CHAPTER ONE. PART ONE: mingling in the eco sphere
2018
First iteration 31/03/2026
Update 11/05/2026
Final draft 14/06/2026
Update 11/05/2026
Final draft 14/06/2026
A Curator slipped an Art Gallery Catalogue from Wellington that has a book cover referencing my first film into a cabinet in at Auckland Art Gallery in 2018. I had offered Wellington curators a graphic image twenty-five years before as an art exhibition cover - the one in black and white on the right. It was for City Gallery catalogue, Wellington. in 1993. The event there was Alter Image. Feminism and Representation in New Zealand Art 1973-1993. The exhibition was multi-varied. There were works in the plastic arts, in installations, sculptures and prints and some films from a number of us in the country.
In Auckland during 2018 it was ambiguously placed with many publications from a publishing group called Spiral Collective. It was in this basement book cabinet for a while. In this particular room were some videos by Juliette Batten. I knew of Juliet. I bought a watercolour of hers in 1980. I ended
up being invited to her shared coastal house after my film shoot, still unbeknown to her.
Also, in this collection, a vitrine held several audio cassettes of interviews with artists from 1980 by Lita Barry. * Barry was a legend 'swanning' with her red lipstick in early art critical days, including seducing a local curator. Barry, it would be able to be said, was a forceful intervention. She built to becoming a most active critical writer. Her most amusing turn was to call the 1970s, the menstrual revolution. To be true, it is only fair. Our generation were the first to prod a speculum up to our vaginas and look with a torch.
There was an interview with me under the glass about what I was doing. I had produced two documentary films. I was earning money filming video weddings at the time and otherwise completing university undergraduate reading as well as researching. I then got some weeks of research for the Director, Gaylene Preston, for a school leaver film she was to shoot, Learning Fast (1979) in Masterton. This doco intimated the meat freezing industry threatening to close. It was a large industry in the town - the Wainunga works. Questions became curiosity about how young people about to enter the workforce felt that they would fare. The film was released at the local school with cakes, cups of tea and sandwiches. The opening credits for the film carried riffs of Pink Floyd's "The Wall". The factory just held on until 1989 and closed.
Barrie has persisted with sharp writing. Here is an excellent excerpt from
her touch about Kelly Berg in 2022. *
It was 1973. While strolling Constitution Square before heading off to dinner in Athens in the Plaka district I was approached directly by a worried man. He asked, "Would you say that our current progress is satisfactory?" I recognized the man’s anxiety. Greece was in bad financial shape. With no work there can be no life to give. Livelihood is essential for both love and life. As to the management of pathways to protect the vulnerable, this is the gesture we are taught. To work and to give.
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Hydra Harbour foreshore. Daily fisherman ritual in front of our Hotel. 1973. Photograph by Stephanie Beth.
It wasn’t necessarily those warm nights in Athens that had prompted me. However, after three weeks in the Aegean, in 1973, the Yom Kippur war in Israel broke out and time and history somehow seeped into my sinews. Within weeks David and I headed home. After four years on the road, we were each ready to get onto the next phase. For me it was back to school, perhaps to train to become a practitioner. Taking steps to ask questions had become a necessary drive.
PERFORMANCE
An Art Historian Book Cover. PERFORMANCE. 1979
This book cover is an image of a book displayed on an exhibition table at Adam Art Gallery on the subject of performance. Wellington. April. 2023. 3 *. The work is authored by RoseLee Goldberg, who is an art historian, critic, and curator. ** (The 1979 edition). I glanced specifically at the book whilst passing through the city three years ago as I was gathering my text together for here.
When I was in Europe in 1970 and 1973, I lived with a woman who had sat one day for Salvador Dali when she was 22. Specifically, in London, in 1973, it was interesting to begin to notice environments set up for participant to note artists exploring early days of Art as processes, sometimes, with focuses upon performance in Art Galleries. The Art Gallery work was mostly experimental.
notes on the topic ***
I had not ever seen Elvis Presley live but noted his southern inspired wiggling and effect upon women fans. When I first flatted in London in 1971, it was in Notting Hill. Mike Jagger lived around the corner and acted in an early film, Performance, made the previous year. His capacity to move kept and keeps him and audiences alive.
* I was passing through.
Copy of a photo of the agora on the island of Hydra. It is in a book by Lawrence Durrell. The Greek Islands. 1978
We stayed for three weeks in the ochre coloured Hotel in 1973 during a four- year travel period. Our room had the balcony.
David (on the left). with traveller friends. The swimming rock. Hydra. 1973 ( See more stills from Hydra. 1973 by Stephanie. correctives.co.nz/HYDRA
In 1968 I was launching into a decade of wandering. After marrying in 1969 and committing to lifelong partnership, my explorations shifted to expanding my mind through creative pursuits not unlike crochet or applique, in finding mental grounding. I incorporated visual elements, dynamic motion, and audio components into my amalgamation. The practice of filmmaking turned out to be, for me, an anchoring. As did, inexorably, when I was young, dance. A person finds oneself by moving. In 1980 I produced and directed a documentary exploring Improvisation theater in Auckland with a group of women with a performance facilitator. The film was IN JOY (1980). I spotted the facilitator, Maggie Eyre, the person who I asked to work with me, as a firebrand of love and life. A compact planning and structure made with Maggie affirmed my confidence that we would put together an opportunity for several individual women to experience a group amateur workshop over four days that aimed to give suggestions for funny insights. It would be a great show. The film was a riveting success, standing out for its close attention to detail and processes. We screened the doco to a thrilled audience. 2025 In 2025 I was invited to Auckland University’s Gus Fisher Art Gallery: in partnership with CIRCUIT.org.nz forty-five years later, to show the IN JOY film again. The piece was chosen to conclude a two-week exhibition showcasing videos produced by international women utilizing video cameras. The exhibition was titled ‘Having it all, all.’ 4 The videos were videos from the 1980s except for two in film, mine and Yoko Ono’s in 16mm (1968). The videos originated from Canada, the United States, Turkey, France/USA, Japan, Switzerland, USA and Cuba. The collection’s ‘banner’ showcased examples of activism and identity politics from Second Wave Feminism. Women learning to be more assertive in this decade was a real thing. Women were keen on growth tools. It is always the matter of the body. I sensed I had had it all. My life was about the loving and protected world of my family. It was not just that though. Jiggling, wrestling, riding, running, throwing, diving, hitting, risk taking, were all part of my repertoire. Heartily. A great granddaughter of three women who signed the petition for Women’s Suffrage in 1893 in New Zealand. When I was first approached and then was commissioned to make a film about women in society, it gave me student wings to address issues that could run amok. My first film, when a student, I titled, I Want to be Joan (1977). That documentary emerged from interviews I conducted at the 1977 Women’s Convention in Christchurch. I had been commissioned to be political about misogyny within the patriarchy and to claim attention for the sex of self. The technique for doing so was to be forthwith. Three years after that film, at age thirty-two, I created IN JOY effortlessly. IN JOY was made in a medium that's expensive - 16mm film negative. I directed my attention to getting the film offshore to three festivals and screened this four times in New Zealand. The audiences were enthralled, firstly on Queen Street at the Civic Wintergarden. When we SOLD OUT the repeat screening, queues strung down the road past Wellesley Street to Derby Street. Maggie took the film to America in 1981. It was also taken to Cannes that year. Short films were not getting much leverage then, though. The Film Commission took a trip to NFT London where the film was shown in a packaged set in 1992. Maggie told her second New Zealand audience, the CIRCUIT and University of Auckland one, in September 2025, that she received great ovations at Harvard and at Waikato University. The compliments to her, she said, felt wonderful. A film about heartiness, think IN JOY that way, reached an enormous pinnacle of reception in its second screening in 1981. This was at Waikato University. My host was Rosemary Seymour, a woman who commenced Women's Studies as an academic subject in a New Zealand University. The way Rosemary thanked me for the film was an experience that became imbedded in me. Her tears and her gratitude were embalming. I looked up her education journey later, in 2018. I received two Art grants for IN JOY. I needed to borrow a lot more money to buy film negative and working time in post- production. My confidence had been triggered by the aftermath of Film No 1, by what I learned and felt while travelling the country as a distributor. The 29 minutes long doco, I Want to be Joan (1977) was aided by a couple of grants, as well as the labour of numerous volunteer crew members. Its launch was in the Christchurch Town Hall James Hay Theatre. The evening was dressed in a Steinway pianoforte performance first, then for the second half of the evening, the film. After that I started my single tour with it (Thundering Through New Zealand 1978/79.)
