The major Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki exhibition explores the trailblazing work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s women artists during the middle decades of the 20th century.
Ask most people what history is and they’ll tell you it’s what happened in the past. Not wrong, but not entirely right either. When we talk about history, we’re really discussing the record of what happened in the past. Art history, then, is a visual record, but it’s also the stories of artists – what they made, why they made it, and how they made their way in the world.
Auckland Art Gallery’s Modern Women: Flight of Time is a rare kind of art historical exhibition, one that refuses the uniformity so often draped over history. The exhibition, dedicated to women artists’ contribution to modern art in Aotearoa New Zealand, emphasises connections over chronology, collapses the distances that typically separate artists working in different locales, and loosens the ties to well-worn themes that so often dominate the modern art histories of Aotearoa.
The result: an exhibition that celebrates the diversity of what women artists were actually creating between 1920 and 1970, highlighting the pioneering nature of this work.
With more than 80 paintings, prints, sculptures and textiles from 40 artists, the words and images below only scratch the surface of the treasure chest that is the free-admission Modern Women. Alongside the accepted canon of Rita Angus and Frances Hodgkins are trailblazing, influential artists whom history has not held onto – until now.
I joined curator Julia Waite – also the editor of the gorgeous book that accompanies the exhibition – for a private tour of Modern Women, and to learn more about what makes these works so special.
Julia Holderness, [Florence Weir in a Room, Ōtautahi Christchurch], 2024
The answer lies with the photographer, contemporary artist Julia Holderness, who has invented Weir – her artworks and her history – as a “device to facilitate connections that go beyond recorded histories and fill gaps.” Holderness invites audiences to consider the construction of identity, artistic or otherwise, and the elusiveness of women artists in a canon compiled primarily by men. Slippery and smart, Holderness’s photographs are an intriguing entrée to an exhibition that challenges the homogeneity of how we tend to show the past.
Pauline Yearbury, Papa-tu-a-nuku (Earth Mother), circa 1960s
Pauline Yearbury was not only the youngest artist ever to be accepted into Elam (she entered the art school aged just 14), but also, in 1946, the first Māori artist to graduate from the school. Working initially in the strongly figurative Elam house style, her work soon evolved into abstract modernist interpretations of Māori creation stories. Yearbury described this approach: “What was important to my ancestors is still important to me, but the way in which they did things is no longer important… One must use legends, but interpret them in a modern manner.”
The delayed recognition of Yearbury’s contributions to art in Aotearoa underscores the historic and ongoing undervaluing of work by wāhine Māori artists. Recently, her work has gained significant curatorial attention, featuring in the landmark exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art and the 24th Biennale of Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Winifred Knights, The Marriage at Cana, 1923
In an exhibition of mostly domestic-scale works, The Marriage at Cana feels extra-large, a literal manifestation of women artists taking up space. It also reimagines the much-depicted scene of Jesus’ first miracle populated by as many women as men, including a calmly breastfeeding mother in the mid-ground, posed like the Madonna.
When I ask curator Julia Waite about the inclusion of works by overseas artists – Knights is British – in the exhibition, she explains how significant acquisitions into our national collections often result in works like The Marriage at Cana becoming integral to local art history, especially as they are displayed regularly in public galleries alongside New Zealand artworks.
One of only nine paintings ever made by Knights, The Marriage at Cana remains eerily unfinished.
June Black, [Dr Endedus], circa 1958
Undoubtedly my favourite discovery of this exhibition is June Black. Her works are undeniably strange: they’re spindly characters with haunted expressions, elongated ceramic figures built from textured segments of clay, adorned with various objects and medallions, each glazed a different colour: pocket watches, a three-leaf clover, a sun, a chain. When they were first exhibited in 1958, each painted character was paired with its ceramic counterpart, as well as a short script detailing their name, role and a pithy “mission statement”.
In Modern Women, Black’s works have been hung alongside lines cribbed from what she called her “sausage books”: journals filled with quotes from poets, writers, artists and philosophers, her own thoughts stuffed in alongside. Reading these words, viewing Black’s art, one has the sense of a truly original mind, but also the struggles of wrestling with that mind. “Emotional struggle, existential struggle and the struggle to be creative… Black brings all of that to the surface, and that becomes the subject of her work,” Waite tells me.
Flora Scales, Le Port de Mochool, au soleil couchant [Port of Mousehole at sunset], 1951-53
Flora Scales is an artist who benefited from the exposure and creative energy of leaving her home country – a move that enabled many women artists to break free from the constraints of feminine identity in their countries of origin – although not until she had unshackled herself from a complicated family life at the age of 41. In Europe, she learned to paint outdoors, connected with fellow New Zealand expatriates Frances Hodgkins and Gwen Knight, unlearned linear perspective, and unlocked a new way of working, eventually creating a language of abstraction that was entirely her own.
Jacqueline Fahey, Woman at the Sink, 1959
When I think of Jacqueline Fahey paintings, I envision hectic domestic scenes: daughters screaming at each other across a butter-yellow kitchen, balloons and birthday mess sprawled on the dining table; tired women drinking wine while a little girl fumbles with her toys on a patterned rug.
Not this one. Touted as the first overtly feminist painting in Aotearoa, Woman at the Sink is as dour and static as Fahey’s later works are riotous and alive. Made of geometric shapes with thick black outlines, it invokes a sense of drudgery, sluggishness and isolation: here is a woman trapped at the sink, trapped in the suburbs, unpaid and unrecognised for her labour.
Kāterina Mataira, Deep Water, circa 1957
While Dame Kāterina Mataira is best known for her pivotal role in promoting and revitalising te reo Māori, before the 1970s she is also recognised as one of the first Māori modernists; she was the only wāhine artist included in the inaugural exhibition of modern Māori art in 1958. Her painting Deep Water demonstrates her skill with mixed media, using different textures to build a sensuous, layered painting evocative of the sea despite its earthy colour palette. Abstract marks swim and coalesce to form fish, streams of bubbles, kaimoana and swirls of light and sand.
Ilse von Randow, Auckland City Art Gallery Curtains, 1958
It is a travesty that these curtains were ever allowed to leave the institution for which they were created. Originally (and innovatively) commissioned to divide the gallery’s principle exhibition spaces, von Randow’s double-sided, handloom-woven curtains – which took four months to weave – are now held in the collection of Tāmaki Paenga Hira, the Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Keen eyes might notice how the geometric patterns of von Randow’s curtains recall Māori tāniko design, and indeed, as Sebastian Clarke notes in the exhibition’s accompanying publication, it is likely she was aware of these patterns as the following year she did in fact design a tāniko panel.
