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Angus [Cook], Rita [Henrietta] (Catherine)
(b Hastings, 12 March 1908; d Wellington, 26 Jan 1970). New Zealand painter. She studied at the Canterbury School of Art, Christchurch (1927–33). In 1930 she married the painter Alfred Cook and used the signature Rita Cook until 1946; they separated in 1934. Angus established her reputation in the 1930s with a hard-edged realist style of painting influenced by contemporary Canadian and American regionalism. An example of her landscapes of that period is Cass (1936; Christchurch, NZ, McDougall A.G.), a symbolic image of a small Canterbury railway station typifying the isolated and unpopulated character of rural New Zealand. Angus was also a painter of highly formalized portraits, which she often imbued with symbolic overtones. In her portrait of Betty Curnow (1942; Auckland, C.A.G.), Angus captured not only the likeness of the sitter but the essence of the period. Angus was a pacifist during World War II and gave to her paintings a degree of social and philosophical concern rare in New Zealand art of that time. Her later paintings are more strongly modelled and often incorporate composite imagery, as in Flight (1968–9; Wellington, Mus. NZ, Te Papa Tongarewa). Angus influenced a younger generation of New Zealand realists, including Robin White (b 1946) and Brent Wong (b 1945). The major collection of her works is in the National Art Gallery, Wellington.
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