I separated out male from female for this film so as to concentrate on a culture of the female ‘voice’. I wasn’t yet into debt from Real Estate or parenthood, so it was a great time to go full throttle with Art. Societal change was walking along beside me. I could briefly explore tropes. I had been determined to make a second film quickly that harnessed imagery of women in collective engagement. That was my instinct; to make and share ideas about women and mental health from a second point of view. The primary logic for this was to still film women alone. The second time, the next film, it was to film women studying performance, laughing together and by using the facilitators techniques to gain some personal insights. I knew I was on a ‘focused path there: for a mime and performance facilitator to guide a classroom of women in performance crafts. It was simply a matter of me asking Maggie Eyre to be with my idea. I went to live in Auckland in 1980 for a few months and we got underway. Maggie, after this shoot, went on to have a stellar career in the commercial sector, continuing to support people finding their ‘voice’.5 My film IN JOY (1980) slipped into the repertoire by being about a young facilitator tumbling happily with her ‘freedom’ undampened - young enough and in carte blanche style. I had a conversation with a woman two decades younger than me the other day who saw this 1980 film in 2025. Her sense of the times for women in the 1970s was that women did support each other, did gain from Feminist focus, that that film was magical and reminds us that there is a world lost in harder, isolating realities for many people now. What to do? One of the traditions of newer modifications of Performance has been not to participate in bombast. Clarity. Honesty. Those traits have been a goal. Obviously, also, expressing a 'voice'. PERFORMANCE
Rosa Lee Goldberg, mentioned, wrote about exploration. This curator, based in New York, assembled biennales called PERFORMER that got people past a very curious introversion that had “led people to cut themselves, drop blood” (in the 1970’s.) to extremes. Goldberg’s research looked at the start of the 20th Century. The Futurists, 6 Picabia, 7 Dance at the Bauhus. 8 By the 1990s she was keen to create sit down audience spaces for people who used several skills with which to design live performance. She started with the thought of Cindy Sherman appearing at parties in dress up. She began commissioning artists, e.g. an Iranian woman who sang, but had never been allowed to sing to an audience. Lee said of her book, by then in several translations, at the launch of a fresh translation, this time translation of Performer into Russian, in 2014, the performer in art is the, "avant-garde's avant-garde."
Art and Theory. Notes.Yvonne Rainer. 9 (80 in 2013) Different audiences. Different edges. - Isaac Julian. 10 (African diaspora)- Strong content. Marvel.- What makes any work radical? - Go back to the Russian constructivists. 11
Marina Abromovitch would carry on with the power of articulations of the ‘body’ later in history via her knowledge of predecessors. 12 I picked up on Kembra Pfahler, for example, self-made, just lately, who still performs on a shoestring. As well as being a figure in New York, she appeared in The Gentlewoman, a London magazine in 2024.21
Our lives bear out as performances. From within families, awareness of the psychology of this stirs us all. By the mid 1980s I had personal needs. I took a break from working in film for more than twenty years and worked in part-time media education. I began filming again when I saw that our son was moving into Art. His energy of choice is Heavy Metal - the mosh pits - the emotion - the heavy base. In respect, my delight, in 2008, was to take notice of the vibes of music and life in the northern regions of this planet. I talked with Petri Perho from Helsinki. He told me about the Finish summers of music.
*Sleigh, a producer for CIRCUIT.org.nz, interviewed me about both of these films in 2018 (Listen on Soundcloud from correctives.co.nz/reviews)
Film No 3
US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY(2014)
I waited for the accelerating networked world of computer software to link me more adeptly so as to produce a documentary; post ftp files communications, then went to California in 2009 to see how individuals and groups of creatives were faring. I travelled to San Francisco after setting up my primary connections by email and telephone.
In process during 2008- 2012, released first in Los Angeles in 2013, my third film touched upon the activities of artists, designers, musical composers, arrangers, engineers, and directors being dynamically published on the internet. If Heavy Metal had not been a vibe for some, there was weight-lifting or extreme gymnastics, DJing and ridiculous sports with sounds of uproarious laughter for others. Always people in company, or in sharing with colleagues.
Participants of videogames culture enjoy the intensity of games. I glanced at this world, the world running as a race away trend from trends in cinema.
I became attracted to a new ‘few’. Tom Robinson, agreed to open my eyes to provisional research.( index. Issues 1 and Issue 2)
It would go down in history that later there was an independent game developer bubble, and this provided many challenges, expansions, tensions and growth, specifically in the E-Sport era. However, for me, deciding to pop in and look around early, I was able to encounter small teams at work and genuinely be thrilled that there was so much viewable creativity at scale. I selected solo designers with contracted others, all of them wrapped by childhoods of learning and games. There were others also already noted for experimentation. There were suddenly opportunities for me to talk and meet with
‘alt view' developers at such a forefront. When I first looked st the internet to see who was talking, I clicked on to Ian Bogost's Water Cooler.*
Videogame development.
Years of work go into this Artform. If we equate my approach to my piece of research and say I approached my new topic like Third Cinema; my view was to ascertain degrees of artistry at scale for developers keen to explore games with more adult curiosity. I had a tiny budget but huge interest. I felt that I could produce some of my impressions. Attitude towards production indicated a world newly coerced by the blooming of mathematics; a world of humans intrigued by the pull of computer technology at a time when engineering was compounding an ever-expanding range of design tools. There was applied physics in play (Newton’s Law of Motion) and studies of forces and dynamics with objects. As to literature, what is a test of prowess for fiction and illusions? There was also the genre factor. What about sadness or humour? I went to California to have a look as a judicious new kid on the block. Not unsurprisingly, I selected a game director to speak with who used English as a second language. Also, I was also looking, in my right brain, for relationships to celebrate at nonverbal levels. So, for example, swooping on and filming the music composer for the videogame JOURNEY in 2010, for me was a no-brainer.
When I attended the first GDC (Game Developers Convention) in San Francisco, in 2009, the popular presentation of a few Swedes and Finns that I met was that they loved to ‘throw down the gauntlet ‘for speed challenges in programming. Knowing this gave me a lead to how, later, Nordic Games assemblies did so much for them.
There had been Lovelace and Turing 13, 14. How could coding language be a thrill? Where in the swirl of new satellite communications was the category of artificial intelligence going to take us all? How was the ‘human’ per say, finding new human relations in the networked universe and what, otherwise, were the benefits of skilled computer play? Skills of life-health building and long -term consistency with workloads, has been one of the parts of videogames creation.
A small body of young developers at a production house thatgamecompany, were working with’ Flow ‘as theory. Welcome to ‘Flow’ in games (Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (2009). 15 The company director, Jenova Chen, completed a Master of Fine Arts Degree at USC with an investigatory thesis on Flow. The key, as Chen sensed, was to work with ideas about ‘solace’ or ‘seeker’ for play. JOURNEY became one game I followed. 16 I investigated and then telephoned Jenova to arrange a meeting with him before I left New Zealand. I selected the team working for him as my focus for the film. (correctives.co.nz/Documentary Reviews) I met and then spent a few days with designer Richard Lemarchand who was really excited to be considering advances in game narrative in design. Jason Rohrer was already an attraction to me. He had executed one short game of repute (Passage 2007). Musical composition was, in my awareness, another key drive. By 2010, once I became aware of steps in production processes, I made a booking to meet with Austin Wintory at his studio in Burbank when he was recording Tina Goa playing cello. He had called her in to record the opening chords of JOURNEY, the game in production for thatgamecompany. It was a beautiful moment to film this. It was achieved on the ‘first take'.
