Review: Modern Women: Flight of Time

This substantial 284-page, well-illustrated, hardback comprehensively documents an important exhibition of the same name at Auckland Art Gallery which opened in August 2024 and runs until late February 2025.

The exhibition was curated and the book edited by Julia Waite, from Auckland Art Gallery, who should be commended for the breadth and depth of the research which lies behind both exhibition and publication, and for her interesting selections which are bound to arouse discussion and debate for their inclusions and omissions. She has combed both public and private collections to deliver a fresh and challenging rethink of the role of women in New Zealand art through the half century between 1920 and 1970. Furthermore, in assembling the publication she has drawn on the talents of close to 40 (mostly female) authors to contribute short essays mostly a page or two in length on the 42 artists involved. These well-informed essays are a very useful contribution to thickening the texture of women’s art history in this country.

The artists represented (far from being an exhaustive list of women artists active in the period), include famous names: Frances Hodgkins, Rita Angus, Doris Lusk, Lois White, Olivia Spencer Bower, Jacqueline Fahey, Molly Macalister, Barbara Hepworth; but also some surprising and curious omissions such as Louise Henderson, Evelyn Page, or the somewhat less familiar Freda Simmonds and Jean Horsley.

There are also many substantial artists included who are less than household names but are given a worthy boost by the attention accorded them here, such as Adele Younghusband, Pauline Yearbury, Helen Stewart, May Smith, June Black, Flora Scales, Alison Pickmere, Margot Philips, Alison Duff, Tanya Ashken, Teuane Tibbo and Ilse von Randow. Still others are hardly known at all and are in effect rescued from oblivion; they include: Jenny Campbell, Gwen Knight, Avis Higgs, Ivy Fife, Beth Zanders, Mary Wirepa, Elizabeth Ellis and Mere Harrison Lodge.

One of the more surprising features of the exhibition/publication is the inclusion of international artists (mostly English) such as Kittie Roberts, Laura Knight, Winifred Knights, Anne Estelle Rice, Natalia Gonchorova, Eileen Agar and Barbara Hepworth. The works shown by these artists come from New Zealand collections and the explanation offered for their inclusion is: ‘To counter the almost constant siloing of modern New Zealand art from the modernisms taking place elsewhere, the project collapses distance between artists working in different places’.

Fair enough, but if that is the case why not include some American artists known to have been admired by local artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe or Helen Frakenthaler, or Australians such as Margaret Preston or Grace Cossington Smith (since a number of New Zealand women, such as Helen Stewart, Avis Higgs and Maud Sherwood, worked in Australia and interacted with compatible artists there)? The international element seems somewhat arbitrary and would probably have been better left to a separate exhibition/publication where it could be explored more fully.

The book (like the exhibition) has three main sections, labelled Stage, Mask and Setting. In her comprehensive introductory essay, ‘Once More, with Feeling’, Julia Waite usefully summarises their purpose and character. ‘The rhythmical and enigmatic works in the opening section illustrate the way artists used the stage as a public and performative space in which to explore myriad female identities from across time’; prominent in this section are Lois White, Adele Younghusband and Pauline Yearbury. The second section, Masks, ‘unveils artists’ experimentation with revealing and obscuring themselves. This section blends portraits, still lifes and surviving pieces of textile design, and highlights works by Maud Sherwood, Frances Hodgkins, Anne Hamblett, Helen Stewart, Rita Angus and June Black. In the third section, Setting, ‘the perspective shifts to consider how women chose to depict their physical environments and how these artworks shed light on the deeper contexts – settings – in which they operated. Prominent here are Rhona Haszard, Flora Scales, Margot Philips and Teuane Tibbo.

The divisions reflect the curator’s worthy aim to avoid traditional categories and art historical divisions so as to forge a new women-centred understanding of history and the ‘flight of time’ for New Zealand.