By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

"I'm sorry sir, pens are not allowed," a gallery attendant advised as I scrawled in my notebook in the Rita Angus survey exhibition at Te Papa. "I'll go get a pencil for you." I was tempted to ask for a brush and paint.

It's hard to be churlish however - the paintings look fantastic in this beautifully presented show. Not only does Angus's work surprise you with its life whenever seen out of reproduction, they look here like they've had some major conservational love and care.

Image: Boats, Island Bay, 1962-63 by Rita Angus, oil on hardboard, private collection. Reproduced courtesy of the Rita Angus Estate.By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

"I'm sorry sir, pens are not allowed," a gallery attendant advised as I scrawled in my notebook in the Rita Angus survey exhibition at Te Papa. "I'll go get a pencil for you." I was tempted to ask for a brush and paint.

It's hard to be churlish however - the paintings look fantastic in this beautifully presented show. Not only does Angus's work surprise you with its life whenever seen out of reproduction, they look here like they've had some major conservational love and care.

Image: Boats, Island Bay, 1962-63 by Rita Angus, oil on hardboard, private collection. Reproduced courtesy of the Rita Angus Estate.On several lunchtime visits I've been surrounded by quietly cooing crowds of Angus admirers, one of whom (from Auckland) remarked on the joy of being able to get up as close as she liked to the surfaces of these gems, rather than being stuck behind white lines.

Yes, Rita Angus Life and Vision is a painter's delight. A strength is its demonstration of Angus's rigorous approach to her work. Rather than making you want to grab a brush and finish Angus's unfinished works off, you marvel at how this painter continually pushed her ideas into new ground to reflect a world she called 'richly variable and infinitely beautiful' - a world that can maybe never be considered complete.

This is an exhibition to celebrate Te Papa's tenth anniversary (a gift to the nation, we're told pompously) and the irony is that it looks more like something from the defunct National Art Gallery than anything that has preceded it.

The Tower Gallery has been smartly configured to allow for the exhibition of 200 nicely-spaced works, the design providing a series of domestically-scaled rooms that encourage an intimate reflection of paintings, each room providing a strong chronological grouping of works.

The last big exhibition representing Angus's oeuvre was at the National Art Gallery in 1982. The agenda then was on assuring Angus's place in New Zealand art history, Angus having asserted her independence throughout her life. Yet what is interesting about commentary around Angus is how writers and curators continue to consider her apart from her contemporaries and artists today.

With Life and Vision curators William McAloon and Jull Trevelyan state that presenting a survey twenty-six years on from the last provides the opportunity to reassess Angus ¹s place now, yet in the curation and writing in the accompanying catalogue (again based around chronological groupings) that fresh contemporary critical gaze is not easily apparent.

There are many, many astonishing paintings in this exhibition. The familiar icons surprise with every visit (icon being quite the word with an artist so determinedly creating jewels to venerate). Struck by Angus ¹s extraordinary ability and dare as a colourist, I was newly enchanted by the music in the interplay of colour between book spines for example behind the celebrated portrait of Betty Curnow. It's a painting I never tire of looking at.

Less familiar works also delight. I've always adored Angus's painting of Central
Otago from 1953, but I revelled in the complex animation of other landscapes from this period, such as two of Hawkes Bay under flood.

Yet as innovative as Angus could be, seeing the full gamut of Angus's work is also to see that she could also rest occasionally in conservative and rather ordinary ground. While in the much admired Boats, Island Bay the boats chatter together like a choir of sparrows on a musical stave of wires, the same subject painted two years later has no such musical charge.

Conversely, for every two astonishing landscape here, where a complex layering of different perspectives and elements sings, there is another where the compression of different elements into a picture frame may be bold in arrangement, but the overall effect is awkward and boxy.

The well-known Cass is exception to the general rule that when Angus places a figure in a landscape it's awkward. It's only when the figure themselves is at the centre of the work as portrait, becoming the landscape itself that they come to life. For all the smart framing and composition of a late painting like 'At Suzy's Coffee Lounge' it's a remarkably dull account of humanity.

In later works the experimentation can be particularly striking and it's the sense of the supernatural that brings some everyday subjects alive. In a nice touch McAloon and Trevelyan have included Angus ¹s drawing studies of the moon pulsating with differently coloured aura. Meanwhile it's a smoke-ring of cloud, like a manifestation of a holy ghost that makes a depiction of houses in Thorndon.

A contemporary focus then may be glimpsed in some of the selections, but it's subsumed by the need to tell Angus's life story. While the curators talk about following Angus's idea of creating 'a kind temple of art', the chronological approach dulls that.

Arguably this is too much to expect of curators given the job of creating the biggest and most popular national birthday card possible, and in that Te Papa have succeeded. Rita Angus Life and Vision is a real treat and, in a particularly welcome move, this free exhibition will tour to Dunedin, Christchurch and then Auckland.

Rita Angus Life and Vision, Tower Gallery, Te Papa, until 5 October

12/08/09