A small body of young developers at a production house thatgamecompany, were working with’ Flow ‘as theory. Welcome to ‘Flow’ in games (Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (2009). 15 The company director, Jenova Chen, completed a Master of Fine Arts Degree at USC with an investigatory thesis on Flow. The key, as Chen sensed, was to work with ideas about ‘solace’ or ‘seeker’ for play. JOURNEY became one game I followed. 16 I investigated and then telephoned Jenova to arrange a meeting with him before I left New Zealand. I selected the team working for him as my focus for the film. (correctives.co.nz/Documentary Reviews) I met and then spent a few days with designer Richard Lemarchand who was really excited to be considering advances in game narrative in design. Jason Rohrer was already an attraction to me. He had executed one short game of repute (Passage 2007). Musical composition was, in my awareness, another key drive. By 2010, once I became aware of steps in production processes, I made a booking to meet with Austin Wintory at his studio in Burbank when he was recording Tina Goa playing cello. He had called her in to record the opening chords of JOURNEY, the game in production for thatgamecompany. It was a beautiful moment to film this. It was achieved on the ‘first take'.
* Water Cooler was a blog co-established by a writer and a professor in Studies Professor. Ian Bogost.
Austin Wintory drops in for a cup of tea to Richard Lemarchand, game designer, educator and author. I photographed this image of Austin when he called in on Richard, who had just had a chat with Jason Rohrer in Los Angeles for the film, in 2010. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2010
Austin Wintory is enamored with composing music for videogames. He was on a full salary for three years composing the videogame JOURNEY as it evolved with the programmers and artists for SONY Entertainment America. Busy and enthralled, he composed a special celebration a decade later with the London Symphony Orchestra so as to share the success of the thatgamecompany, as this game became an enormous hit. 17
Careers for all of the participants in this documentary continued in salutary careers. Lemarchand, for example, put out a best practice game design book in 2021 that is touted as a treasure for all. 18
Visiting America I was able to visit several writers, designers,
teachers, organizers, leaders and players in the games field. Simon Carless, Tracey Fullerton and Ian Bogost to name a few.
It was enjoyable for me to look on as a participant observer of play over those years.
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Photographs
Composer Austin Wintory's Studio. Burbank. Tina Guao gets ready to play the opening theme of Journey for recording. 2010
WRAP PARTY. in Santa Monica. US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY (2013) c 2012.
Location. People view a player play JOURNEY for the first time. At the home of assistant Professor Tracy Fullerton, University of Southern California. 19
* Austin Wintory
https://www.orchestravictoria.com.au/people/austin-wintory
AMTRAK. Holiday. California. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2016
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David and Tom Robinson. Christchurch. 2014
Then
continue
THE SUBJECTS OF TRAVEL: BOOKS OR GEOGRAPHIES
David gave me books. One on Brecht, one by de Beauvoir and one by Nin. David adorned his bookshelf. He fondly retains one or two well-travelled novels and short stories by Henry Miller, Hemingway and Durrell’s quartet as his language palette and style. David had already graduated University and experienced life abroad. He had already read American children's classics as far as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Home had left him when his father died.
I was born 1948. I grew up on a sheep farm Estate. The business exported to Britain. David was born in 1944. David's father was employed by an American company. We both grew up in the post-war golden era. We were the first generation post the Atomic Bomb. As we travelled, the war in Vietnam was raging. Furthermore, we travelled during the political scandal of Watergate. I had no conversations about Bretton Woods as a child. I knew, though, by my twenties, that Nixon had unpegged the dollar from gold.
1970
I knew that when I travelled, I would begin to catch up on a perspective of the current active, political and economic world. Long travel does this. It is not a holiday. It tends to foster epiphanies. I know that events in these times were the outcome of thoughts, actions and learnings in real situations. These two chapters of mine are fragments of my life tale where I reference experiences that were part of the kindling for the life fire. The fire came from the gift of my childhood, the lack of impediments along the way and the energy that I contained with which to forge some ideas.
I had enough savings in 1970 to go travelling. I topped up costs with waitressing and some Infant teaching in London, Australia and Canada. I was living out what the author Simon de Beauvoir had written about autonomy for the individual. What I am putting to purpose now is some writing that elucidates my sense of how culture has flares of expression and how traditions as well as experimentations affect thinking and actions in life. Also, that a person needs to know what the State is thinking; that any set of precepts for the individual, is ‘work in action’ and that citizens are affected by relations of commerce.
To use the motif of ‘migrant story’, as David articulated, fits well with my curiosity about life, for it is ideas themselves that move. It is through this modelling i.e. reading, discussing and sharing that we humans ascertain the function of human roles, activities and relationships of self in relation to others. We find ways to ‘become’ from either long histories or even shorter time spans.
My film work has been associated with Second Wave Feminism. The label attached itself easily. To invite further balancing of what we in society have become, is to see how crucial it always is to research, monitor, test and debate ideas. What is a contemporary view of humans within the spectrum of ‘pain and pleasure’ in life here, there and over there? * Consequently, what are relationships for: people and relationships on our life spectrum? In the process of writing, I recognize that I have lived a chosen lifestyle, not a professional career. I have worked some moments with film as Artform. What are some of the takeaways and memories and what for a ‘generalist,’ is a life overview? Is the crux of all questions due to being on a continuum? I decided to invite the idea of my 19th Century women relatives into this broad -brush parameter. My family has reminded me of pathways in history.
To use the motif of ‘migrant story’, as David articulated, fits well with my curiosity about life, for it is ideas themselves that move. It is through this modelling i.e. reading, discussing and sharing that we humans ascertain the function of human roles, activities and relationships of self in relation to others. We find ways to ‘become’ from either long histories or even shorter time spans.
My film work has been associated with Second Wave Feminism. The label attached itself easily. To invite further balancing of what we in society have become, is to see how crucial it always is to research, monitor, test and debate ideas. What is a contemporary view of humans within the spectrum of ‘pain and pleasure’ in life here, there and over there? * Consequently, what are relationships for: people and relationships on our life spectrum? In the process of writing, I recognize that I have lived a chosen lifestyle, not a professional career. I have worked some moments with film as Artform. What are some of the takeaways and memories and what for a ‘generalist,’ is a life overview? Is the crux of all questions due to being on a continuum? I decided to invite the idea of my 19th Century women relatives into this broad -brush parameter. My family has reminded me of pathways in history.
*An old Bentham clause. One that Goethe rather mostly dealt with as ‘Light and Dark', whilst Christopher Marlow, for example, took another tack.
- I trained in primary education. In the late 1960’s my educational route had been when age nineteen, to consider styles by which to teach children in the thinking subject called Art. Such was my specialty that I had worked with theorists, Itten, Piaget, Illich, Erikson and more.
- As to cinema. I had grown up with British, including satire, and then HITCHCOCK. e. g British. **
- As to the Arts in very small country, I knew that I had to move past ‘Art Grant systems’, quickly, so I privately borrowed 10K to make my second film; a personal investment, so that, free of national obligation, I would make a film that I felt like making. I produced my third in 2013. I moderately covered the financial equation for that with the viability and the reality of pre-sales.
** British Cinema e. g 1968
Because I grew up with cinema, I was to have images of characters made indelible on my brain. For example, the actor David Hemmings as the anti-hero in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) Also, the young daughter of Charlie Chaplin, Geraldine, in an early female role for her. Here, in cinema was already the second generation of movie stars. Our childhoods had been flooded by Charlie Chaplin shorts. The Chaplin Industry had preserved and distributed 16mm prints of these worldwide. What was astonishing to me then, was the impact of Tony Richardson’s satirical approach to the status of the British military that had been largely inactive since Waterloo.
Patreon, the crowd funding platform, has supported a documentary about that battle of 1854, on a BATTLE GUIDE site in the 2020s. This one ends up, having accounted for Turks, French, British and Cossacks, with a remark from a French general observing the scene from a high ridge. ‘Not War. Madness.’ 19a
Lord Alfred Tennyson, poet laureate through much of Queen Victoria's reign, just twenty days after the tragedy at Balaclava in 1854, wrote a poem.
Tennyson often addressed the House of Lords. ‘He was raised to the peerage in 1884. Among his famous works are “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” In Memoriam, and Idylls of the King.’ Encyclopedia Britannica)
Because I grew up with cinema, I was to have images of characters made indelible on my brain. For example, the actor David Hemmings as the anti-hero in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) Also, the young daughter of Charlie Chaplin, Geraldine, in an early female role for her. Here, in cinema was already the second generation of movie stars. Our childhoods had been flooded by Charlie Chaplin shorts. The Chaplin Industry had preserved and distributed 16mm prints of these worldwide. What was astonishing to me then, was the impact of Tony Richardson’s satirical approach to the status of the British military that had been largely inactive since Waterloo.
