Rita Angus
Impressions by some friends

DENIS GLOVER

The first time I even heard of Rita was when I saw Gas Works. I was young and more ignorant than I am now, if that were possible. Most of us students were in a mood of fierce idealistic realism. The Woolston Gas Works was as stark and grey as Stalin's uniform. Location: next to the Roman Catholic Cathedral which Bernard Shaw affected greatly to admire - one suspects to pull the Anglican leg about their quaint little period piece now peered down on in the Square by so many more impressive cinemas, banks, and insurance buildings. Of course the Anglicans actually gave that site to 'the Italian missionaries in Barbadoes Street'.

If it were only on a hill, the Roman Catholic Cathedral would appear as a noble baroque cameo in the St Peter's style, and no doubt it has been well or ill portrayed by many of the faith. But the Gas Works next door - here was something! In one puff was blown away all the genteel piddle-painting English, to this day not sure if they are New Zealanders or First Four Colonels' Daughters.

No, that's not fair and no longer true. At that time I could sit in rapt contemplation of a power pole as a reaction against bloody Corot trees, roses roses round the door, and West Coast bush bush bush with mum walking down the road followed by a tired horse to give proportion to the height of those dull trees.

Richard Wallwork would paint Greek grottos and temples, highly eighteenth century fake, and Sydney Thompson would repair to France to sell New Zealand landscapes returning to sell the culture-vultures pictures of fishing-boats in Concarneau or some such improbable place.

RITA ANGUS Cass c.1937
Oil, 36.8 x 46.3 cm (collection of The Robert McDougall Art Gallery)

Give me the Gas Works. I remember Rex Fairburn saying, when I drove him over a sunset Porters Pass, 'These are great crouching tigers! Why does your Canterbury School make them look like Sunday icecream?'

And that point brings me back to Rita, because she would have none of the delirious woofy mango-swamp muck of the then Auckland School. She set out to impose order and clarity and immense discipline on what she saw. There were no emotional overtones. The looker could provide them for himself.

The next shock I got was Cass Railway Station. Another break-through. What had the Christwegians been doing? Rita saw it with utter directness. I see it often. Although outdistanced by the later simplicity of Juliet Peter and Robin White the impact remains every time  - though the stack of timber looks like a batch of bad cheese-straw. (Heaphy was equally unconvincing - Hokianga and Mt Egmont timber lack solidity.)

She was never in good health for very long, and one of the prescriptions was the eating of raw liver. Yet the life and laughter of any company, which in the late 'thirties she enjoyed with the best of us. Not really a gregarious woman, but in the pursuit of her private ideals knew when to relax. She saw through the dreary bunch of punks who ran the Canterbury School of Art, a mosquito breeding ground for advertising agency fashion artists and delineators of electric heaters. But Shurrock ('Shurry') and Mrs Shurry shared their direct honesty with her, and with all of us. Olivia Spencer Bower, a woman of casually deceptive brilliance, was a close friend.

After the war I bought a place on Aranoni Track, Sumner, and to my joy there was Rita but two doors away. We visited often, though there was a tempestuous outburst when I felled one of two noble pohutakawas, partly to clear the view of Cranleigh Barton, an up-above artist friend, and partly to ingratiate myself with the coalman, who had to circumnavigate it bowed down with his wares. But Rita heaped coals of fire. A tree murderer! It was some time before she would drop in for biscuits and cheese, or a good square feed. It took us some time to realise that she was suffering from malnutrition, whether from proud penury or reasons of health I could not coax out of her. Certainly she had a bad breakdown and - how shall I put it? - became very mysterious and mystical. And this, especially in a woman, makes me swallow my adams-apple. The laughter was gone.

I think by this time that those unbelievably sensitive flower water-colours had been completed, or nearly so. I used to drop in on a lonely Rita when I could, partly to chatter in my obtuse way, partly to see what was on the easel and try to discuss it. At this stage Rita got a lot of dream-quality fun out of Sumner beach. I remember one beachscape which left me startled. In the foreground shells of all shapes and sizes were propped on end, like Stonehenge straightened out, or the statues of Erewhon. I could see faces in them, which I thought accidental.

'But can't you see?' cried Rita. 'That's Professor Shelley, and that Sir James Hight, and that Professor Pocock. And here's Miss Fitzgerald, and John Oakley.' A weird charade they made, excellent fantasy, and many of them.

More frightening (and I thought of dubious worth) was a large oil depicting metaphysically War and Peace, the United Nations, the Brotherhood and Butchery of Man, Mother and Child you know, the sort of cartoon Leonardo would have loved.

I saw little of her in Wellington, where instinct told me she wanted solitude.

Rita Angus: an idol and friend of my youth, a corrector of my ignorance, a later puzzle to my mind. If there is any purpose to life, which I doubt, it is in the brief knowing of rare people.

Originally published in Art New Zealand 3 December/January 1976-77