Rita Angus
Impressions by some friends

JOHN SUMMERS

I remember Rita as one of the deep-breathing kind. One day in the early 'fifties she stood by the counter in Whitcombe & Tombs where I then worked and said something looking at me with those level eyes of hers, waiting for the words to sink in, looking away and then turning her head back to see if perhaps they had. The effect was of great composure, but not I thought, of a composure easily won. I can't now remember what Rita said, but I got the impression that it was what lay a little beyond the words in those deep-breathing silences, the silences of a very reserved but not coy woman, that really mattered. And what was that? As I got to know her work better I thought it very probably was The Sun Goddess, The Goddess of Mercy, Scrub-burning, North Hawke's Bay, protea with their fullness of strange life, irises, the liquid eyes of Maori boys: a longing for harmony, peace and goodwill on the threshold of the mystical and the apocalyptic. This at any rate seems to have been one important part of her vision and almost marks the boundaries of what I respond to most in her work.

Mysticism and painting do not easily go hand in hand, and loss of form or sentimentality are the hazards of this particular goal. However at its painterly best mysticism is an apprehension of form at a level transcendentally beyond the simpler objective record of visual effects, but almost of necessity using nature as the spring-board to that inward vision. This notion would, I think, have appealed to Rita who if anything gave the impression of being over-disciplined, over-controlled, both in her person and in some of her work which is perhaps too tightly constructed.

RITA ANGUS View from Tinakori Road c.1967
oil, 59 x 58.3 cm (collection of the Hocken Library)

The person herself is finely evoked in Leo Bensemann's 1937 conté drawing in Doris Lusk's possession. Rita was then twenty-nine years old, some fifteen years younger than she was at the meeting which made such an incisive impression on me. The nose is strong, the eyes level, or levelling: there is a touch of humour round the lips, the planes of the face are softly chiselled and the hair is light and fluffy. Consonant with the slight austerity of this image is the military-style jacket Rita is wearing with its puffed shoulders and its high breast pockets to which the only concession is the cravat she wears. The grey paper on which this drawing is done gives some gentleness without sentimentality to what might have been a harsh image: as in fact the only self-portraits I know that Rita did are rather harsh and unsparing. The fifteen years between the drawing and my meeting had laid more lines on her, but they were as consonant as that military jacket and were not harsh. On the contrary there was a motherly effect. Rita might prefer me to say Buddha-like: I don't think any contradiction is involved.

The emphasis on a certain military bearing may seem as much an anomaly as the large reproduction of The Battle of Waterloo(?) which hung in the pacifist-inclined Angus home in Napier. Mr Angus, a building contractor of some note, and his wife encouraged Rita, the eldest of seven children in her early chosen vocation. 'Waterloo' was one of several Victorian paintings in the home. Rackham, Tenniel and the illustrator of Tom and the Water Babies may all have been influences in ways not easily discerned. What does emerge pretty clearly is that Rita was an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary painter: the Victoriana was not sternly rejected but simply faded out. Indeed in childhood there was consistent desire to be a painter but no fanatical obsession with painting. As a child Rita loved games and was 'full of fun.' Later as a full time student at the School of Arts, Christchurch, she found time to make her own dresses, and as the young married woman in about 1932-34 Rita was fond of social life and welcomed many young artists and their wives to the Cook home in Ferry Road.

Outside the enlightened nurturing warmth of the Angus home, the more remarkable for those early materialistic times and in view of Mr, Angus's 'down to earth' occupation, devotion to a painterly vision could hardly exist without a certain quantum of aggression which, no doubt, bears some relation to the more violent kind. The artist has to maintain within herself a strong notion that what she is doing is worth while. This probably explains the young couple's absorption in the life of Benvenuto Cellini the casting of whose bronze horse, you will remember, was more important to him than his own crippling fever. Not only does the artist have to battle against the go-getters but also with her own community whose canons almost inevitably, if tragically, are so fierce and exclusive. Thus while her work gave Rita her marriage, to the artist-teacher Alfred Cook, it was soon to take it away from her because they were both so highly critical of each other's work. Alfred Cook later went to Australia, as did the better-known brother James.

For a while Rita wrestled with the problem of identity in-between-times painting under the name of Angus, then Mackenzie before reverting to her maiden name again.

Around about 1937 came the dreadful awareness of impending disaster. The pencil propagandist of our own collective guilt was Arthur Wragg, the greatest of whose statements was less than the least sketch of oppression or despair by the wonderful but here almost unknown German Expressionist Kathe Kollwitz. Rita like others looked at Wragg but the influence would not be direct as her visual statements stressed a longed-for unity between man and man, and man and nature. Giotto was more recognizably influential as he came directly out of a great mural tradition where 'design', Rita's battle cry, was of utmost importance. But by no means the least influence and certainly one of the most discernible visually is that of the masters of the Japanese woodcut whose precisions, whose spare flat application of colour, formal arrangement and attitude to nature, are most evident in Head of a Maori Boy and Tree 1943. Indeed the adaptation of their disciplines into terms of Rita's watercolours is responsible for the bunched crystalline effect of the apocalyptic Scrub-burning, North Hawke's Bay 1965 with its mysterious suggestive shapes which never lapse into the overt or the overtly banal.

If in this article I have stressed certain aspects of Rita's work and tried to show it as an authentic part of her person it is because the information given by her artist sister, Jean Jones, who knew her so much better than I did, supplements certain gaps in the understanding of the relation of the person Rita to her reading, her visuar experience and her work.

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