Mina Arndt – Forgotten New Zealand Painter

Press, Volume C, Issue 29633, 2 October 1961, Page 8

Mina Arndt - Forgotten New Zealand Painter

Mina Arndt, an exhibition of whose paintings and drawings is on show at the McDougall Art Gallery, is a New Zealand painter whose name has been almost forgotten. although examples of her work are in the collections of the galleries at Auckland, Dunedin, and Wellington. This exhibition, culled by the director of the National Art Gallery (Mr S. B. Maclennan) from a large retrospective exhibition of Mina Arndt’s work given by the Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington a few months ago, was sent on tour by the Auckland City Art Gallery. Hermina Arndt was born near Queenstown in 1885. She left New Zealand for Europe in the early 1900’s, going first to London, where she studied with Frank Brar.gwyn and others. Later she went to Berlin, where she came under the tuition of Lovis Corinth, the pioneer German expressionist painter She spent some time in Paris before returning to New Zealand on the outbreak of the First World War. After her marriage to Mr L. Mannoy she went to live in Motueka, where she continued to paint until her death in 1928. Unfortunately, none of the 32 works in the exhibition are dated so it is impossible to gain any idea of the sequence of her development, but the general impression is of a talent which never really flowered. It might have done so had she stayed in Europe; the New Zealand art world in the second and third decades of this century was impossibly provincial for a serious painter—as Frances Hodgkins found. Now the situation has changed and going to Europe is simply running away in an attempt to evade the problem of environment and nationality which the New Zealand painter must face Mina Arndt’s charcoal drawings are simply the work of a talented student, whose own personality is subordinated to an attempt to emulate the broad style of Brangwyn. In her oil paintings there are some passages where the paint is handled with understanding but otherwise they lack distinction.

However, her pastels—especially in the softly luminous “Spring” show that Mina Arndt had a considerable gift as a colourist. But even in these apparently late works there is little or no concern for compositional values. Had she lived to become acquainted with the discoveries of the Cubists we might have had another

woman painter to rank with Frances Hodgkina, but. as it

is, one feels • that there was more poetry in Mina Arndt than she expressed in her work. Lascaux Paintings A more interesting show may be seen next door, at the Canterbury Museum, where another of the Auckland City Art Gallery’s travelling exhibitions is on show. It comprises several full-size silk screen reproductions of late Stone Age paintings from the Lascaux caves in southwestern France. These 20,000-year-old paintings, vary in degree ot naturalism, but all leave one staggered by their energy and beauty of line. The reproductions are spaciously hung and the gallery also contains examples of prehistoric bone carving and engraving, which reinforce the impression gained from the paintings. Maori Rock Drawings In conjunction with this exhibition, a number of tracings of Maori rock drawings in South Canterbury, made by Anthony Fomison, are on show at the Several Arts, a little gallery in north Colombo street (just beyond Victoria square), established by an enterprising and courageous group of young painters and sculptors. Mr Fomison, who is himself well known as a painter, is engaged on a survey of all the Maori rock drawings in Canterbury with the backing of the National Historic Places Trust. His tracings on transparent plastic film are by no means as immediately impressive as the glamourised copies made some years ago-by Theo Schoon—reproductions of which can be seen at the museum—but the amazing rhythm which Mr Schoon made explicit is still present in the designs. Mr Fomison suggests that these drawings date from a period before Maori carving bad developed. On purely aesthetic grounds, this seems likely, for these designs have a grace and elegance of line that is found in the art of other Polynesian peoples but is absent from later Maori art, in which strength and intensity are dominant -J.NK