Patreon, the crowd funding platform, has supported a documentary about that battle of 1854, on a BATTLE GUIDE site in the 2020s. This one ends up, having accounted for Turks, French, British and Cossacks, with a remark from a French general observing the scene from a high ridge. ‘Not War. Madness.’ 19a
Lord Alfred Tennyson, poet laureate through much of Queen Victoria's reign, just twenty days after the tragedy at Balaclava in 1854, wrote a poem.
Tennyson often addressed the House of Lords. ‘He was raised to the peerage in 1884. Among his famous works are “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” In Memoriam, and Idylls of the King.’ Encyclopedia Britannica)
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1973.The Hydra foreshore directly in front of our hotel for three weeks. Donkeys were readied for work every morning early. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 1973
THE VALUE OF TRAVEL
In the late 1970’s in the Arts scene, several artists left the ‘Art Wall’ and moved to interactivity, installations and mixed media. By instinct there was always line drawing, painting, etching, moulding and sound. Times were tough since the machine of ‘progress’ had harnessed itself to the fossil energy industry and we were all made to Kow Tow. Headiness had gone ‘Pop’. The question though had to be by what forces? One commercial think tank summarized, ‘The 1980s was a decade of neon colours, big hair and cultural shifts—but behind the pop culture glamour, women still faced many social, economic, and legal barriers. Progress had been achieved, nevertheless. Since the feminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s, several outdated rules and expectations have continued to hold women back. From work and motherhood to fashion and financial freedom, certain unspoken “rules” defined what it meant to be a woman—and not often in empowering ways. (I suggest, google a range of summaries)
Until I read Geronimo and Dalziel’s book, ‘Half the Perfect World ‘in 2019, I didn’t know it had been a thing to jump into the sea at Hydra fully clothed.20 The delirium struck. After the ferry from Athens edged us into the small harbour we waited until dark, squealing with the thrill of being on an island famous for not having motorcars. Three of us took to the night sea nude. The fourth was carrying our clothing. We came out at the other end of the agora near a booming “ritzy'' nightclub. I found out from David about his important six weeks on his own in Hydra five years earlier. Canadians had had something of an edge there, especially due to minstrels and writing bohemians. The Australian writer/journalist George Johnstone, his journalist wife Charmian Clift, painter Sidney Nolan and Canadian poet/singer Leonard Cohen, romantically owned some Greek earth on Hydra. were notables.
We lived in Austria in the summer of 1973 with an artist Hilde Goldschmidt, with whom we had lived for ten weeks in the winter of 1970/71. David and I then lived on Hydra for a month at the end of summer 1973.
Suddenly, one morning, we dramatically heard two Israeli female soldiers in September at 5.00am, rush and leave for war. Events of such conflict in societies were sending David and I home. We needed to find our own ways to settle into our expression in work and good will.
Two weeks later we were in London and then considering the packing to go home to New Zealand. As closing, however, we were invited to attend a wonderful art exhibition in the Lake District. It was a curator with an art history writer, J.P. Hodin, showing an exhibition of the artist Hilde Goldschmidt. Our room was opposite Hilde in Kendal. I brushed Hilde's hair in the early afternoon as we all prepared for what a big event for her this was going to be.
‘At 50 a lot of you is what you have read between
say 16 and 35’. Jacqueline Fahey*
* Thanks Jacqueline. There are two Fahey paintings as stills in my documentary I WANT TO BE JOAN. (1977). One was Christine in the Panty. 1971. The images were photographed on an early English 16mm Neilson Hordell Animation stand.
NEW ZEALAND IN MY YOUTH
Novels and films were the top drawcards in the first half of my life. Having chosen to study, the demand of the work I have done allowed me to turn the tap on and off, not be a committed film director. After making two films by my 30s, I didn’t want to make any more until I was a mother. I wanted to be a mother, stay in my country of birth and start living in the symbolic and sensual garden as well. This tome is one of love and respect for family and equally a chance to preview some intellectual precedents.
It had come to me with clarity when I haunted Art Galleries in my youth on visits to Auckland, specifically to the Barry Lett Gallery in 1966/67, that Art shown internationally or locally basically told either individualized or ‘collective’ ideas. I could see that this source of thinking about interblending and interconnecting of Art and its styles would be an interest for me to enjoy all of my life. As to indigenous expression, one of the Art History professors at the University I attended, Jonthan Mane-Wheoke, a writer for the Christchurch Art Gallery summarized him in March 2026, in the Art Gallery Bulletin, as one who aided a 'culmination of Maori art focus globally'. 21. I had been in accordance with this view. The substance of the journey of Maori Art to the world with a particular exhibition, Te Māori in 1984, and the effects of this exhibition upon its return (Te Māori: Te Hokinga Mai) gave many of us in the country acquaintance with the high degree of impact that exhibition had that year. 22
I had grown up in the North Island of New Zealand in Hawkes Bay, attended teacher's College in Papakura, lived and worked in Rotorua and Whangarei between 1961 and 1969, as far as my cultural awareness was active when appraising the local Art scene. After Wheoka had been at the National Art Gallery and then taught at Elam, he was primed with advocacy for Māori Art.
The importance for me was to develop my own angle and thinking about art and philosophy. I travelled to the Northern Hemisphere. Our long travel, David's and my amazing trip to several regions of the world in 1969 - 73 remains unreplaceable, a treasure trove. About the 1970s through to the 1990s, along with family joy and recall, this memoir celebrates what artists do. I have met or had acquaintanceships with a few. Their endeavors set me on a path that has prompted some writing. David got himself fully to work in his thirties. He fitted himself to the fermentations of the road to Damascus story, a parable I did not know.
In New Zealand, we lived for four years in Rangiora with great friends as a ‘peer group family’, in a property we purchased together. It was a time that encapsulated the best of our young desires to reach for a way to live, balancing the yearnings of the psyche with a lifestyle of substance. Four individuals: David, I, Maureen and Bob Garvie, lived our late 20’s immersed each in our own tapestries; in reading, work, music, politics, social engagement and vitality - everything our age demographic offered. What we did together was brilliant. We presented and lived a home of welcome and conviviality to ourselves and to many. At the end of those years, Maureen ‘cameoed’ our times then as the vapors of our ‘being young and life as ephemeral’. I, as the youngest of the four, still had to step up to do more tertiary school. David found his direction. He framed a full decade for himself working within the probation service of the Justice Department by 1982. Then he moved to being an independent practitioner. Maureen felt a strong urge to return to her home and family in Kingston Ontario. She was intent on being a writer. Bob qualified with an MA in Resource Management. His mind played upon the taut strings of our looming ecosphere collapse having learned from history resource excavation and plunder. His father had been an engineer in mineral excavation. He knew how the dice rolled.
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We four. Rangiora. 1976 We put some hours into loving life at this house.
INFLUENCES
In New Zealand, Australia, Austria, England and New York, art as event had given me stimulus. Particularly Austria by meeting Hilde Goldschmidt. Hilde was a gift of an experience at close hand and David and I lived with her for weeks. I wish to honour.
AUSTRIA. 1970, 1973
David would accompany Hilde for the weekly food shopping.
23 This is Hilde in her winter hat. One day in the '40s in Paris Salvador Dali st her down to draw' Hilde, I love your hat!".
(See Hilde on David page again)
I was a pupil of culture already when I met Hilde Goldschmidt in Kitzbuhel Austria in 1970 and then assisted to calm her nerves in the hotel where we slept while attending a retrospective exhibition of her work in Abbot Hall in Kendal, UK, in 1973. Meeting two individuals in the process of Art, exhibition and writing, an artist and an author, at age twenty- five, swept me off my feet.
My exaltation was at the specifics of the depth of the pool, the art world into which David I had been invited by Hilde. David had adored working alongside her, helping with a formative first draft translation of P. J. Hodin's book on Hilde (A Way of Life) during the summer of 1973. The experience emboldened me to climb to a brief métier, an appreciation of what my being a descendant of colonial heritage was: from the values of my slender links to Judeo-Christian traditions and then living far from that source. It was for me to grasp more particularly and more vigorously ways to celebrate cultures as rich and diversified worlds that carry great feelings and identifiers.
