Rita Angus 'Before the Demolition'
Jill Trevelyan
Essays
Posted on 5 August 2025
Bathed in light, a pink house beams out from the picture, a symbol of warmth and comfort. It could be an image from a child’s storybook, but it is deftly constructed – a series of crisp geometric forms, set against a vivid cerulean sky. The title seems at odds with the image. Before the Demolition – there is no hint in this cheerful painting of the destruction to come.
Like so much of Rita Angus’s art, this image of houses in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon is intensely personal. Angus settled in this neighbourhood early in 1956, attracted by its narrow winding streets and historic nineteenth-century homes. Her cottage at 194A Sydney Street West was a short walk from the city centre, and adjacent to one of her favourite places in the capital, the Bolton Street cemetery. Quiet and secluded, it became her sanctuary.
In September 1965, Angus’s tranquillity was shattered when she learnt that many neighbouring homes were slated for demolition to accommodate the new Wellington motorway. While her cottage was spared, her street would be re-routed and partially destroyed, and she feared that the motorway would eventually reach her boundary.
As residents lobbied the council and activists took to the streets, Angus began her own project of documentation. Just weeks later she told her sister Jean Jones, ‘Most of my new work is of subjects around here (if & before the demolition, things are in the balance at present) …’(1) Initially, Angus depicted the buildings tagged for demolition; later she turned her attention to Bolton Street cemetery, recording the 19th century tombstones as they were uprooted and temporarily stockpiled down the road. The project became an obsession, dominating the final years of her life.
Before the Demolition is almost certainly the work shown at Wellington’s Centre Gallery in March 1967 in the exhibition, Rita, Jean and Tim Angus, priced at 50 guineas.(2) A second work of the same title was exhibited ‘NFS’ – it had already sold to Angus’s friend and supporter, the Boston-based New Zealand sexologist John Money, and is now in the Eastern Southland Gallery. A third painting, View from Tinakori Road (1966-67), was purchased by the poet, editor and patron Charles Brasch, and gifted to the Hocken Library in 1973.
This oil was acquired by the Wellington collectors Tim and Sherrah Francis, who befriended Angus in the late 1960s and owned a number of her paintings. Interviewed in 2011, Tim Francis recalled a conversation in her studio. ‘[Rita] told us how she had been impressed by the pre-Renaissance works she had seen in London and how she used the same technique of layering colours … so that the work would glow from within’.3 It’s an apt description of Before the Demolition – a radiant painting, a poetic historical document, and a charming example of Angus’s mature style.
