But heady student days gave way to the serious task of earning a living. In spite of her dramatic and literary successes, Ngaio had always seen herself making her living from art. ‘It had never occurred to me that I would attempt to be anything else in life but a serious painter: there was no question of looking upon art as a sort of obsessive hobby—it was everything.’ Her college years seemed to substantiate this dream. She practically paid her own way through art school with scholarships. She won the Pure Art Scholarship and Medal, worth £25, in 1917 and 1918, and two awards for figure composition in her final year. Art appeared to be her destiny. In order to establish her career, she exhibited with the CSA from 1919 to 1926, and also intermittently with the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts (NZAFA) in Wellington and art societies in Auckland and Dunedin. However, even though she was mentioned positively in reviews, her receipts were modest.
As students, Evelyn Page and Ngaio had shared a studio, along with Haszard, Edith Wall, Margaret Anderson and Viola Macmillan Brown, and after leaving art school they kept it on. By 1927, it had become an established sanctuary away from the strictures of Victorian upbringings and families. They were delighted, not just to escape there, but also to assert their professionalism as artists. ‘We rented a small room in Hereford Street,’ recalled Evelyn Page many years later.
It was a tiny room…then I think it was Edith Wall who discovered the old Press building…right in the middle of Cashel Street, was vacant…and it was a whole top floor…it was brick and you had to go up a fire escape to get into it and…there were great big square windows all round so the lighting wasn’t too bad but it was very cold so we had points put in and heaters, electric heaters. We couldn’t afford too many of those so we had kerosene heaters as well…we thought we’d…have exhibitions…and we did.
They whitewashed the walls, and ‘Ngaio thought instead of having tea and sandwiches’ at the opening, that they should have ‘a hock cup…or a claret cup’. So they pooled their money and bought a ‘vast basin’ of wine. They invited their friends, then ‘we thought, we’d better invite some possible buyers…so we looked up the telephone book and rooted out all the wealthy old dowagers of Christchurch and invited them too and up they came, up the fire escape and had their hock cup and ran round buying indiscriminately—it was marvellous!’
In fact, this was a point of radical departure for art in New Zealand: the beginning of The Group. The exhibition, with its ‘hock cup’ and dowagers, was its inaugural show. Group members were looking for an opportunity to show their work outside the CSA’s annual Edwardian clutter of pictures. ‘There [was no] deliberate attitude towards the Arts of Christchurch,’ said Ngaio of The Group’s genesis. ‘There were no politics. We were not a bunch of rebels, or angries, we were a group of friends.’ They were discerning friends, though, Page remembered: ‘We invited…only the newest, the most modern of our contemporaries.’ The Group would become one of New Zealand’s most important outlets for progressive painters.
Ngaio was a relatively pedestrian painter, and her talent glowed dimly in a constellation of stars. Page was beginning to realize her talent as a dazzling colourist who could apply Impressionistic brush strokes of impasto paint with a skill that looked effortless. Equally, Haszard was distinguishing herself, with pictures painted in the British Camden Town style composed of luscious paint-loaded mosaics of bold Post-Impressionist colour. Other talented painters—Spencer Bower, Rata and Colin Lovell-Smith, Rita Angus and Louise Henderson—were also establishing careers. In this context, many of Ngaio’s Impressionistic scenes of New Zealand High Country looked staid and formulaic. They were competent but tepid: she laid down the bones of the landscape but not its heart.
By the time Ngaio joined her women friends (and two men, W.H. Montgomery and William Baverstock), in their new Cashel Street studio in 1927, she realized that art would never be more than an abiding passion. She showed with The Group in 1927 and 1928, then left for England.
Her friend Rhona Haszard had departed two years earlier, and many of their contemporaries followed. It was difficult for artists to establish themselves in New Zealand without the authority of overseas experience, so they were lured away. A few, like painter Frances Hodgkins, remained abroad, but most came back. The news, therefore, of Haszard’s death after a four-storey fall from a tower in Alexandria, in February 1931, sent shockwaves through conservative Christchurch. Many, already suspicious of her second husband Leslie Greener, believed he had killed her because of an affair she had while staying in London. Rumours abounded. His decision to bring his wife’s paintings back to New Zealand and sell them reignited controversy. Ngaio almost certainly saw Greener’s memorial exhibition, which he toured nationally in 1933, the year after she returned and began exhibiting herself. She showed with the CSA in 1933, and The Group in 1935, and continued to exhibit intermittently with The Group until 1947.
Among the paintings she showed at the CSA in 1933 was Native Market, Durban, taken from the photograph and quick sketch she had made on her voyage to England. Ironically, there is more visual interest in the bustling human energies and vibrant marketplace colour than she ever achieved in the remote Canterbury landscapes she loved to paint. The simplified forms of the figures and produce have a sculptural quality reminiscent of Paul Cézanne and his precept that Nature can be structurally reduced to the cone, the cylinder or the cube. She was influenced by work she saw in Europe, but also by Australian Margaret Preston’s magnificent Post-Impressionist distillations of white-on-white: in Native Market, Durban, these are in the white folds and twists of turbans, veils and dresses.
Her painting In the Quarry was exhibited at the CSA in 1935. The subject is a group of local relief workers building a section of Valley Road close to her home on the Cashmere Hills. She looks down on the scene from above. The summer day is hot, and men work, sit, stand or laze lethargically in wheelbarrows. The work is a vivid communication of an ordinary scene. Forms are simplified and geometric. Captivating contrasts of work and repose, blazing light and deep shadow, and the warm cream of a dusty dirt road cut through lush green grass, activate the canvas. At The Group exhibition that opened in early September 1932, English émigré and Post-Impressionist Christopher Perkins showed four oils and a group of drawings. His hard-edged naturalism, with its simplified form and colour, pointed to a new direction in New Zealand art. Ngaio had seen the exhibition, and his drawing Employed, reproduced in Art New Zealand in September 1932. This almost certainly influenced her In the Quarry. She called it Still Life for the CSA catalogue, a pun as her novel titles often were. After the ‘mistake’ was pointed out by a literal-minded art society official, the painting was retitled and entered in the correct section.
But just as Ngaio was beginning to embrace modern ideas in painting, her writing career swept her off in another direction. Enter a Murderer was published in 1935, along with The Nursing-Home Murder, which was to secure her place as a leading crime writer in Britain. The year before she had suffered from gynaecological problems. ‘I spent three months in hospital undergoing a series of minor operations and a final snorter of a major one.’ As a result, quite devastatingly for her, she could never have children. While she was in hospital Ngaio began thinking of another story, about a murder that occurred, not on a stage, but on the table of an operating theatre. The parallels are obvious. It was a closed environment with distinct hierarchies and procedures, and the same kind of intensity of performance. But the stakes were higher and life routinely in balance. Imagine if the patient were the British Home Secretary, fighting for his life after a ruptured appendix, and everyone around the operating table had a motive for killing him…
Again, in The Nursing-Home Murder, a play within the novel becomes a metaphor for the action. In the sterile chill of the anteroom, nurse Jane Harden and Sister Marigold help the two surgeons into their white gowns.
‘Seen this new show at the Palladium?’ asked [assistant surgeon Dr] Thoms.
‘No,’ said Sir John Phillips.
‘There’s