Hilde, David and I fell into the habit of daily outdoor breakfast after she had woken and sketched her ‘Morning Prayer’. Her view was the Hahnenkamm run across the valley above her villa. We walked, talked or took a meadow hike and the odd time a motor vehicle outing when a friend of Hilde’s came to visit.
I take the combination of being uniquely met with some Europeans back to my growing time with my family - my education with feeling, knowing and thinking about the Twentieth century with the voracious experience of violence that war intrusions had made upon the flow of energy otherwise allotted to people during peacetime.
The artist Oskar Kokoschka had immediately stood as an example of a person’s continued capacity to work in paint. After having grown up in Vienna, taken time in Czechoslovakia, and emigrated to England, he had been to centers of civilization and ancient worlds. He had been conscious of the ramifications of change in Europe before the First War. It was so significant that he had been Hilde’s principal tutor. O.K. only took on three pupils at masters level and Hilde had been one.
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Hilde invited David and I to the survey exhibition of her paintings at Abbot Hall, in the Lake District in 1973 a few months after we spent our summer with her and in Hydra. We travelled from London to Kendal. The curatorial team put on an exhibition covering 1948 to the decades before her return to life in Kitzbuhel. If there was a single moment when I knew what my step towards a focused adult life was going to be, it is that first image that I made of the author Joseph. P. Hodin and the artist at the exhibition at Abbott Hall. I got a thrill from being pointed out. At that moment I was 24 years of age. I decided then that I was an ‘image maker’ of relationships and contexts. Joseph. Paul. Hodin, Art critic and writer, who by this time was the author of her biography and was co-curator of that retrospective exhibition. (Reference 24)
Abbot Hall Art Gallery
THE LAKE DISTRICT IN 1973
Art critic and author. Dr. J. P. Hodin (1901 - 1995) smiling at Stephanie. 24 Abbot Hall, Kendal. UK. Photographs by Stephanie Beth. 1973
"Look Peppi! That's Steffi"!
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Hilde Goldschmidt Exhibition at an exhibition of her work. 25
J. P. Hodin was writing a monograph about Hilde Goldschmidt through 1971 -3 *
I received Hodin’s smile of acknowledgement on an early afternoon of an exhibition that celebrated Hilde’s life and work. I knew about other artists whom Hodin had written. Meeting an individual who was at the top of his field as an Art professional felt like a page turner. Hilde Goldschmidt, curated in the UK, gave me a lot of inspiration to become more appreciative of human exchanges. That evening at the Kendal hotel cocktail party, a colleague of the Director of the gallery, raised her glass for a toast to Barbara (Hepworth), absent friend. 26 We all clinked glasses and I signed the group postcard. I had received smiles from my parents, my teachers and friends in my life. To be received in this other world, to become more knowledgeable in the arts, became a new cue for my ambitions. Art is a celebration, an exploration. The making of it requires persistence and nurture. Art requires exhibition and housing. To see, hear or participate in artistry can be a bliss. Back at the artist studio, wherever it is, the artist must rigorously work. It was a fact that seeing Hodin that day with Hilde and experiencing the context of appreciation for her in this event in England gave me a heightened moment.
Who was J.P.Hodin? *Czechoslovakian, I quote. Hodin had obtained his Doctorate at Charles University in Prague [2] and moved to London during World War II to work as a press attaché to the Norwegian government-in-exile. [1] ‘‘(Wikipedia) He lived in England from 1944. In 1945 he was a friend of Oskar Kokoschka.
In an interview in 2023 published by the TATE:'An émigré from Prague who spoke four languages fluently, and wrote in seven, he was responsible for introducing many European cultural figures to British audiences, and for opening up movements in the British art world, like the St Ives scene, to the continent. Art historian J.P. Hodin was friend and supporter to some of Europe's most important artists and thinkers, such as Franz Kafka, Barbara Hepworth and Oskar Kokoschka.'** He had completed short critical works published about Munch, Moore, Hepworth and Nicholson. He was soon to finish, A WAY OF LIFE- life of the painter Hilde Goldschmidt. 1976.
In an interview in 2023 published by the TATE:'An émigré from Prague who spoke four languages fluently, and wrote in seven, he was responsible for introducing many European cultural figures to British audiences, and for opening up movements in the British art world, like the St Ives scene, to the continent. Art historian J.P. Hodin was friend and supporter to some of Europe's most important artists and thinkers, such as Franz Kafka, Barbara Hepworth and Oskar Kokoschka.'** He had completed short critical works published about Munch, Moore, Hepworth and Nicholson. He was soon to finish, A WAY OF LIFE- life of the painter Hilde Goldschmidt. 1976.
Artists who had lived in England during World War II became recalled again and again as members of the deep history of Arts relationships landmarked at Abbot Hall. One exhibition in 2019 was titled. Refuge - the Art of Belonging: Exhibition of artists who escaped Nazi occupation. Artist names in the show runs over three galleries and includes work by Kurt Schwitters, Hilde Goldschmidt, Hans Coper, Lucie Rie, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.’27Some filmgoers will have seen the excellent portrayal in "Moss & Freud"(2025) of Freud at work, written and directed by James Lucas, Freud performed by Derek Jacobi. Kate Moss learned a great deal about complementary professionalism.
In 2022 Museum Kitzbühel honoured Hilde. "Hilde Goldschmidt. Art and Self. The Artistic Estate at the Museum Kitzbühel."28 What I recall hearing from David Robinson was that Hilde described her friends in that village (ski friends of her youth) during the 1940’s who told her that they made sure that no SS personnel were ever allowed to live in her house. This was such an affirming confirmation of protection from contamination. David, in conversation with her over many hours, learned this detail.
In 1973 Hilde advised David and I that she was working on a portrait of us. We really only saw it in glimpses. It was not a sitting. For her it was pure instinct. It was with her predictive tools, from her mind’s eye, that she placed us. Hilde had asked David to work with her on a first draft translation of Hodin’s tract, Way of Life. Life and Work of the Painter Hilde Goldschmidt. (1976) She made me go upstairs to draw with pastels and pencils every evening in 1973 as they, David and Hilde, worked on the text below in her stube (including cigarettes and brandy!). David did not start this assignment until the summer of 1973. He and I had taken our (my first) big trip to Canada in 1972, for me to meet David's mother Laura and all of his family before this. What was of palpable incredulity to David was his constant awareness of Hilde having been in the nexus of cultures affected by political collapses about which he had had a childhood and student life reading about.
In 1973 Hilde advised David and I that she was working on a portrait of us. We really only saw it in glimpses. It was not a sitting. For her it was pure instinct. It was with her predictive tools, from her mind’s eye, that she placed us. Hilde had asked David to work with her on a first draft translation of Hodin’s tract, Way of Life. Life and Work of the Painter Hilde Goldschmidt. (1976) She made me go upstairs to draw with pastels and pencils every evening in 1973 as they, David and Hilde, worked on the text below in her stube (including cigarettes and brandy!). David did not start this assignment until the summer of 1973. He and I had taken our (my first) big trip to Canada in 1972, for me to meet David's mother Laura and all of his family before this. What was of palpable incredulity to David was his constant awareness of Hilde having been in the nexus of cultures affected by political collapses about which he had had a childhood and student life reading about.
Hodin's book on Hilde arrived on our doorstep in 1976. The Robinsons image there is in black and white.
**Hodin: Biographies on Kokoschka Munch, Moore, Nicholson,
Hepworth and Goldschmidt, potter Bernard Leach and a book on Modern art
and the modern mind (1972) as well as several essays
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Exhibition opening. Hilde Goldschmidt. Abbot Hall.
Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 1973.
New realism became the story of the post-World War era. American abstract art became a cultural thing. Hodin’s text on Hilde increased my awareness of an individual finding a way to work and live.
In 1973, New Yorker Paul von Ringelheim came to stay when David and I were living with Hilde. 29
Paul von Ringelheim draws Hilde in her sunhat. David and I out in Pastern for lunch. 1973. Photograph by Stephanie Beth.
Paul, after lunch, drew a sketch of Hilde.
Get away from the figurative’.
