B.

Henderson produced this landscape on a ten-day painting trip to the railway settlement of Cass in the Southern Alps, with her friends Rita Angus and Julia Scarvell. It is a companion work to Angus’s more famous Cass, and similarly represents the vigorous new spirit of critical enquiry in New Zealand art of the 1930s. Like Angus, Henderson used a simplified modernist treatment of form to represent the modernising landscape, depicting its utilitarian buildings and rickety telegraph poles. The faint traces of human presence she captures underline the essential majesty of the alpine landscape. Up in the mountains, Henderson found the freedom to further develop ways of painting – and seeing – that reflected the independence of her distinctive vision.

(Louise Henderson: From Life, 27 June – 11 October 2020)