The Cursive Line - Adele Younghusband

16 August - 30 November 2008

16 August - 30 November 2008

Conceived and curated by Scott Pothan, toured by the Whangarei Art Museum

Young woman and a cat, oil on card, 1941, 545 x 398 mm, Whangarei Art Museum Collection.

‘I never met her, but in my imagination she looms large, for she represents something important. Like Robin Hyde and Eileen Duggan she was greatly gifted…During a fairly short creative life she produced a number of images which to me give her immortality. They have a power, strength and vigour which mark them as icons of her time, of our land in the 1930s and 1940s…’

The Cursive Line: Adele Younghusband, is an exhibition of more than 70 works curated and toured by Whangarei Art Museum, gives insights into the life and work of an artist who ‘broke the mould for women artists of her generation’.

Initially making a living as a photographer, Adele Younghusband, who was born in 1878 on a Waikato farm, maintained a painting practise most of her life.

Divorced and with bobbed hair, she attracted notice in Northland where she operated her photographic businesses. After travelling to Australia to study art with George Bell, she produced linocuts and paintings which captured the spirit of Art Deco movement with their curving rhythms and bright colours.

The complex body of work on view includes themes from Maori mythology, feminist concerns, religious symbolism, allegory and modern life depicted in styles which range from cubism through to symbolist surrealism and conventional landscape. ‘She was able to synthesise the manifestos of modernism and Art Deco sensibility’, melding these influences into her own personal style, and placing herself firmly in New Zealand art history.

Acknowledgements

• Installation Design Carolyn Duxbury – Woods
• Fletcher Trust Collection
• The NeWDowse
• Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
• Hocken Library Uare Taoka O Hakena
• Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
• Trust Waikato
• Ferner Gallery
• Liberal Catholic Church/Theosophy Society, Hamilton
• And private collections nationally.