The advertising for <i>Rita and Douglas</i> evokes a famous image of an artist whose work has raised a few questions in the past. The performance is a cross between concert, play and art show and is the creation of the playwright Dave Armstrong.
It will run as part of the Otago Festival of the Arts in October. The Rita and Douglas of the title are the artist Rita Angus and the composer Douglas Lilburn and the script is based on surviving letters.
In the performance Michael Houston is Lilburn and Jennifer Ward-Lealand plays Angus. The advertising features a photo of Ward-Lealand wearing a big 1930s coat and a white-spotted green neck-scarf and holding a green beret in one leather-gloved hand and a cigarette in the other.
She has a truculent expression and looks like someone you wouldn't want to mess with. It successfully evokes the artist's well-known 1936-37 Self Portrait now in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
It's a great portrait and because it's well known is excellent for advertising purposes. Angus and Lilburn had an affair and then a long friendship. The friendship was known to acquaintances but not the affair, which was not even suspected, because it was known Lilburn was gay.
The production is possible because Angus' letters have been passed into public ownership or otherwise been made accessible to Jill Trevelyan, author of the first book-length biography, published in 2008. It's an excellent study and a good read and I highly recommend it.
It also contains much which illuminates earlier discussion about Angus' work.
I was privy to the gallery's purchase of the Self Portrait in 1980, which was exciting, because it is such an arresting image. It was little-known then but soon became famous, but my interest has continued because of the discussion surrounding her work.
In 1969 Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith had published their pioneering study, An Introduction to New Zealand Painting. They had singled out Toss Woollaston, Colin McCahon, Doris Lusk and Rita Angus as particularly interesting artists of the 1930s and '40s and had grouped them stylistically.
This seemed odd to me, not because they weren't all interesting artists but because, while Woollaston, McCahon and Lusk did seem stylistically similar, at least at that time, Angus seemed clearly different. A lot of water has gushed under the art historical bridge since the 1970s and '80s but Trevelyan's material still cast useful new light.
One reason Woollaston's, McCahon's and Lusk's work look alike is because they shared the same influences: the Englishman Bob Field at the art school in Dunedin and the German expressionist Hans Hoffman filtered through Flora Scales' notes in Nelson.
These three artists socialised together, exchanged ideas and worked together and the result was their own particular form of New Zealand-made expressionism. With another artist, Patrick Hayman, they were New Zealand's first "native school" and their work was a form of modernism.
Brown and Keith had tried to link the three with Angus as representing a nascent distinctive New Zealand style, emphasising the country's light, geomorphology and the Wellington-based, English-born Christopher Perkins as its sources.
Brown and Keith had originally intended to devote a whole chapter to each of a few significant painters, but one, they said, had objected. What emerges from the Angus correspondence is that she was the one who did. She also emphatically rejected being linked to the other three in particular. She had known them, but not well. Her art was different.
There had also been much discussion on Angus' sources and the correspondence assists and expands this. It seems she did know Perkins' work but doesn't make much of the connection. Brown and Keith had thought she wasn't much concerned with European models, but Angus mentions Vermeer, Cezanne, Hans Memling and Pieter Breughel the Elder, the last two in relation to particular works.
She was also interested in and influenced by Japanese prints, a bit later in the 1930s than her Self Portrait, which is fairly apparent in some works. Also, and significantly, a second-hand source attested Angus' interest in the American Regional artist Grant Wood.
Angus' mature style first crystallised about 1936 and soon produced impressive things.
Her dynamic, patterned, flattened, stylised landscapes and portraits do resemble the American's manner, but there are others like it around the world at the time. In the Soviet Union it is the style of the Socialist Realists.
In Paris Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish aristocrat of Bohemian tastes, used it to dramatic effect. It knew no national or political boundaries and its source wasn't New Zealand's light.
It was the commercial manner of the time and Angus had been doing commercial work before and during her own version first emerged.
It isn't really any kind of modernism but none the worse for that. It catches the eye and is still firing imaginations.
• Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
