The ‘Almost Legendary Wanganui Artist’. That description, by the then-director of the National Art Gallery Stewart MacLennan, was made in a 1956 review of one of Edith Collier’s rare forays into the realm of the more usual spaces in which we encounter art: a touring exhibition.
From the early 1920s, on her return to Aotearoa after nearly a decade in Europe, until her passing in 1964 Collier was a diffident painter and exhibitor, rarely doing much of either. Her work was seen in passing, discussed by other artists intermittently, or pointed to occasionally by art-world insiders such as Charles Brasch, who tracked Collier down in 1960 to persuade her to be the subject of a feature in Landfall magazine.
Collier was either reticent of or indifferent to the more usual path of the hustling artist searching for an audience and – for the anointed few – acclaim. Perhaps she was timid, shy or even afraid to fully commit to the life of the artist as framed in 1921 by her teacher and mentor Frances Hodgkins: ‘… don’t mind the buffets or knocks. They are inseparable from the artist’s life. It’s an uphill struggle all the way & it’s only the stout hearted who win through.’
The artist that emerges in this affecting account may not have been sufficiently ‘stout hearted’ to engage with the rough and tumble of the art game, but that does not mean she wasn’t an artist of talent and, at times, searching observation. Her work is leavened with a quiet introspection. In particular, the best of her portraits such as The Pouting Girl (1920) or Girl in Sunshine (1915) reveal that Collier made good on her pact to explore the conceptual building blocks European modernism in the early 20th century. Figurative artists were responding to the challenge of the newly minted abstraction as articulated by the French painter Maurice Denis: ‘Remember that a picture – before it becomes a battle-horse, a nude woman or any sort of anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered by colours arranged in a certain order.’
Read the full review by Hamish Coney at the Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books here.