Seek ‘the tension between objective planes and negative space’. said her younger colleague, Von Ringelheim. *
I did not know from any conversation that Paul had with Hilde that he had had lessons with Picasso in 1959. I caught up with his facts in 2024, from an internet update. His credentials took shape in such exploratory times. He also designed jewelry. (correctives.co.nz/Appendix. von Ringelheim)
Austrian born artist Paul von Ringelheim, raised later in contemporary New York, wanted to suggest the importance to Hilde of her getting to more abstraction. * He and his family escaped Nazi persecution in Austria in 1941 by emigrating to America, settling in Newark New Jersey before moving to Brooklyn. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck NJ. In 1959, he met and was befriended by Picasso and studied with him before spending 1960-61 in Munich on a Fulbright scholarship. For the New York World Fair of 1964 and 1965 he was commissioned to create a massive minimalist cast bronze 'Screen of Peace', 29 foot wide and 10 foot high, for the Federal Pavilion, which now stands in the campus of his alma mater. For me, a fascinating viewpoint concerning Europe and America as terrains of culture were differences in assertions in structures and forms. Paul came to stay with Hilde the summer we were there. We would go on drawing outings, and he would talk with and shout at Hilde!
Austrian born artist Paul von Ringelheim, raised later in contemporary New York, wanted to suggest the importance to Hilde of her getting to more abstraction. * He and his family escaped Nazi persecution in Austria in 1941 by emigrating to America, settling in Newark New Jersey before moving to Brooklyn. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck NJ. In 1959, he met and was befriended by Picasso and studied with him before spending 1960-61 in Munich on a Fulbright scholarship. For the New York World Fair of 1964 and 1965 he was commissioned to create a massive minimalist cast bronze 'Screen of Peace', 29 foot wide and 10 foot high, for the Federal Pavilion, which now stands in the campus of his alma mater. For me, a fascinating viewpoint concerning Europe and America as terrains of culture were differences in assertions in structures and forms. Paul came to stay with Hilde the summer we were there. We would go on drawing outings, and he would talk with and shout at Hilde!
*An influence on von Ringelheim. Skylla rock. (look up the myth) Spatiality became a motif for him. (Appendix. Ringelheim)
In my adulthood I became more aware of topics such as post- war reconstitution. I bought a detailed coffee table book was release in 1999 in three languages.30
COLLAPSE AND NEW BEGINNINGS 1945 The West. 1948. Germany: Twelve million refugees or displaced persons came flooding in from the eastern territories, exacerbating the housing shortage. No ban on night flying during the Berlin blockade of 1948-1949 and American and British ‘candy bombers' ensured the survival of the city rabble of Soviet soldiery”. 31
COLLAPSE AND NEW BEGINNINGS 1945 The West. 1948. Germany: Twelve million refugees or displaced persons came flooding in from the eastern territories, exacerbating the housing shortage. No ban on night flying during the Berlin blockade of 1948-1949 and American and British ‘candy bombers' ensured the survival of the city rabble of Soviet soldiery”. 31
correction. 1931 - `2022.
At age twenty-four I observed and conversed with Hilde. I was made conscious of the context of one European artist's story. I saw her drive, her struggle and her staying power. When I noted that she exuded commitment to the opportunity given by her father’s approval for her to study, I recognized that I was seeing a life story of caliber and of real intensity. Hilde was the youngest child of several female siblings, the youngest by eight years. Her sisters were all inclined to literature. Their father was a patron of some writers very well -known and regarded - Thomas Mann with his family and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke often came to the house for dinner when she was a girl. * Supported by a cultured family, Hilde wanted so much to try. She started first in book binding, then she shifted to painting. She had at one time had interest in dance as much as painting in 1916. Immediately she secured dance classes with Mary Wigman. 34 Wigman, Hodin wrote, firmly said to her when she had to pull out of a show in Dresden (when her mother had found out about her activities and was freaked out that she wanted to be in a dance), that she had to decide. It really was either/ or. ‘Dance or Paint.’35
* Note. 'Mann and the poet Rilke' mentioned in the sentence above, will be suitably extended by many readers. Just to say that Hilde's father was a patron of the Arts.
The artist Oscar Kokoschka became her private art teacher at the master's level with two other painters in 1923 at the Dresden Academy. Importantly, when I read Kokoschka’s autobiography I moved into decade two of the Twenty-first Century around the time that I decided to do this writing. J. P. Hodin’s text on Hilde increased my awareness of artists and their subjects find a way to work and live.
Each decision for a Western artist is described as that of the individual rather than the collective. At the micro level it formulates as a potential. The idea of collective consciousness, a larger, older idea, comes through via the educators and from therapists, philosophers and other commentators about the symbiotic qualities we are able to all recognize within ourselves as nature. A path in its own right has to be sorted out according to each individual. This becomes where the degrees of choice are laid according to what to make into application with symbols, textures and abstracts. Such thinking was how I had been taught during teacher training, as had my mother who also taught me. Mother had run a kindergarten before her marriage. Artists from indigenous cultures do not make individual decisions, necessarily. For example, I hear of one man who became a carver telling how he had been shoulder tapped to go in a classical direction.
I often visited TATE Britain in 1971 before I visited America. The studying gave me the impact of five, not three artists. I was stopped in my tracks by Bacon and Hockney. I had attended early and more emotionally, an expansive Turner of skies and a room where I had several hours one day in entire privacy with Mark Rothko.36 more here After that, after a real pause, I was then surrounded by a room of Warhol. 37
Without hesitation, I could take in Turner’s sky glory. On a much more emotional load, I was presented with floor to ceiling crimson and black paintings by Rothko. I was with the Seagram murals. I wasn't to know of the iterative details of these at that time. I read more about Rothko in 2024. Then, though, I knew of a world that had become deep. I was a responsive candidate for his work. I had with me tears about death. My mother had died no more than six years before. I was still carrying that loss. It took me several decades to process, however, what an artist suicide does for the world. In 2024, I read about the stages of Marlborough Gallery's vendor role with ROTHKO’s art, and I read about Rothko's home soil at the Latvian Art Museum. (Appendices MARK ROTHKO) Christopher Rothko wrote about his father, the artist, in the twenty-first century.
Non-representational work in Western tradition became a strong challenge for artists post WWII in New York. My visit there was a mere four days in 1972. However, the place held an energy. I became firm in my perception of unique Jewish cultural drive with the contemporary in New York and London. I thought about breakthroughs by the artist Gustav Klimt. I saw several Klimt when hitchhiking through Belgium in 1973. Our driver was a Belgian who knew where the magic of Klimt was housed. We hitchhiked with him, it is so endearing to state, in the smallest of Citroen 2CV 1954 models. I didn't see Judith and the head of Holofernes' then, but several others. I could also think about the Art Business and the wonder of curatorial practices in culture.
Without hesitation, I could take in Turner’s sky glory. On a much more emotional load, I was presented with floor to ceiling crimson and black paintings by Rothko. I was with the Seagram murals. I wasn't to know of the iterative details of these at that time. I read more about Rothko in 2024. Then, though, I knew of a world that had become deep. I was a responsive candidate for his work. I had with me tears about death. My mother had died no more than six years before. I was still carrying that loss. It took me several decades to process, however, what an artist suicide does for the world. In 2024, I read about the stages of Marlborough Gallery's vendor role with ROTHKO’s art, and I read about Rothko's home soil at the Latvian Art Museum. (Appendices MARK ROTHKO) Christopher Rothko wrote about his father, the artist, in the twenty-first century.
Non-representational work in Western tradition became a strong challenge for artists post WWII in New York. My visit there was a mere four days in 1972. However, the place held an energy. I became firm in my perception of unique Jewish cultural drive with the contemporary in New York and London. I thought about breakthroughs by the artist Gustav Klimt. I saw several Klimt when hitchhiking through Belgium in 1973. Our driver was a Belgian who knew where the magic of Klimt was housed. We hitchhiked with him, it is so endearing to state, in the smallest of Citroen 2CV 1954 models. I didn't see Judith and the head of Holofernes' then, but several others. I could also think about the Art Business and the wonder of curatorial practices in culture.
