Poussin's Humour

Rita Angus - 4 [old notes, unpubl tpscr] - part 3

Last part -- with a last paragraph [ommitted] of generalities about NZ modernism. [I don't think that I would write like this now]. 

The originality in Rita Angus's painting is her pushing her way via oriental painting and religion [?] into a questioning of appearances, a reconstruction of them follows in which they become silhouette-signs of objects, that is, figures. This is why she is a singularly important painter for others in New Zealand, as testified by the recurrence of the technique and its very varied adaptations and modifications in the 1960s by Don Binney, by Robin White and by richard Killeen. As will be seen [in an intended future text] it is one very strong strand in New Zealand art that turns on a kind of pictorial semiotics, painting as signs. It is one vartiant on the continued search for a means of sending messages in paintings, using it as a means of communication. One constant is the belief that communication is exactly what is missing in New Zealand: in spite of the proximities, the muteness, and the inarticulateness continues.

The last paragraph sketches lightly a possible reading of various other artists in similar terms: Woollaston, Lois White, John Weeks, Eric Lee-Johnson.  

Rita Angus - 4 [old notes, unpubl tpscr] - part 2

[Part 1  Notes, various, - a phase before criticism - intimate working with paintings - a regular practice,writing down whatever came to mind [without stopping to check references or allusions]- something like what T.J.Clark tried with two landscapes by Nicolas Poussin in The sight of Death : an experiment in Art Writing. Yale University Press, 2006. But certainly no thought of publication at that time.]

Part 2, more general notes.

Up to the work in Wellington in the early 1960's, precisions of painting had only answered to the necessity for an unwavering outlining process, that ruthlessly disposed with [of] modelling and chiaroscuro, as if to lay bare the pure flat profiles of things. Each of these things would be uniquely represented by these measurable or at least controllable shaped silhouettes. The possibility of showing three distinct views aas if in one field without discontinuities appearing, in fact so smoothed over they are hard to detect, occurs in the lovely Central Otago, begun in 1954 worked on until 1956 and then finished much later, in 1969. 

The Hawkes Bay paintings are something else. Grids intrude on the continuities of scenes, break them up. It is plain that you would go crazy if you tried to sit and contemplate a landscape in so far as you could make all of its clear divisions fit with a mental grid of straight lines. Churches, Hawkes Bay is a compendium of churches telescoped together. The whole ecclesiastical edifice is peopled by the persons of the New Zealand suburban dream, utterly proper. The last of the best of these is Fog, Hawkes Bay. In this the disjunctions are accounted for by the fog, rather as in many oriental landscapes mist or water from waterfalls intervenes,

The portraits are no longer done in flat silhouette shapes. Inside the form itself there are facets which extend the grid and measurement inside forms. There is a sea-horse perhaps and a great cat in the forms of the Scrub-burning, North Hawkes Bay, which is a by-product of the formalitieswith which she finally comes to treat those vague representaminae clouds (see Mantegna's St Sebastian) [The Vienna painting, 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Sebastian_(Mantegna)]. The cat is a Marc looming over the smoke. [Was that a tiger? http://franzmarcgroup.blogspot.com/]

There are always puzzles. In Cass in 1936, the little railway halt with its use in the timber trade, has strange shadows on the building, that look like saws for its boards. Th multiple punning of "SAW""SEE" and the visual pun in which sawn boards cas t the shadows of the instruments that produced them is a richness of device that has not been seen, let alone accounted for. The fact is that a silhouette is readable as an object in a given field due to a variety of cues that make it certainly one thing and not another. In this case the station's label, as Ron Brownson pointed out. [In his essay symbolism and the generation of meaning in Rita Angus's painting. (Rita Angus. National Art Gallery, Wellington. 1982, pp 79-88.]  Not once, in the front, but twice, once to the side in a grotesque and amusing bit of perspective. But the reduction to conventional signs that goes on here -- or in Fraangelico lan dscapes or Canaletto's descriptions of waves on canals -- means that there is no space really here, only silhouettes and signs. Its sign-constructedness is at least as evident as its geometry construction. In that case the shadows are as good as any of the other silhouettes, begin to compete with objects and invite  recognition as sawblades. the hills are not any ambiguous breasts -- though the Takaka Night and Day of McCahon seems to [be] full of knees under draperies. A sign construct of silhouettes is not what Rata Lovell-Smith seems to have in mind. She is after geometyr, form, like Rhona Haszard.   

   to be continued

Rita Angus - 4 [old notes, unpubl tpscr] - part 1

Rather than throw them out for paper-recycling, here are parts of pages 2-5 of unpublished notes [1990s]- lightly edited.

2 ....

 

Mountains Cass [mid 1930s]I love.

The fields full of strange pictorial events, heaving mountains, ectoplasmic outer space visitors in the sky. amazing agitation, like a late Van Gogh, doing Disney Fantasia....

I love the little hairy caterpillar foreground vegetation, with some atrocious thistlian darker mound like ones. Talk about Bosch, a thorny land below and enormous forces above. No wonder the building feels fragile.

Something like a boar's head on right side of picture, threatening bushes. A blasted tree stands before a decaying hut in a windswept valley. She Japaneses a New Zealand Gothic landscape.

Even if she knew about Caspar David Friedrich doing nature symbolism, she has her differences. One, she makes up a symbolism of pioneering in the wasteland, not Salvation by recognising the signs that point to Faith in Nature. And, two, manipulating the ambiguity of silhouette as compared with her coded silhouettes, a bush or a tree can invoke a mood - [Christopher] Perkins [Taranaki] is clser to C.D.F.

"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 up 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'."

The caterpillars are hairbrushes so to speak. and also tight control of spacing in groups of short dark strokes plus v-scribbles.

Poplar Trees, 1929-30. The trees area as much figures as anything by Moore or Giacometti, hooded harlequins, Picassoid? Early example of peopling the landscape with trees.

 

3

Cass is altogether more pleasant, hot sunny day, sheltered in folds of hills on either side, the building decent, a door to get in, and live planted trees around it. It's all Seurat-ed into shape.

The hillocks on the left behind the trees take on a special edge technique, like airbrush almost, never allowed to become volumetric consistently cubist and so very flat. Graphic signs for hills. Nice ribbon strokes in the foreground this time....

Her Goddess images are painted to look like Indian icons, and she certainly studied Japanese woodcuts in Christchurch in the early 1930s. Hiroshige and Hokusai were available in reproduction in books at 5/- each. 

All three [paintings] are at variance with the prevailing values of the Canterbury school at the time. A spiritual neo-classicism is the result but in a new version. She is an artist who is trying to get, 1) her figures grounded inthe local, 2) but abstracted from it by her to be installed among other signs and shadows, 3) to open onto the hidden order of things. To get to that you hve to listen [look] out for signs that what you intuit of the hidden order are authentic, What guaranted her authenticity is the continous refinement of everything [every thing] seen until it was simultaneously geometry and a figure of something else. One thing it could never be was itself. It is the exact contrary to minimalism, [as it involves] the deepest suspicion of every thing: opening the question  is it a sign, to me, of what?