Te Papa
With Te Papa Curator Modern Art Lizzie Bisley
This is one of Rita Angus' last works
It was painted the year before she died.
Bolton Street cemetery (1969) by Rita AngusTe Papa
In the late 1960s Angus spent hours sketching tombstones in the cemetery near her Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington home.
She was troubled by the removal of grave sites to build a new motorway.
Flight (1969) by Rita AngusTe Papa
The tombstones in this painting come from those sketches.
A lifelong pacifist, Angus was drawn to a carved stone dove that she found piled up with tombstones at the site.
Here, the dove takes flight over a landscape composed from three different locations around Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.
The painting shows Mākara’s hills
fishing boats from Island Bay
and headstones from the Bolton St Cemetery.
It is full of sharply-observed detail, like this gull.
Parts of the painting are mysterious
like this ominous column of smoke, rising from the hills.
‘Some people were puzzled by the content of this painting,’ wrote Angus’s friend Juliet Peter.
‘Rita, when asked said’ “It’s so simple … I took the headstones to the picnic too.”’
Text by Te Papa curators Lizzie Bisley and Hanahiva Rose, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 2022.
All images reproduced courtesy of the Estate of Rita Angus.
