wheel.

I was reminded of this reading Joanne Drayton's excellent book on the expatriate painter Rhona Haszard. Haszard was born in 1901 and studied art in Christchurch at a time when the city dominated art education in New Zealand. It was a postwar period when women were coming into their own. She studied alongside Ngaio Marsh, Rata Lovell Smith and Evelyn Page.

Haszard was clearly talented, her paintings a form of modernism which was acceptable but also really rather lovely. She married an art teacher, Ronald McKenzie but, very soon after, met her nemesis: a relatively sophisticated, if opinionated, Englishman, Leslie Greener. Haszard was swept off her feet and out of her marriage, somehow overlooking how scandalous this would be, particularly in the socially moribund Christchurch of the period.

Haszard and her new husband were eventually catapulted out of the country and went to France and England in search of fame and Art with a capital "A". What follows is an oft-told tale.

Talented artist ekes out living in inclement city, usually on the borders of the famous and smart. He or she creates, against all odds, good art, but also suffers self-doubt and bad health.

The interesting thing is how deeply conditional Haszard's success was on being rebroadcast back home. This seems to me curiously like many contemporary New Zealand-born artists who have a modicum of success overseas but who are really kept alive by the response of the culture they were born into, despite their firm decision not to live "at home".

Haszard had some success, both here and abroad. But eventually, at the astonishingly young age of 30, she "fell" from a tower and killed herself. A mystery still surrounds her death. Her marriage was unhappy, her own sense of self slippery. Really, in the end, what remains are her pictures - lovely, modern, clever, full of talent.

Drayton does a very good job conjecturing about Haszard's life, filling in the gaps and creating a vivid sense of an early pioneer of what, these days, is an extraordinarily lively local art scene.

Her life was difficult, awkward and to a certain extent unfulfilled. Yet it is on the very real basis of her art that she will have a continued presence in our lives (and auction rooms). This highly readable book marks a most welcome return.

* Canterbury University Press/Unitec $34.95

* Peter Wells is an Auckland writer and film-maker.