Between the Lives: Partners in Art

by Deborah Shepard (Editor), Joy McKenzie, Linda Tyler, Jill Trevelyan, Claudia Bell, Catherine Lane West-Newman, Paul Millar, Peter Simpson, Joanne Drayton

Overview

This fascinating look at artists and their intimate partners takes nine well-known New Zealand couples and explores the many aspects of their lives—particularly how the presence of an artistic companion or soul mate impacts the art they produce. Combining the pleasures of gossip with information about how these artists have conducted their lives, this illuminates many of the themes found in the artists' paintings, poems, and films that revolve around their partners and the strains of producing serious art in a small and isolated country. The couples include Gil and Pat Hanly, Colin and Anne McCahon, Sylvia and Peter Siddell, Frances Hodgkins and D. K. Richmond, James K. Baxter and Jacquie Sturm, Kendrick Smithyman and Mary Stanley, Rudall and Ramai Hayward, Toss and Edith Woollaston, and Meg and Alister te Ariki Campbell. All told, nine painters, six poets, two filmmakers, and a photographer are included.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781869403331
Publisher:	Auckland University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2005
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

Deborah Shepard is the author of Reframing Women: A History of New Zealand Film.

Read an Excerpt

Between the Lives

Partners in Art

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By Deborah Shepard

Auckland University Press

Copyright © 2005 The contributors
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-699-8

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CHAPTER 1

Portrait of a Marriage

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Toss & Edith Woollaston

JILL TREVELYAN

You've had one good thing in your favour in your struggle – you picked the right wife! – W. H. ALLEN TO TOSS WOOLLASTON, 1979

Today, toss Woollaston is regarded as one of New Zealand's most significant twentieth-century artists. Like his younger contemporary Colin McCahon, with whom he was often linked, Toss was an early exponent of modern painting in New Zealand and went on to dominate the local art scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Like McCahon, he married an artist who became his life-long partner. Edith Woollaston, née Alexander, was a woman with multiple talents and a powerful creative instinct, and she never abandoned her own work in a wide range of media. From the time of her marriage in 1936, however, she put her husband and his art first. In 1967 Toss paid tribute to Edith in a letter to his dealer, Peter McLeavey. 'She has indeed been the right sort of wife for me,' he wrote, 'not the kind who would "promote" me in a business sort of way, but the kind who knew what was right for me to do though the whole world seemed against us. The fervour of her silent support has never failed us.'

Edith was thirty-one when she married; Toss twenty-six. They met in Dunedin in 1932, when Toss was an art student, but it wasn't until he returned for his first solo exhibition in 1936 that their friendship deepened. In his autobiography, Sage Tea, Toss gives a lyrical account of his courtship of Edith. When he called to see her, after sending a written proposal, his knock on the door 'was answered beyond my wildest expectations. Before I even had time to remove my overcoat she had swept me into a great, wordless embrace full of the authority of love. It felt like the beginning of life'. Their marriage on 20 August 1936 was the beginning of a long and loving partnership that ended only with Edith's death fifty years later.

In 1936, however, not everyone was so enthusiastic about the marriage. Toss's mother Charlotte wrote to Edith: 'You children seem to have captured a whole rainbow between you and I am rather wondering if you know what to do with it ... I hope you realise Toss's utter impracticableness before you marry him and the rather hopeless outlook it implies. The circle of shadow within the rainbow perhaps. I hope not.'

Charlotte Woollaston was not alone in her doubts. Among Toss and Edith's friends, there was general concern: how was Toss, the impecunious artist, to support a wife? He'd had to borrow thirty shillings for a marriage licence. Edith was delighted with the landscape painting he gave her in lieu of an engagement ring, but she had led a sheltered middle-class life in Dunedin – how would she adapt to Toss's austere existence at Mapua, in rural Nelson? Some, at least, were soon to have their minds set at rest. Woollaston's friend and mentor, the Christchurch poet Ursula Bethell, met Edith for the first time a month after the wedding, and was impressed with her maturity and strength of character. 'Edith – she is not a girl, she is a woman; a developed person,' she wrote to Rodney Kennedy, a close friend of Toss and Edith. 'She will need all the character she's got in the life that's coming.'

At twenty-six Toss was a strong-willed young man, romantic, religious and unconventional in his thinking. His artistic ambitions had incurred his parents' disapproval: 'Artists always starve,' his mother warned him. Toss had simply gone his own independent way, moving to Nelson where he could live cheaply as a part-time orchard worker and concentrate on his art. His rapid development during the mid-1930s owed a great deal to his fortuitous meeting with the artist Flora Scales in 1934. Scales had recently returned to Nelson after studying at the Hans Hofmann school of art in Munich, and her paintings and lecture notes gave Toss the intellectual framework he needed. Works such as Figures from Life (1936) show him to have been the most modernist painter at work in New Zealand.

