Art work as relevant today as ever

I’ve always had a soft spot for this little painting. Unassuming in its outlook, the work has heroic ambitions, tackling monumental themes of human rights and social justice as relevant today as they were in 1945 when the painting was created.

Millions of Europeans had been exiled from their homelands as a result of the geopolitical conditions at the end of World War II, when Hildegarde Read painted Displaced Person. Moved by such heartbreaking circumstances, Reade elicits empathy for the plight of European refugees by drawing an analogy to the story of the Virgin Mary and Joseph, who fled Egypt to avoid persecution.

Displaced Person recalls historical depictions of the Holy Family in its use of colour. Marian blue drapery at the figure’s ankles recalls the Virgin Mary’s blue robes, and the figure’s sienna halo alludes to bole clay, traditionally applied beneath gold leaf halos in early religious iconography.

What is also interesting about this painting is the way Read weaves disparate episodes of painting history together. In the 1940s in Aotearoa, many painters were still deeply committed to the ideas of nineteenth-century French artist Paul Cézanne, whose ideas were championed by painters in Read’s circle such as John Weeks, Louise Henderson, and her tutor, Ida Eise.

In its distorted perspective, the work shows Read’s interest in Cézanne’s ideas. Read also seems to have been looking at the paintings of Piero della Francesca as her niche-like background is a reminder of the church apses or spaces seen in the work of this fifteenth-century artist. Two major painting influences on Read’s work, four centuries apart.

We don’t know much about Read, save that she was born Hildegarde Dixon in Stratford, Taranaki, and died in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. Reade studied at Elam School of Fine Arts in the late 1920s, and we can probably also assume she was a committed Christian given her charitable affiliations with World Vision and the Leprosy Mission New Zealand.

Read’s generosity saw her donate her estate to the organisations listed here, suggesting she was clearly passionate about the future of the environment and about social justice.

A few weeks ago, Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust was fortunate to acquire a number of drawings by Read produced between the late 1920s and 1940s. The twenty life studies are beautifully fluid and show an intelligent understanding of the human form. A number of them show Read’s analytical exercises in simplification of the human form to cylindrical shapes like those of the figure in the painting and, in that sense, are vital to understanding what Read was aiming to achieve in Displaced Person. Both Della Francesca and Cézanne tended to reduce figures to geometric shapes as a way of creating order and structure in a painting.

There is a small drawing and painting of Read’s held in the Auckland Art Gallery collection, but we know of very few elsewhere. This work is currently on display at MTG Hawkes Bay, Tai Ahuriri, in the museum’s exhibition The Light Shone Clear: HISTORY / PERSPECTIVES / ART. Do come and see it for yourself.

Published in the Hawke’s Bay Today newspaper 27 July 2024 and written by Toni MacKinnon, Art Curator at MTG Hawke’s Bay.

Image: 

Displaced Person, about 1945

Hildegarde Egmont Read (b.1892 d.1988)

oil on board

432 x 312mm

gifted by anonymous

Reproduced with the kind permission of the beneficiaries of the estate of Hildegarde Read, specifically World Vision New Zealand, Leprosy Mission New Zealand, Waipahihi Botanical Society, Royal New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand, SAFE for Animals, and Bushy Park Trust

Collection of Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust, Ruawharo Tā-ū-rangi, 2012/45

29 July 2024

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