Private Collection, Auckland

REFERENCE Auckland Star Review, Volume LXXII, Issue 112, 14 May 1941, Page 12

This sensuous and mysterious work, painted in the dark tones of a nocturne, evokes the Neo-Classical style of French academicism. Created and exhibited during World War II when there was a shortage of artists’ materials, it inaugurates Lois White’s interest in painting female allegories which she often presented as varnished watercolours. These escapist compositions, created for her own enjoyment, were exhibited alongside her serious commentaries on political events, which were larger in size, and priced accordingly.

While Zephyrus, a Greek god and personification of the West wind, is always depicted as male, Lois White’s composition is dominated by a dreaming female. Her inspiration may have come from the poem of the same name, by Russian Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) where the night zephyr stirs the air, and streams through the ether while humanity sleeps. Over forty musical settings of the text of the Pushkin poem are known, and as an acclaimed soprano, Lois White may have been familiar with the sheet music of a composition for voice and piano.

A champion swimmer, White excelled at depicting the female form in motion, and often photographed and drew women at the beach. Her iconic Bathers (1949) shows a pair of young women with long hair in revealing swimming costumes, cavorting with seagulls and fish in the shallows. As in all academic art, these are ideal rather than real women. Te Papa has over 600 pencil drawings and sketches archived of her predominantly female nudes.

Lois White was well-versed in the icons of art history such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s The Birth of Venus (1879) which turns up the temperature from Botticelli’s neo-Platonic erotic frigidity (c.1485). Bouguereau’s goddess of love stands in perfect contrapposto with her weight on her right leg as she lifts long locks of curly red hair off her neck, slowly coming to consciousness, but eyes still closed. While only a three- quarter figure, the pose of White’s form evokes this earlier masterpiece of academicism. Unlike Bouguereau’s rosy, pink Venus, White gives her female flesh a greenish tinge, making it seem etiolated like a plant kept in the dark for too long. The long auburn tresses take on a life of their own, curling into koru shapes which echo the tentacle-like forms representing the movement of the wind. Three cartoonish five-pointed stars whizz by as this dreamer is lifted into the night sky.

Called the best painter in New Zealand by Archibald Fisher (1896-1959), the principal of the Elam School of Art where she studied and worked first as a part-time tutor and then as a full-time lecturer for 34 years, White’s work also found acclaim with critics. When it was exhibited at the Auckland Society of Arts Annual Exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery in 1941, Arthur Hipwell chose White’s work from amongst the 350 exhibitors for comment in the Auckland Star. Remarking that her contribution was a notable one, he praised her lively, creative imagination and strong, rhythmic designs, judging Night Zephyr (priced at 10 guineas) and Thunderstorm to be equally successful.

The 1940s were the most productive decade of Lois White’s career. As well as producing murals and political allegories related to the war, she explored the potential of the female nude to be idealised and thereby act as a cipher for concepts open to the viewer’s interpretation. This work belongs to a group of sinuous female bodies shown in rhythmic movement as representations of the elements and atmospheric forces: fire, wind, rain and wild waves.
LINDA TYLER

No.148 Summer Exhibition, Auckland Society of Arts, Auckland, 1941
Revisiting Modernism Group Exhibition, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, 2023