Modern Women: Flight of Time

Curated by Julia Waite.

"Modern Women: Flight of Time highlights the leading role women artists have played in shaping the development of modern art in Aotearoa New Zealand through seizing control of their own representation.

Spanning a period of roughly 50 years, from 1920 to 1970, the exhibition mixes paintings, prints, sculptures, and textiles from public and private collections across Aotearoa New Zealand, to reveal new connections between artists, along with previously hidden themes, while revelling in the theatre of modern art.

While presenting key works by such iconic figures as Rita Angus, Frances Hodgkins, and A Lois White, the exhibition also aims to celebrate the significant yet often overlooked contributions of lesser known figures, including June Black, Flora Scales, and Pauline Yearbury, one of the first Māori graduates of the Elam School of Fine Arts. Through their works, the exhibition uncovers how these women navigated and transformed the cultural and political landscape of their time, offering new insights into themes of storytelling, identity, and belonging." - https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/exhibition/modern-women-flight-of-time

The full list of artists included in the exhibition are: Eileen Agar, Rita Angus, Mina Arndt, Tanya Ashken, June Black, Jenny Campbell, Edith Collier, Alison Duff, Elizabeth Ellis, Jacqueline Fahey, Ivy Fife, Natalia Goncharova, Anne Hamblett, Mere Harrison Lodge, Rhona Haszard, Barbara Hepworth, Avis Higgs, Frances Hodgkins, Gwen Knight, Laura Knight, Winifred Knights, Doris Lusk, Molly Macalister, Ngaio Marsh, Katerina Mataira, Eileen Mayo, Juliet Peter, Margot Philips, Alison Pickmere, Anne Estelle Rice, Kittie Roberts, Flora Scales, Maud Sherwood, May Smith, Olivia Spencer Bower, Helen Stewart, Teuane Tibbo, Ilse von Randow, Florence Weir (Julia Holderness), A. Lois White, Mary Wirepa, Pauline Yearbury, Adele Younghusband and Beth Zanders.

‘Flora Scales’ by Barbara de Lange and Tamara Rakich, Modern Women: Flight of Time publication (ed. Julia Waite, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand, 2024) pp 171-172, 253-254:
The thing is to forget you’ve been influenced. I didn’t want to be like anybody.
I wanted to be a little uncommon, unusual.¹

Flora Scales (1887–1985) was 41 years old when she travelled to Europe from New Zealand, desperate to forge a life for herself as an artist. It was 1928, and it was to Europe that artists were flocking for all things modern.

Born into a wealthy family in Wellington, Scales was afforded certain advantages that allowed her to pursue a life as an artist. She had travelled before, in 1908, to England, where she attended William Frank Calderon’s School of Animal Painting for four years. This time, 20 years later, Scales organised her own journey and took care of her own finances. She had previously been shackled to her mother and sister – left in a precarious financial state after her father’s scandalous affair and her parents’ subsequent divorce – but was freed by an inheritance on her father’s death. Now she desired to change and rebuild her life. World War I had unsettled the social and political cornerstones of the Edwardian era and her own place in it. Scales sought liberation and self- sufficiency, an independence that aligned her with the modernists who demanded autonomy for both the artist and the work of art.

Basing herself initially in Paris, Scales spent summers in the South of France in the early 1930s, where she painted outdoors with the likes of Gwen Knight, Frances Hodgkins and Maude and George Burge. These connections opened a door. Having met Edmund Daniel Kinzinger in St Tropez, Scales travelled to Munich to study under him at the avant-garde Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art. There, during the freezing winter of 1932, as Hitler was negotiating his rise to power, she learnt to ‘do away with linear perspective’.² This revelation was fundamental in Scales’ adoption of modernist philosophy in her practice; it symbolised the iconoclastic spirit of the modernists and her own desire to break with tradition and find a new, more open way to live and work.

