Exhibitions
Wellington
NEIL ROWE
FLORA SCALES
One of the more extraordinary stories in the history of New Zealand art is that
of the rediscovery of eighty-eight-year-old Miss Helen F. V. Scales (better
known as Flora Scales) after a forty years disappearance. Over this period her
importance in a historical context has become considerable. About a year ago
Auckland gallery directors Barry Lett and Kim Wright met Miss Scales living and
painting in Auckland, after having returned unheralded from the United Kingdom.
An exhibition was mounted at Auckland City Art Gallery last December (incredibly
her first one-man show in a public gallery) and shown recently at the Peter
McLeavey Gallery in July. Flora Scales had left New Zealand in 1928 on her
second study trip to Europe. She worked at the Grand Chamiere studio in Paris
and in the early 'thirties went to Munich to study at the Hans Hoffman School,
returning to New Zealand again in 1934. It was at this time that Toss Woollaston
met her in Nelson, and was allowed to use her notes from the Hoffman School.
Wootlaston acknowledges his debt to Flora Scales in his autobiographical piece, The
Faraway Hills. The extent of that debt has never been so apparent as now. In
viewing a representative body of her work (forty- three paintings from 1939 to
1970) we can see the stylistic influence Miss Scales, and indirectly Hans
Hoffman, had on the young Woollaston, and ultimately on his mature style. Hans
Hoffman has been a seminal influence in post-war American art, and on the New
York school and Jackson Pollock in particular. That his theories and techniques
radically influenced one of our own important painters is entirely due to Flora
Scales.