Winter's approach

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

On 1 April 1939 the last of the Republican forces surrendered to General Franco, bringing to an end the bloody years of the Spanish Civil War. A week later Italy would invade Albania, while in the middle of March Germany occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia following its annexation of the Sudetenland the year before. Visitors to the Auckland Society of Arts’ fifty-eighth annual exhibition the following month may have seen the chill of the worsening international situation represented in A Lois White’s painting Winter’s approach.

Since the Depression, White had been recognised for her forthright engagement with topical subject matter, something that marked her out for distinction in New Zealand art circles. ‘I suppose you could say I was a socialist,’1 she later recalled, and as for many on the left in New Zealand at the time it was a socialism underpinned by profoundly Christian beliefs.

Visitors to the exhibition would have also recognised another contemporary dimension to the painting. The allegorical figure of Winter, whose talon-like fingers echo the hostile branches of the forest from which she emerges, is a close relative of the evil Queen from Walt Disney’s Snow White and the seven dwarfs (1937), which had been released in New Zealand the previous year. As well as Disney — White was an avid filmgoer — other influences permeate Winter’s approach. The pose of Summer, it has been suggested, is derived from contemporary lingerie advertisements or, on a more elevated plane, from Sandro Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles, c.1494–95, and The birth of Venus, 1486 (both Uffizi Gallery, Florence).

This concern for political and allegorical themes and an ability to entwine high art and popular imagery provided the stimulus for White’s best works. Added to this was a remarkable sense of design and modelling that White learned from her mentor at Elam School of Art and Design, AJC Fisher. These qualities saw her painting fall from favour as art fashions changed in the 1950s, and it was not until the last decade of her life that interest in White’s work revived. Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey played a key role, giving White her first one-person exhibition in 1977 and placing numerous works, including Winter’s approach, in public collections.

White’s posthumous reputation was ensured with a retrospective exhibition, By the waters of Babylon, organised by the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1994. Along with Winter’s approach, the exhibition featured material from White’s archive, also housed at Te Papa.

William McAloon

1 Lois White, quoted in ‘A conversation with Lois White’, Art New Zealand, no. 18, Summer 1981, p. 39.

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Winter is portrayed here as a predatory figure with sickly green skin and menacing talons. She emerges from the darkness of the trees to envelop the vulnerable flesh of ‘summer’.

World War II was looming when A Lois White painted this work, which expresses a sense of anxiety about the evil that could overcome peace. Her religious and political allegories made her a major artistic figure in New Zealand from the 1930s to 1950s. 

She often combined the popular with the political – ‘winter’ here resembles the wicked queen from Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released the previous year.