The ‘what ifs’ of dazzling New Zealand modernist painter Edith Collier

The paintings that Whanganui painter Edith Collier created in England 100 years ago remain to this day, utterly fresh. At that time, there was no one in Aotearoa New Zealand painting with such modernist verve. 

“I am certain your fate will bring you back to England as mine did,” wrote our most celebrated artist of the period, Frances Hogkins to Collier, after she had returned home in 1921.

Yet, that was not to be. Which may help explain why it’s only in recent decades we have begun recognising Collier as one of the finest of our painters of the first half of the 20th century. 

Edith Collier’s career instead contains a series of fascinating ‘whats ifs’, notes writer and biographer Jill Trevelyan. 

What if Collier hadn’t had to return to New Zealand from England at the height of her burgeoning powers? What if she hadn’t been so shy of self promotion? So loyal to her family? And what if a conservative New Zealand society hadn’t dismissed her dynamic modernism so quickly, or had the wherewithal to support her?

Trevelyan is also co-curator of a new Collier exhibition that will reopen Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua 9 November. Collier also features in Julia Waite’s book and current exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki Modern Women: Flight of Time.

The Sarjeant looks after an extensive collection of Edith Collier’s work on behalf of a family trust who have instigated this book.

In fact, retrospectives of Collier’s work at the Sarjeant go back to 1955 (when astonishingly it's said Collier didn’t even attend her own opening).

There have been touring exhibitions, documentaries and a book by her biographer Joanne Drayton in 1999. Yet despite all this, it feels like Collier is an artist, at least outside Whanganui, who we are constantly in the process of rediscovering. 

Perhaps because following her work not being supported in New Zealand in the 1920s, it didn't become known to the modernists who were to follow in the ‘30s, like Rita Angus, Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston. She has come to our art history later. 

In 1912 Collier left for London to study art. She was in her 20s and after rejecting more classical art training there, came under the tutelage of two notable painters of the era who were greatly impressed by her: Margaret Preston (MacPherson) and Hodgkins.

Study with them led her to make memorable recordings of the fishing villages of St Ives in Cornwall and Bonmahon in County Waterford, Ireland.

Collier’s family believed in her talent, notes Trevelyan. They invested in her time in the UK for a sustained period, where she was extremely productive as a painter in return.

Yet Collier was also loyal to her family, and was persuaded to return home to Whanganui in 1921. The eldest of 10 children, Collier was to have 37 nephews and nieces, devoting much of her later adult life to the care of family.  

Then there was the cultural conservatism of the country she encountered when she returned. Even Frances Hodgkins, Trevelyan says, started to send back only her older, more conservative work to New Zealand as her work became bolder. 

A local art critic in the 1920s wrote of Collier’s modern painting that it “suffers from a slavish imitation of a prevailing fad.”

For her family this was understandably difficult. Famously Collier’s “disgusted” father was to burn a series of her nudes. Their modernist style was daring enough.

But a woman painting other women nude, may have been for Whanganui society then, still a step too far. This must have been for Edith Collier terribly demoralising.

As this new book shows, with generous attention to colour reproductions, Collier didn’t stop painting entirely. Her work was recognised everywhere from The Group painters in Canterbury to Charles Brasch in Landfall magazine. But the extent of her work wouldn’t have been recognised.

Memorable are landscapes and portraits completed working with kuia and the marae in Kawhia over 1927 and 1928; an episode which has led the Sarjeant recently to create a special new relationship with the coastal settlement, which is recorded in this book. 

Equally, Collier’s depictions of the landscape and people of Bonmahon in Ireland have led to a special connection and an exhibition of her work on the centenary of her time there in 2015.  

To picture Edith Collier’s life as some tragedy does her an injustice.

In conversation with Culture 101, Jill Trevalyan notes that many great artists don’t go on to long careers. 

"We are, simply put, not all built with the same temperament or set of concerns."

Collier’s family has repaid her care since the artist’s death in the way they have looked after her work. It is now carefully archived and looked after by the Sarjeant Gallery (with work also in the Te Papa national collection).

The Sarjeant’s new extension, which sees the gallery reopen in November, was an idea first hatched at a dinner celebrating the establishment of the Edith Collier Trust back in 1985.

Jill Trevelyan is the author of celebrated biographies of Rita Angus and art dealer Peter McLeavey, author of Toss Woolaston: A life in letters and as co-author of a book on the work of Robin White.