Modern Women: Flight of Time

‘A curated tour of Modern Women: Flight of Time’ by Lucinda Bennett, thespinoff.co.nz, 4 September 2024, https://thespinoff.co.nz/partner/04-09-2024/a-curated-tour-of-modern-women-flight-of-time?itm_source=spinoff-homepage-layouts&itm_medium=sponsored-1, “Flora Scales, Le Port de Mochool, au soleil couchant [Port of Mousehole at sunset] [BC026], 1951-53

There is no better word for this painting than “jewel-like”. Although small in scale, it glows upon the wall – a yellow orb caught in a ring of red, falling from a golden sky through a smudged horizon.

Flora Scales is an artist who benefited from the exposure and creative energy of leaving her home country – a move that enabled many women artists to break free from the constraints of feminine identity in their countries of origin – although not until she had unshackled herself from a complicated family life at the age of 41. In Europe, she learned to paint outdoors, connected with fellow New Zealand expatriates Frances Hodgkins and Gwen Knight, unlearned linear perspective, and unlocked a new way of working, eventually creating a language of abstraction that was entirely her own.”

‘Buying art? Why these NZ women artists are your best investment’ by Kim Knight, The New Zealand Herald, 24 August 2024, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/buying-art-why-these-nz-women-artists-are-your-best-investment/X3Y6MHESWZBXBP3WHACM4L23KY/, “Modern Women: Flight of Time opened last week. It includes the household names (Rita Angus, Frances Hodgkins, A. Lois White), but how many people could correctly identify a painting by Pauline Yearbury, Teuane Tibbo or Flora Scales?

They were, respectively, one of the first Mãori graduates of Elam School of Fine Arts, a self-taught Samoan painter "discovered" by Auckland's art scene in the 1960, and a New Zealand-born woman who was travelling on a British passport in 1940 when she was arrested in France, imprisoned for two years and lost most of her paintings to Nazi plunderers.

Male modernist painter Toss Woollaston was once asked how Flora Scales had influenced him: “Profoundly and instantly and constructively,” he replied.

So why is he more famous than she? Why is the highest recorded auction hammer price for a Woollaston $310,000 – and the equivalent for a Scales just $16,000?

Watch this space, says the experts. Public art institutions are actively back-buying to fill the female-shaped holes in their collections…

"I think that the revaluation of the market for women's art is only beginning," says [Art + Object's Ben] Plumbly.

"There is so much scope for price increases to bring them into line with their male counterparts."

Volume is an issue. The biographical essays in the book of the Modern Women exhibition reveal common threads - domesticity and, in some cases, early deaths stymied the output of many female artists.

"There's often a paucity of material," says Plumbly. "If you look at someone like Anne Hamblett, who was married to Colin McCahon, or another painter like Flora Scales, I'm sure we would see a really strong rise in the market for their works, but they are just so rare. It's impossible to build a market off the back of them."”