New realism became the story of the post-World War era. American abstract art became a cultural thing. Hodin had spotted very early on how and why Art moved into the modern. He described the artist's motivation. To him the writer's task was to articulate this new style process to the viewer. He conducted critical writings, wrote lectures, wrote notes and corresponded with this perception. Hodin developed the idea of giving voice to consciousness. I went looking for someone who had thought about him. It was Alexandra Lazar, who noted that he wrote perceptive essays. About him she wrote:
‘Hodin’s writing primarily reflects a methodology that sought to illuminate the artistic presence within its times. What he called the enigma, or the dilemma, of modern art was, to paraphrase the critic Jerry Saltz, ‘a link to a new vision and the vision itself’, a method of seeing and knowing humanity that he felt was constantly changing.38 I recognized that a short documentary was made at the TATE between Hodin's daughter, the curator Lazan and an Art professor of Fine Arts at the Slade School, Andrew Stahl. I listened to this in 2026. It is an affirmation, particularly, for Hodin's gesture of introducing European and English art to the world.
‘Hodin’s writing primarily reflects a methodology that sought to illuminate the artistic presence within its times. What he called the enigma, or the dilemma, of modern art was, to paraphrase the critic Jerry Saltz, ‘a link to a new vision and the vision itself’, a method of seeing and knowing humanity that he felt was constantly changing.38 I recognized that a short documentary was made at the TATE between Hodin's daughter, the curator Lazan and an Art professor of Fine Arts at the Slade School, Andrew Stahl. I listened to this in 2026. It is an affirmation, particularly, for Hodin's gesture of introducing European and English art to the world.
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The foreboding was present in his writing, as was his awareness of loneliness and timelessness of creativity “remembering and reproducing itself. “Lazar had written 40 TATE Gallery, London, holds significant documents that discuss Hodin's insights about the Modern world and artists perceiving what this was doing to the minds.41 As well as writing prolifically about Oskar Kokoschka, Hodin was the major biographer of Edvard Munch. In later years he would frequently return to Munch’s work, not least in his lectures at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London during the 1950s.’42 What was significant was Hodin's proclivity to visit and be with any artist he wrote about for a good deal of time. This had been in St Ives and Oslo, as well as in the early instance of meeting Oskar Kokoschka in Switzerland.
Kurt Schwitters attends his shubbery. Hilde Goldschmidt is visiting. She was good friends Schwitter's wife Edith Thomas. Schwitters is standing outside his world famous shed in which he made the art construction Merzbau. Online image. c 1946
The Lake District, UK.
Artist. Kurt Schwitters. 1887 - 1948. c 1943.
Artist Kurt Schwitters in the Lake District in Ambleside.
Famous Schwitters.
As an epileptic, when living in Hannover, Schwitters was exempt from WWI military service. He is most famous for his post-impressionist work and was a champion for performance. He designed Merz, a 'Psychological collage' made with objects he found around himself in six of his family rooms.
He fled to Norway in 1937. He was interned as an enemy alien in Scotland.
Freed in 1941, he moved to Paddington, London to work. He then moved with his wife Edith to Ambleside in the Lake District.
Hilde Goldschmidt lived in Ambleside as artist, a friend and a neighbour to the couple from 1942 - 1949.
Merz Barn wall. Construction by Kurt Schwitters. 1947. Ambleside. The Lake District. UK. (Online image) Heritage. Merz Barn as an influence. Kurt Schwitters discussed.43
We lived with Hilde Goldschmidt for more than two months. My privilege was to be so conscious, vis a vis writing here now, of P J. Hodin's critical writing method. It is special that writers framed her. Then, knowing the manner by which she held her own mental energy up, became inspiration for my own forward trajectory in appraising art with words. I saw David and her engrossed every day and every evening in the 1973 days as they broke into building a first English translation. David broadcasts in his writing, his incredulity in being placed into center European history. I heard Kokoschka laughing on the telephone with Hilde in 1970 on evening, snow falling outside. “A marvellous phone call” Hilde said in a thrilled mood in her stube where we lived the first time with her in the winter of 1970. The call lasted an hour - London to Kitzbühel on a landline. Thus, I too became deeply immersed in the European story. Audibly as well. Incredible.
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Book cover. Autobiography. By Oskar Kokoschka. 1974
Photograph by Stephanie Beth of a book from the glass cabinet of donated books to the Robert and Barbara Stewart collection at Christchurch Art Gallery. It was property of the artist Leo Bensemann. New Zealand. 44
(Der irrende Ritter) Knight Errant. 1915. Oskar Kokoschka. Guggenheim Museum Collection 45
Oskar Kokoschka as a subject
Oskar Kokoschka, artist, poet, playwright and teacher.(1886 - 1980)
Oscar Kokoschka painted Knight Errant after he felt completely unarmed by the agony of losing the child he desired. Alma Mahler arranged an abortion of their foetus without consulting him. He was recovering from a serious wound from war in 1916. I quote from the Guggenheim. I read Cornelia Lauf's label for the painting when exhibited: ‘‘In the Vienna of 1914, a woman having an abortion was cause for scandal, even within the confines of the relatively open-minded art world. When such a woman was the widow of a famous composer, unwed, and carrying on two love affairs simultaneously, her decision would alarm even the most sympathetic souls.” 46
I see in his writing: ‘Thus it is that the agonized knight errant of Oskar Kokoschka’s painting is to this day read as an expression of the artist’s pain over the death of an unborn child and the crumbling of his relationship with the fascinating, and quite unrepentant, not wishing to be a mother, Alma Mahler.’ 47
I began to develop a text for a documentary script. 2021
Title. Bearer of Dreams
Vo Audio
In 1906 Oskar Kokoschka was a prominent painter in Europe. Known as expressionistic, something he would write in 1971, to say, “as in, doing art as young people do, as they set out to find themselves” . Kokoschka took a very personal route. He had lived in total poverty prior to and during the First World War. He travelled extensively, painting many scenes of viewpoints in world famous cities, bent upon capturing these before advancing industrialization eviscerated visual experiences. Image with audio effects.
Muddy sunlight. Colours Serpentine, white and grey textures from within an oil painted canvas fragment fill the frame. This is the Thames and Tower Bridge, London. 1926.Text label.
Tower Bridge, London.1926.performance.(Brush strokes in a painting in the style of Kokoschka, German expressionist) (reference https://www.artsy.net/artwork/oskar-kokoschka-london-waterloo-bridge)Text. London. 1926.
After I visited London, I quickly bought a print of Kokoschka’s Tower Bridge to give to my aunt Priscilla , the one relative who had travelled to Europe in the mid-20th Century from my home territory. It was the first print I ever bought. That’s the bridge, the bascule bridge, built in 1894, that stands today - one down from the one bought by the American who took it brick by brick, (The London Bridge), to the desert.
Kokoschka was seriously concerned about the damages of the “age of rationalism”. p 119.It seemed that he most wanted to appreciate Art for its humanism. He was loath to embrace abstraction.
Image with audio effects.
Historical images of European Wars and History Image with audio effects.
War archive footage. World War I. Maps of Europe animated with conquests and changes.
Vo. Audio Oscar Kokoschka was Born, 1886, “in a small town Pöchlarn on the Danube. Kokoschka took up a pathway to painting. His strategy was to pay little attention to political movements to turn his energies and attention fully to exploration of consciousnesses. We must consider his life during the first World War. We may know that he started drawing young. Image with audio effects.
Costume museum clothing
Having to enroll when aged 28, he trained rudimentarily for World War I as an Austrian cavalryman. Resplendent in a blue jacket with white stripes, yellow trousers and a helmet, upon a horse, his nearest foe was the Russians.
Vo. Audio. Stephanie cont Kokoschka left Hungary, his regiment part of the liberation of the Austrian part of Poland. (p 87) “We left like liberators”, on the endless trek to the Eastern Front”. Kokoschka wrote, “Girls in colourful costumes brought us wine and cheered us up”. “Our cavalry was protecting the flank of the infantry and artillery of the Austro-German army corps” (p88)
9. Voice. Reader
“The first dead that I encountered were young comrades - in arms of my own with whom, a few nights earlier, I had been sitting around a campfire on the Ukrainian forests, playing cards and joking”
”. Next, he saw the results of an attack done ahead of him - “a cap dangles, and in the next tree a dragoon's fur-lined blue cloak”” The horses lay in the forest with their hooves in the air, swollen-bellied, swarming with flies”A day or more later,” The Russians had lured us into a trap. “I felt a dull blow on my temple” Image with audio effects.
Performance.Close up images of paint being applied to a canvas in Expressionistic style
Image with audio effects.DrawingGirls in colourful costumes bring soldiers’ wine Photograph. O.K. as a Dragoon on the Isonzo front. 1916.