Temperamentally, Edith had much in common with Toss. Like him, she was idealistic and intellectually curious, but she was also modest and somewhat reticent by nature, and as a young woman and a dutiful daughter had found it much more difficult to gain her independence. In the early 1920s she had enrolled at the Canterbury College School of Art and completed several terms there, the first step towards a career as an artist. The Woollaston Archive at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa includes two School of Art certificates of honour, presented to Edith Alexander for winning the 'free scholarship in the Annual Competition' in Elementary Art in 1923 and in Intermediate Art the following year. Edith flourished at the School of Art, but her study was disrupted by her mother's illness. Soon a pattern was established – every time she went away to study she was called back to help out at home. Friends felt that her parents took advantage of her sense of duty and her capacity for self-sacrifice.

Edith may have resigned herself to living at home to support her parents, but she was determined to retain at least some degree of independence. By the time Toss returned to Dunedin in the winter of 1936, she was working as 'Official Artist to the Bacteriological Department' at Otago University Medical School (a position briefly occupied by Anne Hamblett in the early 1940s). In this rather grand-sounding but poorly paid position, Edith was responsible for designing teaching aids – models, murals and diagrams. Her current project was a display on the flea, and for this she enlisted Toss's help on Saturday afternoons. He visited her at her parents' home, but as they worked together the conversation soon turned to more romantic subjects. Edith confided her dream: to pack all her belongings on to a donkey and make a long painting trip through Central Otago. She had got the idea from Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey.

In Sage Tea, Toss writes of Edith's 'protest against her fate' – her desire to break free from the frustrations of the Victorian role of spinster-daughter that kept her at home to see her parents through their old age. In this situation her marriage to Toss may have seemed to offer an escape, an opportunity to live a life in which art assumed a more central role. In reality, however, marriage very rarely presented women of Edith's generation with the ideal conditions in which to pursue an artistic career. The case of Anne Hamblett, who eventually ceased to paint after her marriage to Colin McCahon, is told elsewhere in this book. Edith, like Anne Hamblett, married a man with a keen artistic ambition. Toss had just had a reasonably successful exhibition; he was articulate and passionate about his work; and to the local cognoscenti he was a young artist to watch. Edith, by contrast, was an art student, a talented woman certainly, but one who was about to become a wife and eventually a mother. Friends and family took it for granted that she would support her husband in his ambitions and put his needs first. She took it for granted, too.

AFTER THEIR MARRIAGE IN 1936, the Woollastons settled at Mapua in the single-room mud-brick house that Toss had built on his employer's property in 1934. Here at least there was no rent or mortgage to pay, but life was primitive by today's standards, with no electricity or running water and only the most basic cooking and toilet facilities. Edith blossomed in the following years, however: friends commented on her robust health, and to Rodney Kennedy she 'had never been happier'. Edith's letters to Ursula Bethell provide glimpses of her early married life and show her eager adaptation to her new environment: 'I am rapidly becoming really farm-ey,' she confided after describing her experiments with bread- and cheese-making.

It was the decorative arts that most absorbed Edith in her new life. The simple house at Mapua was a spur and a challenge to her creative talents, and her letters to Bethell document many projects: making a linocut design to print curtain fabric; embroidering household linen; spinning, weaving, and sewing for herself and the family. A letter of April 1939, when Rodney Kennedy and Colin McCahon were working on nearby orchards, gives a picture of evenings at Mapua.

Toss usually finishes the evening work at eight, then we settle down – if Rodney and Colin don't appear for a brief visit – he to write and I to sew or weave. I have a very attractive piece on the loom right now – blue & green warp & grey weft – which I mean to make into tweed. If it is a success I shall do others & be quite ambitious & try to make enough for garments such as waistcoats (sleeveless cardigans) & perhaps skirts. I must try to spin my own 'weft' yarn.

The garden, too, exercised Edith, and the letters to Bethell are full of notes and sketches of her schemes for improvement.

Edith's letters reveal a considerable creative energy and a wide range of talents, but hers were the traditional feminine pursuits, and in the 1930s the decorative arts rated a poor second to the 'fine' arts of painting and sculpture. (Indeed they still do today, despite the attempts of feminist art historians to reclaim the status of 'women's work'.) Edith inevitably absorbed the artistic hierarchies of her day. Twenty years later she would regret that her creative energies had been 'always sidetracking into some craft or other'.

For Toss, life at Mapua continued much as it had in the years prior to his marriage: in autumn he worked full time in the orchards, and for the rest of the year he eked out a subsistence wage with casual work. Now, however, he had a female companion and soul-mate to support his work and maintain his home. He also benefited from having a new and willing model, and paintings like Portrait of Edith (1936) (plate 1) and drawings like Edith (c. 1942) rank among his finest works. In Sage Tea Toss vividly evokes the circumstances surrounding the production of these works, and provides an insight into his approach to his subject: 'I drew and drew Edith in the evenings, mostly asleep in her chair after the rigours of our primitive days. It didn't matter that she was asleep, I had no concern with the animation of expression that requires wakefulness, wanted to paint no smiles or flashing looks, only the planes and volumes of the object ...'.

