Daemons and dream children : the secret lives of Rita Angus's symbolic portraits

Abstract

This thesis is based on a close examination of the letters written by the New Zealand painter Rita Angus (1908-1970) to the composer Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001) between the years 1941 and 1969. Bequeathed by Lilburn to the Alexander Turnbull Library at his death, they were made available for scholarly consultation in 2001, and have since given rise to a biography (Jill Trevelyan, 2008) and a video portrait (Gaylene Preston, 2008) of the artist. They have also contributed to the making of a substantial exhibition of Angus’s work (William McAloon and Jill Trevelyan, 2008). The question is, can these letters also be useful to us in interpreting Angus’s creative work, above all the symbolic portraits of the mid to Iate 1940s? My contention is that the peculiar character of these letters, written by one artist to another as a deliberate exposition of her craft, means that they can be - that they are, in fact, indispensable to a full understanding of Rutu and the other ‘Goddess’ paintings produced by Angus over this period. My discussion opens with an account of the letters themselves then moves on to contextualise the main story they tell: the brief physical relationship between Angus and Lilburn which resulted in a pregnancy and a miscarriage, then the Iong emotional and spiritual bonding between the two which gave rise to a family of imaginary dream children, Rutu being the first of them. The thesis concludes by contrasting the engagée pacifist and multicultural agenda of Angus’s work, deliberately aimed at her remote posterity rather than her close contemporaries, with the more ironic approaches to the ‘spiritual’ in art which have grown up since.