Image with audio effects.Performance.Close up images of paint being applied to a canvas in Expressionistic style cont.Vo. Reader
“I had a tiny round hole in my head” “My horse, lying on top of me had lashed out one last time before dying and that had brought me to my senses” (p 93)
“Suddenly, a man was standing over me. He was in a Russian uniform and hence my enemy”. (p 94)” I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand the pain, telling myself that it was only fear, while the bayonet came sliding through the stuff of the jacket”; “Now the point was beginning to pierce my skin, searing into the flesh. My ribs were resisting, expanding, I couldn’t breathe. My capacity was failing. It was unbearable.” ” I went on telling myself, as I grew weaker: ‘Just a second more! This ordinary Russian is only obeying orders!
Image with audio effects.Performance.Close up images of paint being applied to a canvas in Expressionistic style cont.
"Then suddenly I felt quite light and a wave of happiness- never since then in all my life have, I felt it so physically - a sense of well-being positively flung me upward. I was buoyed up on the hot stream of blood from my lungs that was coming out of my mouth and nostrils and eyes and ears. I was floating in mid-air. So, this was all there was to dying?" Voice. Reader. "I couldn’t help laughing in the man’s face before I breathed my last. And the ordeal was over. All I took with me to the other side was the sight of his astonished eyes. The enemy ran away leaving his weapon sticking in my body. It fell out under its own weight”
Image with audio effects. Performance.Close up images of paint being applied to a canvas in Expressionistic style.
Vo.Kokoschka survived a head wound. After he was demobbed, he did not marry, nor have children. He became a committed painter. Image with audio effects.Imagery of Kokoschka paintings
Kokoschka cut all his hair off when he first left Vienna to live in Germany around 1910 so that he looked different from all the other males. I looked like a “convict”, he wrote. Otherwise, he was expected to use a hair net, pompadour, a brush and comb.
It was in Berlin that his work received a commercial value. He had a dealer.
What enormously fascinates me is that during youthful war experience, his psychology created his fearlessness. He left intact with no vulnerable Achilles heel. In that tract just read, he described his rationale as he lay on the ground all the time with his one prescription gun cocked to kill that man, but holding off so that direct killing might not be his action. He said to himself, “After all, it’s our mothers who bring us into the world and not our fatherland”, hence, his thought about the Russian only obeying orders. He escaped death. 48 It has been remarkably interesting to think about Kokoschka. He was insistent upon the importance of Expressionism for German pupils such as Hilde and her generation. Most particularly, he was restless. He gained the label of being a ‘Cook’s Tour’ painter after he painted so many cities before they were obliterated. He wrote, the commissions he did, the number of portraits he did and his having to give up on Vienna, also, his complete disinterest in Cubism, all make the reading of his personal thoughts very considered. He went to England for years in 1939. He borrowed a house in London during the blitz. He and his wife settled in Switzerland. Kokoschka wrote engrossing tracts. Example:
What enormously fascinates me is that during youthful war experience, his psychology created his fearlessness. He left intact with no vulnerable Achilles heel. In that tract just read, he described his rationale as he lay on the ground all the time with his one prescription gun cocked to kill that man, but holding off so that direct killing might not be his action. He said to himself, “After all, it’s our mothers who bring us into the world and not our fatherland”, hence, his thought about the Russian only obeying orders. He escaped death. 48 It has been remarkably interesting to think about Kokoschka. He was insistent upon the importance of Expressionism for German pupils such as Hilde and her generation. Most particularly, he was restless. He gained the label of being a ‘Cook’s Tour’ painter after he painted so many cities before they were obliterated. He wrote, the commissions he did, the number of portraits he did and his having to give up on Vienna, also, his complete disinterest in Cubism, all make the reading of his personal thoughts very considered. He went to England for years in 1939. He borrowed a house in London during the blitz. He and his wife settled in Switzerland. Kokoschka wrote engrossing tracts. Example:
Extract 1. North Africa.
North Africa. After the old city of Tuni (1927 or 1928)
‘On a hair-raising journey from Tougourt south to Chadames, we were forced to take refuge from a sandstorm in the lee of one of those strange, tall, canonical rock formations which are often capped by a mass of precariously balanced stone. Washed out by cloudbursts, blasted smooth by sandstorms, they look like the fossil coral crags on the bed of the sea, wrought into fantastic shapes by the currents. It is hard to believe that North Africa was once the granary of Imperial Rome, and the Sahara a hunting -ground where lions and elephants were trapped for the gladiatorial combats. While we waited for the storm to abate, I began to pick at the crumbled stone lying about us. I found trilobites and parts of oystershells which must have once been as big as cartwheels: but what astonished me most was a fragment of a bone fishhook, delicately worked, reminiscent of the La Tène period”
Extract 2. ‘I have been to Greece five times, too. For all of us, Hellas is an ideal, like the Garden of Eden. Why? Perhaps because there, man came closest to realizing his true nature. Rome, and the whole of Europe until the eighteenth century, lived on the heritage of ancient Greece, building their civilizations on its foundation, while they themselves progressively became less truly human.
An abyss has opened between the ancient Greeks and the modern world. Modern governments - in Germany, and sadly, in England and France as well - are gradually abolishing the study of classical languages, as irrelevant to society’s needs but also because such study stands in contradiction to the spirit of the age, which is entirely dominated by their exact sciences, and would burden the young with useless ballast. No one fears that one day, without ballast, the young might drift weightless and defenseless, at the mercy of the nihilistic current. Even the Catholic Church has now given up, in its sacrament of divine love, the ancient language which once united all nations.’ (Kokoschka) 49
North Africa. After the old city of Tuni (1927 or 1928)
‘On a hair-raising journey from Tougourt south to Chadames, we were forced to take refuge from a sandstorm in the lee of one of those strange, tall, canonical rock formations which are often capped by a mass of precariously balanced stone. Washed out by cloudbursts, blasted smooth by sandstorms, they look like the fossil coral crags on the bed of the sea, wrought into fantastic shapes by the currents. It is hard to believe that North Africa was once the granary of Imperial Rome, and the Sahara a hunting -ground where lions and elephants were trapped for the gladiatorial combats. While we waited for the storm to abate, I began to pick at the crumbled stone lying about us. I found trilobites and parts of oystershells which must have once been as big as cartwheels: but what astonished me most was a fragment of a bone fishhook, delicately worked, reminiscent of the La Tène period”
Extract 2. ‘I have been to Greece five times, too. For all of us, Hellas is an ideal, like the Garden of Eden. Why? Perhaps because there, man came closest to realizing his true nature. Rome, and the whole of Europe until the eighteenth century, lived on the heritage of ancient Greece, building their civilizations on its foundation, while they themselves progressively became less truly human.
An abyss has opened between the ancient Greeks and the modern world. Modern governments - in Germany, and sadly, in England and France as well - are gradually abolishing the study of classical languages, as irrelevant to society’s needs but also because such study stands in contradiction to the spirit of the age, which is entirely dominated by their exact sciences, and would burden the young with useless ballast. No one fears that one day, without ballast, the young might drift weightless and defenseless, at the mercy of the nihilistic current. Even the Catholic Church has now given up, in its sacrament of divine love, the ancient language which once united all nations.’ (Kokoschka) 49
page 30
Kokoschka at work. Villeneuve, Lake Geneva. 1963
‘Eros, as the child of Wealth and Poverty, is always accompanied by Want; and he always pursues the beautiful, like the inspired, clear-sighted creative artist. And so, he stands as a seeker after truth, between the divine - gods who have no need of wisdom, because they are all-wise - and the human, which is eternally unknowing. Diotima, the wise woman of Mantineia, answered her pupil Socrates, when he asked what the value of Eros for mankind was: ‘Eros enters the human soul together with the longing for beauty’. (Kokoschka) 50
(correctives.co.nz/Kokoschka)
Insert 2026
To be noted, so as to round out my Greek reflections, in 2026 I watched a documentary about the doubling of Greek deaths to the birth ratio of new Greeks.
Interestingly, conservative policy works now to provide incentives for Greek births. Some Greeks, after the years when Greece went entirely bankrupt after the 2008 crash, are returning to live in Athens after, for example, seven or eight years of stable work in Germany. Some 30s generation Greeks are returning home and want to make a go of things and consider raising more families. (One article. 51)