Jan Nigro: Lady Chatterley's Lover Jan Nigro: Lady Chatterley's Lover
Jan Nigro -Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
A Suite of works on paper by Jan Nigro
At 91 Jan Nigro MBE (b.1920) would not want her age to be a summation of a life well-lived; - yet it is remarkable that she is still producing powerful and evocative bodies of artwork. Nigro is one of our most venerated living artists. She was awarded the MBE in 1993 for Services to the Arts.
The Whangarei Art Museum is proud to present this suite of new works on paper for the New Year at the new art museum.
It is hard to believe that until the 1950’s D.H Lawrence’s most notorious book – Lady Chatterley’s Lover was still banned in New Zealand and was even referred to the Indecent Publications Tribunal in 1965 when a cheap paperback edition was published. The still book remains banned in some counties of the world in the 21st Century.
When Jan Nigro began to contemplate a new series of works she was developing around Lawrence’s infamous novel, she was intrigued to find a common thread in response. It was a memory that those who had read the book had of “Blue forget-me-knots on red hair”. It struck her that it was not the sensational response one receives for merely mentioning D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel.
French film director Pascale Ferran whose film, released in 2006, based on Lawrence’s third version of the story says D H Lawrence was “... against his times, the puritanical England of the 1920s.” and that he wanted“to try to put sexuality back where he thought it should be. That is, as an integral part of a romantic relationship...” but Lawrence is “accused of obscenity... and today that's all we remember, the transgression, the scandal. Eighty years later, that's no longer where we are. ... Sexuality is no longer something shameful, it's pretty much being marketed to us everywhere we turn...”
Her art agent Jane Sanders agrees, “as a painter of the nude, she has never shied from difficult subjects but she is aware of a stigma that is attached to nudity and sexuality in art. Like Lawrence she has suffered a few battles and like Lawrence she wasn’t the first to work on such themes. It is society’s response that interests her.
Nigro knows she must take a cautious path. For her it is the unfolding relationships of the story that intrigue her: Lady Chatterley to her husband, the husband to his wife, Lord to Gamekeeper, Gamekeeper to Lady Chatterley. Male to female, female to male - they are the reason she returns to the human form as her main source of subject matter” Jane says.
When Jan Nigro first enrolled at Elam School of Art in Auckland in the 1930’s in the midst of the Great Depression she began etching a path for herself in the cultural canon of this country. She continues to leave a unique imprint with this new series of works.
A visual artist’s equivalent of ‘writers block’ never seems to have plagued her. She continues her weekly ‘life class’ with much younger artists, drawing and studying the nude to this day. A discipline she had learned at Elam during the Depression. Her self-contained and self driven life of creative continuum is inspirational and her work has always been endlessly enquiring and thoughtful.
Adele Younghusband had been the first New Zealand woman artist to study with George Bell, the master of Australian Modernism in 1935, and became a Member of the highly influential Melbourne Contemporary Art Group which Bell had established.
By the late 1940’s Jan Nigro had followed her path, becoming a favoured pupil of Bell and a further kiwi Member of the Contemporary Art Group. From this point she began a career garlanded with many art prizes in Australia and New Zealand.
Jan Nigro last exhibited at the art museum in 2003 and this is an opportunity for Northlanders to again engage with a remarkable New Zealand artist. Her drawing exhibition replaces the Te Papa Drawn from Italy – Mantegna to Kauffmann exhibition of Renaissance prints and drawings, and the LadyChatterley’s Lover suite is a deliberate counterpoint to that exhibition. Each includes nudes; underscoring the difference between the ‘nude’ as mythological figure – and as the sexualised human anatomy/commodity of the modern era.
Scott Pothan
A suite of works on paper by Jan Nigro, oil and collage/mixed media from ‘life’
courtesy of Jane Sanders Art Agent, Auckland
IMAGE CAPTION:
‘A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it'
DH Lawrence Lady Chatterley's Lover 1928
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