Frances Hodgkins was the outstanding artist of her generation, with a professional life that spanned 56 years and earned her a secure place among the English avant-garde of the 1930s and 1940s: the first New Zealand-born artist to achieve such stature.
Edith Collier exhibited at the Women’s International Art Club show in 1920, and in the same year joined Frances Hodgkins’s classes at St Ives. There she began producing the most comprehensively modern and experimental work of her career.
Prolific and multi-talented, Joanna Paul was one of the most gifted artists of her generation. Intensely responsive to the world around her, she depicted her surroundings, constantly reworking the conventions of drawing and watercolour painting. Paul also documented her environment in photographs and experimental short films, and published poetry, criticism and non-fiction.
Although ‘Gods’ featured in the 1940 National Centennial Exhibition of New Zealand Art in Wellington, and other work is held in public and numerous private collections, her contribution to Canterbury art was not recognised until she was included in the 1993 exhibition, White Camellias.
Although it is for her Māori portraits that she is best known, critics have generally claimed that Ida Carey’s finest work was done in the 1920s and 1930s, and that much of her later work contains technical deficiencies, especially in her use of colour. This perhaps explains why she has been ignored in New Zealand art history literature. However, her significance both as an artist with great popular appeal and as a major contributor to the development of fine arts in Waikato cannot be denied.
As a working artist, Elizabeth Wallwork established a career in portraiture mainly for private clients. She was described as one of the foremost exponents of pastel portraiture in New Zealand. She also painted in oil: miniatures and portraits of women, children and, as her reputation grew, many prominent Christchurch people. She painted and exhibited landscapes, and in later life submitted impressionistic flower paintings to the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1966 the first retrospective exhibition of Lusk’s work took place at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and was well received. Half of the paintings on display were owned by public institutions, the most prominent of which were the Auckland City Art Gallery and the Hocken Library. The same year Lusk was appointed tutor in drawing at the University of Canterbury. As a teacher she encouraged and supported a subsequent generation of New Zealand artists.
Perhaps best remembered for her portrait paintings, Copeland had a particular interest in Māori subjects. In 1937 the Auckland Star art critic described her study of a girl, ‘Rita Hikiora’, as ‘one of the few portrait studies worthy of attention’ at the time. Another well-known work, ‘Marie’, was a delicate and sentimental portrait of a young Māori girl, who ‘looks tremulously out on life’.
Flora Landells was a leading Western Australian artist and art teacher. She made a substantial contribution to the artistic life of the nation as an exhibitor for some seventy years, as a teacher for over forty years, and, with her husband, as the pioneer in studio pottery in Western Australia.
Alma Woodsey Thomas was the first Black woman to have a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was also the first Black woman to have work acquired by the White House.