Shock therapy 'changed' artist Rita Angus

By ROSALEEN MacBRAYNE AND NZPA

One of New Zealand's greatest and best-loved artists, Rita Angus, received electric shock treatment during a period in a mental hospital, a new book reveals.

It changed her personality irrevocably, making her suspicious of people's intentions, says Rita Angus: Live to Paint and Paint to Live.

Co-author Jill Trevelyan said the artist, born in Hastings in 1908, had electro-convulsive therapy at Sunnyside Hospital in Christchurch, where she was admitted in 1949 ill and unable to paint.

Angus, who lived most of her life in Christchurch and Wellington, suffered severe depression in the 1940s and frequently took the sedative bromide for insomnia.

But after being released from Sunnyside into the care of her parents at Waikanae in 1950, she was as committed to painting as ever.

"She was such an interesting person, a wonderful painter, though to her friends and contemporaries she was not easy to deal with," said Jill Trevelyan.

But fellow artist Jacqueline Fahey, who knew Angus well in the 1960s "not as a patient but as a friend," disagrees.

Angus, an ardent pacifist, sharp thinker and hard worker, was easy to get along with, said Mrs Fahey, who is adamant Angus' work was not affected by her mental illness.

"She was a very compassionate and enlightened socialist, which wouldn't equate with brain damage from shock treatment, would it?"

Greg O'Brien, a curator at Wellington's City Gallery, where an exhibition of Rita Angus works opens today, said the artist painted masterpieces in her late 20s and was still doing so toward the end of her life.

"She had some flat periods, but her career was amazing. She kept reinventing herself."

Her work around the time she was in Sunnyside was very calm.

"That is how she was trying to hold on to order and beauty in her life. The painting was her lifeline," said Mr O'Brien.

Most of the time, Angus led an energetic life and travelled round New Zealand and overseas, painting many landscapes and self-portraits.

She was perhaps at her peak in the 1930s, but produced some of her most original work in the 1960s.

She died of ovarian cancer in January 1970, aged 61.