Jill Trevelyan won the Non Fiction Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2009 for this magnificent biography of one of New Zealand's leading 20th century artists. Now back in print, this revised edition brings the book up to date with new assessments of Angus and in the context of the Rita Angus exhibition to be held at Te Papa late in 2021. Rita Angus was a pioneer of modern painting during the 1930s and 1940s. More than 100 years after her birth, works such as Rutu (1951), Central Otago (1940), and Portrait of Betty Curnow (1941-1942) are national icons. While Angus is perhaps New Zealand's best-loved painter, the story of her life remained little known and poorly understood before this acclaimed and revelatory book. Jill Trevelyan traces Angus's life, from her childhood in Napier and Palmerston North to her death in Wellington in 1970. Drawing on a wealth of archives and letters, she brings to life Rita Angus the person: highly articulate and full of zest, intellectually curious and forthright in her attitudes and emotions, powerfully committed to her pacifist and feminist beliefs and dedicated, above all, to life as an artist. Rita Angus: An Artist's Life is generousl

Rita Angus: An Artist's Life.

"Fourteen writers and critics have produced ... criticism on every period of the artist's work" -- Jacket flap.

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.

The work of seminal, pioneering New Zealand modernist artist Rita Angus returns in triumph to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on 18 December 2021, in a major show of more than 100 works from throughout her career. This extensive catalogue includes all the works in the show and is anchored by a major essay by Angus's biographer, Jill Trevelyan, which gives deep insight into Angus's life and practice. Adrian Locke, the Royal Academy, London, curator who was helming the major Angus show there until pandemic intervened, contributes a significant text that puts her work into international context, assessing her alongside contemporary women artist peers such as Anita Malfatti, Amrita Sher-Gil, Irma Stern, Emily Carr, Frida Kahlo, Henrietta Shore and Georgia O'Keeffe. Short pieces by well-known New Zealanders, including Gaylene Preston, Jennifer Ward-Lealand, Fay Weldon and Robin White, who each examine the force of Angus's work and its impact on them, complete this rich celebration of Angus's life.