Helen Stewart | Another Look: Portraits and Still Life

'Another Look' places a long overdue spotlight on one of New Zealand's most accomplished and still under recognised modern painters: Helen Stewart.

Arguably one of the most accomplished internationally trained artists of her generation, Stewart built a remarkable career from an exceptional fusion of discipline, daring, experience, and artistic fellowship. To recount her training is to name drop the who's- who of the art world of her time. Her years in Europe and Australia placed her among a vibrant circle of painters, absorbing and exchanging ideas in studios. In Académie L'hote in Montmartre, she was surrounded by formidable contemporaries such as Grace Crowley, Dorrit Black, Tamara de Lempicka, and Dora Maar,  and yet she forged a voice that was entirely her own. She moved to Australia in 1930s where she was a key contributor to the Contemporary Group in Australia: missing her off this list for women artists is like forgetting Virginia Woolf in the Bloomsbury group. Her portraits and still-lifes are not just studies of form, but carefully considered reflections of her world, alive with energy, intelligence, and structure. These are paintings that reward the viewer the longer they look. 

In 1928 The Dominion described her, " boldness and singularly successful handling of her colour schemes."  Stewart has similarities with Frances Hodgkin's still-lifes both in composition and colour.  The depicted table is often angled to heighten its reflection of the 2D canvas and common jug motifs with colour that reoccurs to keep the viewer's eye. The use of blocks of textured colour and line are both structural and compositional plays. Her still-life works were sometimes self-portraits, often including pots of paint brushes, beloved red shoes, the lemon of her favourite 'lemon yellow" and her adoration for fabrics. Her diaries lament her fondness for shopping for clothes and fabrics, and her need for more baubles (money) and yet, she did not create art for commercial purposes as Stewart's was considered too radical by Women's Weekly in 1935 for the "average person" to live with.  She was the sensational darling of the avant-garde art world during the 1930s in her ability to make domestics objects into daring compositions and her painting led reviews as one of the most "unconventional" of the Contemporary Group in Australia. 

In 1932 Stewart wrote, "the (artist) is not bound by what he sees, but by what he feels, and his job is to go beyond." Stewart's Portraits were the headliners of her 6 solo exhibitions. One of her best friends and former teachers, Thea Proctor, taught Stewart that the concentration on technique and tone was the "resource of the painter who has no ideas." Stewart had radical ideas; her 1934 show opened with an esteemed fellow artist who claimed Stewart's "the most advanced modern work yet seen here."  Stewart's portraits abounded, often focusing on fellow male and female characters travelling on boats to Europe or other artists, writers and friends. Importantly, she rarely named the sitter - it was about the body language, the filling of the frame and modernity defined. Her composition of background follows certain patterns: interesting vertical divisions, a textural element and a colour that pulls us in, but no one is left in doubt as to who takes up the frame. Her portraiture is a celebration of people, tension and stability, but also of texture, composition, and her colours: raspberry pinks, lemon yellows and deep burgundys.  

Co-curated with Dr Willow Sainsbury.