By 1933 Scales was back in New Zealand, as a companion to her elderly mother in Nelson. She used the time to send paintings she had completed in Munich to exhibitions in Nelson, Wellington and Christchurch. The new ideas evident in Scales’ paintings presented a challenge to various critics and were met with some resistance. Other observers, while still apparently bewildered, commented positively on her use of colour and composition.

In 1934, a young Toss Woollaston sought to connect with Scales in the hopes she might agree to discuss with him the modernist theories she had studied in Europe. Over the course of four informal conversations, Woollaston seized on the concept of ‘a created or spiritual third dimension’³ as being particularly relevant to a change of direction in his own practice. He promoted Scales’ art enthusiastically and shared his new understanding of modernist principles with artists such as Colin McCahon and Rodney Kennedy.

In 1935, determined to pick up where she had left off, Scales returned to France where she studied under Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson in Paris and continued painting in the south. Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez, Southern France [BC021], 1939,⁴ is one of a series of three known paintings by Scales of the French town from this vantage point. To achieve her illusory interpretation of an identifiable landscape, Scales has enlivened the flat surface with an arrangement of contrasting shape and colour. Composition has been worked out carefully, step by deeply considered step, each brushstroke dependent on the next. The painter suggests a shallow, though convincing, depth while maintaining the integrity of her two-dimensional canvas. A sense of completeness, of enclosed calm and harmony, arises from the connections between the landmarks of nature and architecture and the distribution of colour across the surface. In all, Scales’ understanding of scale and proportion enables the distillation of a sprawling scene within her small canvas.

In 1940, Scales’ life in France was upended by war. As a British passport holder, she was arrested by French police and interned in France for almost two years. During her imprisonment, many of the artworks she had stored in Paris were plundered by the Nazis; their fate remains unknown.

Following the war, and completely free from family duties after her mother’s death in 1948, Scales spent the 1950s and 1960s working between England and France. In the early 1950s she painted Port of Mousehole at Sunset [BC026]. Here, Scales’ stringent simplification of form and reduction of content intensifies the poetry and symbolism of her vision. In this ethereal painting all is mysterious. The horizontal bands of finely modulated colour and the jagged horizon and shoreline hint at an undefinable space, just as the dislocated perpendicular of the sun suggests volume. Scales has absorbed the rules and theories she studied so assiduously in the 1930s and moved towards an abstraction uniquely her own.

In 1975, McCahon curated the only solo exhibition of Scales’ work during her lifetime, Helen F. V. Scales, at Auckland City Art Gallery. The exhibition of 43 works then travelled to New Plymouth, Whanganui and Wellington. Reviews of the show by influential male critics were freighted with biographical information and made much of Scales’ influence on Woollaston 41 years earlier. Their tone was frequently patronising, with the use of belittling language such as ‘appealing’ and ‘charming in an unimportant sort of way’.

In late 1976, Scales travelled for the last time to France and stayed for four months. Back in New Zealand she painted nearby landscapes, her back garden, portraits, still-life studies. She died in Rotorua Hospital in 1985.

Although we have documents and ephemera to piece together a timeline of Scales’ life, of her internal, emotional response we know precious little. We are left only to imagine. Given the vicissitudes of her life, one might suppose that she often came close to giving up in despair. But perhaps not. Scales said once, ‘you must hold on and hang on absolutely’,⁵ and she did hold on, driven always to paint.

¹ Marjorie de Lange, Notebooks recording conversations with Flora Scales, 1982–83, private collection, Auckland.
² As above.
³ Toss Woollaston, letter to Rodney Kennedy, written from Mapua, 1934, RC2015/5/7/2841, Flora Scales artist file, E H McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
⁴ The work is in the Fletcher Trust Collection, where it is known as Town by the Water (Saint-Tropez) and dated circa 1929: https://fletchercollection. org.nz/artworks/town-by-the-water- saint-tropez (accessed January 2024).
⁵ De Lange, Notebooks recording conversations.