Toss and Edith were willing to accept a standard of living that many would have considered substandard so that there would be at least some time for painting. They took pride in their self-sufficient way of life, based on the produce from an extensive vegetable garden. But inevitably there was criticism, especially of Toss. To outsiders it seemed odd, and even immoral, that a man – the family breadwinner – should prefer the pursuit of art to earning a living in the conventional manner. One of Toss's employers complained about him: his sin was 'sitting on the veranda painting pictures while the scrub grew on the farm'.

The Woollastons shrugged off such criticism as best they could, but for Toss the situation was an uneasy one. His letters of the period reveal guilt about his supposed inability to support his family, and conflict about the apparently contradictory roles of artist and provider. Initially, the Woollastons had considered they might not have children, for economic reasons, but they both had a strong desire for a family, and their first child was born in 1937. This sparked a period of self-doubt for Toss, and his religious intensity – he had recently joined the Oxford Group – served only to heighten his anxiety. To Ursula Bethell he wrote:

Painting & all else is practically put by. I have to be willing to surrender my painting & pictures ... The spirit of acceptance and not rebellion is what is given, the spirit of petulance & self-pity is taken away, even when I'm very tired, so long as I seek Christ's spirit in all things. I have a quiet time as a grouper once a day ... And in a recent quiet time was given a piece of definite preparation for this, in the shape of preoccupation with the sentence 'He that will not support his own family denies the faith, & is worse than an infidel.'

Art was an unusual preoccupation for a man in 1930s New Zealand, especially in a rural district. And there was no formal infrastructure of support for the arts: no Arts Council grants or subsidies. In such a climate an artist, especially an unpopular modern painter, required extraordinary determination and self-belief to survive. He or she also needed a network of 'believers' who would support their work without reservation. For Toss, up until the late 1950s, the circle was small: Rodney Kennedy, Ursula Bethell, Charles Brasch, Ron O'Reilly and one or two others. But his greatest source of support and encouragement was always Edith. She went out of her way to allow Toss time to paint, even though it often meant inconvenience to herself. Her letter to Ursula Bethell, when Bethell had proposed a painting scholarship for Toss, is typical of her attitude: 'As for being apart from Toss I feel prepared to be separated the whole time if need be – I recognise that it's very much easier to sit here & write that than to put it into operation but I think that as long as I knew he was painting & happy I would manage to support it.'

The Woollastons were often apart during their fifty-year marriage, sometimes for months at a time. Edith travelled to Dunedin for family visits and the birth of her first two children, while for Toss there was seasonal work, painting expeditions and exhibition openings. They wrote daily during their separations, and their letters convey the strength of the bond between them. Edith was no passive partner to Toss; she could be just as strong-willed as he was, and she was often far more decisive. As Toss wrote in a letter to Peter McLeavey in 1967: 'she brought a great independence of her own to our partnership'. One of the refrains that runs throughout Toss's letters is his emotional dependence upon Edith. More than once he describes her as the 'rock' in his life – its loyal and unchanging centre. 'Life without you would be intolerable,' he wrote to her in 1953. 'I know one has no right to be so dependent on another human being as I am on you. But there it is ...'

When Charles Brasch visited Mapua in 1938, he noted that it took Toss and Edith 'most of their days merely to live'. Toss 'often had no more than one whole day a week for painting, but he drew in spare moments; his time seemed well organised'. But if Toss only had one day a week for painting, what time did Edith have? The early letters to Bethell suggest that most of her 'spare' time was occupied with the practical arts associated with feeding and clothing her family and improving her surroundings. Even so, she continued to draw and paint in the early years of her marriage. Edith's correspondence with her father, Joseph Alexander, from the early 1920s until well into her married life, contains many references to painting. Even in 1944, he was writing to her: 'Your intentions in the matter of painting appear (to me) to be in the right direction and order ... I do hope you will find time & energy to do good work ... besides the work of looking after the family.' This letter suggests a seriousness of purpose in Edith's attitude to art which must have been difficult to sustain alongside the demands of a growing family. By the end of 1944, Toss and Edith had four children, all under the age of eight: Joe, born in 1937; Paul, 1940; Anna, 1942; and Philip, 1944. And they were still living in the same mud-brick house. It would be their home until 1950.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Between the Lives by Deborah Shepard. Copyright © 2005 The contributors. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Introduction Deborah Shepard,
Portrait of a Marriage: Toss & Edith Woollaston Jill Trevelyan,
'I did not want to be Mrs Colin': Anne & Colin McCahon Linda Tyler,
'Sinfonia Domestica': Mary Stanley & Kendrick Smithyman Peter Simpson,
Captured in Words and Paint: The life together of Frances Hodgkins & D. K. Richmond Joanne Drayton,
Shadow Play: The film-making partnership of Rudall & Ramai Hayward Deborah Shepard,
'Nobody would have given tuppence for our chances': James K. Baxter & J. C. Sturm Paul Millar,
Pictures and Politics: Pat & Gil Hanly Claudia Bell,
'My way is to be with you': Meg & Alistair Te Ariki Campbell Joy MacKenzie,
Symbiosis: Sylvia & Peter Siddell Catherine Lane West-Newman,
Notes,
Index,