Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist/He Ringatoi Hou O Aotearoa was developed and presented by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and is currently on display in Napier's MTG.
Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist/He Ringatoi Hou O Aotearoa was developed and presented by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and is currently on display in Napier's MTG.
Toni MacKinnon is MTG’s art curator
OPINION
Rita Angus is in the house, in the form of an important selection of works from Te Papa Tongarewa’s collection, on display at MTG Hawke’s Bay Tai Ahuriri for the next two months.
It is fitting, given that Rita was born in Hastings and that, after her death in 1970, her ashes were interred next to her father’s in Wharerangi Cemetery, Napier. Between those events, she lived successively in Palmerston North, Christchurch and Wellington but she remains an inextricable part of Hawke’s Bay’s story.
Regular visits to her parents, who retired to Napier, meant that Hawke’s Bay became the subject of many of her paintings, including Churches, Hawke’s Bay (1963), and Fog, Hawke’s Bay (1968). These and other iconic representations have ensured that the region remains part of Aotearoa’s cultural narrative.
Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist/He Ringatoi Hou O Aotearoa includes many of Rita’s most important works, including Rutu (1951), Cleopatra (1938) and Central Otago (1969), and is great for all ages.
There are a significant number of portraits in the exhibition. Perhaps the most powerful, and certainly most prescient, is the work pictured here, Rutu.
Writer Jill Trevelyan explains that Rutu is an updating of the Madonna figure – a Pacific goddess who owes a debt to the East. Originally titled Sun Goddess, it was later renamed after Rutu, or Ruth, the wife of Tamihana Te Rauparaha. Tamihana – son of the great Ngāti Toa chief – and his wife preached the Christian faith during the musket wars and are credited with helping to bring an end to the fighting. Rutu expresses Angus’ pacifist convictions and heartfelt aspirations for the restoration of peace after World War II.
Another fascinating thing about this portrait is the extent to which it predates the feminist movement in its revival of feminine spirituality and goddess themes.
Rutu, painted by Rita Angus in 1951, is part of Te Papa's collection and is on display at the MTG until August 25.
These ideas of internationalism, peace, harmony and equality exist in the work. Yet it also tells a deeply personal story of restoration and equilibrium.
When Angus created Rutu, she was convalescing. The 1940s had been tough: she’d been living on the breadline and tended to sacrifice company to focus on her work. Suffering bouts of sickness and then a mental health episode, she moved to Waikanae, on the Kāpiti Coast, to stay with her parents and recuperate after a period of hospital care. The background of the painting shows Waikanae beach.
Rutu holds a lotus flower, symbolising purity, enlightenment and spiritual growth. The lotus’ ability to bloom beautifully amidst muddy waters is often seen as a metaphor for achieving inner peace and tranquillity.
Years earlier, Rita had miscarried a child. Regarding Rutu’s genesis, she wrote to composer Douglas Lilburn, the child’s father: “I began with the watercolour of my father before me, and your portrait at the end of the room. My memory served me well; about three hours later, a child about 16 or 17 years of age, like my family, but not mine; she belongs to you.
“Of European birth, simple, monastic, Western schooling – you will find her in the paintings on the walls of the Temple Caves of India, where wandering Yogi priests sheltered, in the Bodhisattvas of the Buddhist shrines where the Chinese worshipped, in the flower and tea ceremonies of the Samurai. The Geisha and the Priestesses of the Shinto shrines of Japan.”
Angus’ genius lies in her ability to bring her ideas or messages into the way she paints. She achieves this through a deep awareness and understanding of the world history of painting. Rutu spans painting traditions from the diverse sources she mentions above, serving as a visual messenger of universal values and global ideologies.
Regarding her goddess paintings, Angus said: “These canvases, when painted, will not count much if anything, to an older, or my own, generation. I paint for the next two generations, aiming for peace, progression, and the continuation of races.”
The time is now.
Curator Lizzie Bisley will be doing a floor talk at 1pm on Saturday, July 6, looking at what shaped Rita Angus’ unique vision and the MTG will be screening Lovely Rita – A Painter’s Life at 2pm on Sunday, July 14, followed by a Q&A session with Dame Gaylene Preston and Jill Trevelyan.
