ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
aesthetic sensibility in engaging with artworks, and must have influence today in
how we engage with artworks. This is why Dutton’s work provides a powerful
new answer to the forgery paradox in art theory.
Originality and Conveying “New Zealandism”
So how can navigating evolutionary heritage back into pre-history and beyond
bring home informational nuggets useful for art discussion today? Evolutionary
theory and neuroscience can provide reasons behind trends in art appreciation, and
when coupled with theory of mind, evolutionary aesthetics can supply a fresh way
of interpreting artists’ popularity.
Rita Angus was born in 1908, and, along with Toss Woollaston and Colin
McCahon over the period of around half a century, became one of the principal
architects of a distinctive branch of paintings that capture, as Keith writes, concepts that can be described loosely as “New Zealandism” (2007, 159). Keith’s concept was introduced with Gordon H. Brown in An Introduction to New Zealand
Painting 1827–1967 (1969), one of the most influential and criticized works in
New Zealand art history. Keith and Brown argued that New Zealand painting
should be viewed as a quest for national identity adjacent to other nations’ artistic
identities, shaped especially in the middle-20th Century by the “big three” of Angus, Woollaston and McCahon. This narrative has been disputed strongly in subsequent years on the history of 19th-Century landscapes of Aotearoa (the name for
New Zealand in te reo Maori, I will use both names throughout) (Pound 1983) and
questions over the role certain artists should be seen as having played in creating a
New Zealandism (e.g. Dunn and Vuletic (1972), Wilson (1976), Leech (1981),
Panoho (1992) Mané-Wheoki (1995)). The latter will come in handy later in discussion about constructs shaping concepts like New Zealandism, but, for now, I
will focus on Angus and McCahon, for reasons of space, and foremost because
they were, and still are, leading figures in what the general public and critics consider New Zealandism in painting, regardless of the angle one analyzes New Zealandism from.
A large proportion of Angus’s work consisted of self-portraits which reveal her
feminist ideals and sympathies, most popularly her depiction of herself in Rutu
under a traditional Christian form, resembling images of the Virgin Mary in Mariolatry. However, her depictions of Aotearoa landscapes, influenced by cubism and
the English artist Christopher Perkins, are often seen as her greatest contribution.
In her landscapes, Angus captures Aotearoa’s harsh light, the pasteurized land of
New Zealand after mass immigration, and the shades and colours of Aotearoa’s
landscapes under its harsh light. Keith describes the style of Angus’s depictions as
“a unique take on Surrealism” (2007, 161), and Anne Kirker describes this style as
being “characterized by...individual ordering[s] of composi ѥ