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Miriama Heketa, the model for Margaret Butler’s sculpture La Nouvelle Zélande, was a member of the Ngati Poneke Young Maori Club in Wellington. Noted for her beauty and presence, Miriama led the Ngati Poneke poi dancers in their many performances in the years immediately before the Second World War. She was the model for two other sculptures by Butler, The poi dancer, 1938, and Maori Madonna, 1937–38 (both Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa). Here, Miriama’s features are rendered with clarity and strength that complements the sculpture’s more rhythmic forms, especially the majestic mane of hair.
In their number, Butler’s sculptures of Miriama and other Maori perhaps fell short of Governor-General Lord Bledisloe’s expectation that Butler should ‘achieve in the realm of sculpture what Mr C.F. Goldie has achieved in pictorial art.’1 Bledisloe’s hope had been expressed at the opening of Butler’s homecoming exhibition at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in 1934. The Greymouth-born artist had returned to New Zealand after ten years in Europe, where she had studied with the French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle from 1926 to 1929. At Bourdelle’s insistence Butler exhibited at the independent Salon des Tuileries in 1928. It was on her own account, however, that Butler had work accepted into the major Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
A solo exhibition at the Galerie Hébrard in Paris was greeted with favourable notices. Calling her ‘our local lady Praxiteles’,2 Bledisloe’s praise was part of a chorus that greeted Butler’s return, including an article in Art in New Zealand and newspaper reports of her European achievements.
Such success was difficult to replicate in New Zealand in the 1930s when sculpture was still regarded as craft to painting’s art. Butler’s health and temperament also contributed to a lack of sustained local recognition, as she did not put herself forward for the few commissions available. She continued to send works back to the Salon des Tuileries, however, and the title of La Nouvelle Zélande is a legacy of its exhibition there in 1938. The contents of Butler’s studio, including this bronze of La Nouvelle Zélande as well several tinted plaster versions, were bequeathed to the Academy after her death and later transferred to the National Art Gallery.
William McAloon
This essay appears in Art at Te Papa, (Te Papa Press, 2009)
1. Lord Bledisloe, quoted in ‘Highly praised: Sculptural art of Miss Margaret Butler’, Dominion, 19 July 1937, p. 11.
2. Ibid.