Art People
Dealing Court Cards in Cuba Street

ALAN BRUNTON

In 1968, it was a circuitous path that brought Elva Bett to 147 Cuba Street to perch a new art gallery in the fracture between Wellington's Chinatown and its levantine quarter. It was a route which lead to a decision and purpose tenaciously upheld despite the vagaries of the art world.

Elva Bett was at that time a director of the Centre Gallery. The Centre Gallery found itself uncertain whether to be a gallery or a coffee bar an uncertainty which forced the director to remove paintings from the walls every time the premises were sublet. Rothmans had approached Ms Bett with the scrambled idea that she became art tutor at their recently opened Cultural Centre, the point being that lessons would be held in view of the idle and inquisitive flotsam of downtown Wellington. Enter fortuitously, Mr Steve Degen, a nimble Dutchman with ideas of starting a cultural complex, a nerve centre for the plastic arts in a building both modest and cheap at the price. Ms Bett inspected the reality, acknowledged the ideal and kicked out into deep water.

The gallery opened on December 3, 1968. Its avowed intention was simply to provide a well lighted gallery in which to exhibit the work of artists of both fame and promise. Catherine Duncan became co-director and total assets were sixteen hundred borrowed dollars. It was called a studio gallery because Elva Bett was to hold her private studio classes in the morning until 11.30 which accounts for the curious opening hour of the gallery to this day. The first exhibits included pots by Doreen Blumhardt and 20/20 vision prints by Greer Twiss and Hamish Keith.

On 10 February the next year the first major show opened with work by John Drawbridge, Tanya Ashken, Paul Olds and Helen Stewart. As Elva Bett indicates, the time was auspicious: 'The academy was all there was really available in Wellington. .. Peter Mcleavey had been dealing, well almost unknown on the. Terrace. The Academy, apart from the Centre Gallery, was all there was; it was the only place to exhibit which was a step removed from the art society. You outgrew the art club thing and the next step was the Academy.'

In fact, apart from Mcleavey and, in Auckland, Barry Lett, the dealer gallery idea in New Zealand was still in a primitive state of locusts and honey. In the 1940s there had been Helen Hitchings Gallery in Wellington and in 1956 Peter Webb threw open the doors to his Argus House Gallery only to close them, broke, two years later. Certainly, the 632-whitewashed-square-feet of the Bett-Duncan Studio Gallery drew the most diverse and cosmopolitan painters. In the stock-room were works by Suzanne Goldberg, Don Binney, Rita Angus and Robin White. During the first couple of years there were exhibitions by: Joan Fanning, DFA (Lond), Vere Dudgeon from Dublin en route to Massachusetts, Bob Bassant (born Rotterdam), Colette Rands (born Paris, educated in Canada), the Cantabrian Trevor Moffitt, the Russian/Pole Yuri Kubiack.

Elva Bett with painting by Gordon Crook

This eclectic scattering of art was sustained by the energy of the directors and the chaotic anarchy of art in the late 1960s. Exhibitions had to cut back from three weeks to two. The gallery's policy however was settling firmly on two feet. Ms Bett retained links with the Academy through the loose collective of Gallery 'A~ which included Betty Clegg, Vera Jamieson, Bonnie Quirk and co-director Catherine Duncan, and Academicians Avis Higgs, Diana Watson and Laura Steinburg. Solid and lyrical painters to become regular exhibitors included the Alexandra mother of three, Elizabeth Stevens and Kilbirnie postmaster, Bruce Henry.

On the other foot, the directors pursued aggressively the best and brightest young painters, especially recent graduates from both Elam and Ilam. The first of these graduate shows included john Nicol and Geoff Tune, who both became regular showers for a time. The following year introduced Glenda Randerson and Dyanne Goldsmith and virtually unleashed the bravura expressionist Philip Clairmont.

Clairmont's wild grab-bag of images painted carelessly on hopsacking drew a bewildered response from critics but instant karma from Elva Bett: 'When I first saw Philip Clairmont's work I was that excited by it because I hadn't seen anything as rough as that and yet made a statement, and large. Now, to be confronted with that when you think you know which way painting is going... this was raw material and it excited more than the established type of painting.'

Clairmont returned to the gallery in May 1972, in company with his friend and mentor Tony Fomison in a show called Prospect which also featured Ben Pitman from Auckland. Fomison already had a slowly burgeoning reputation as a mystic and bird of night passage - and this was certainly the last time one would see Clairmont opera with thirty dollar price tags. By 1974, Clairmont was attracting excited comment from Hamish Keith and Michael Dunn in Auckland and his first one-man show at the Bett-Duncan, an introspective and nihilistic show called Mirrors. His acrylics and collages on hardboard and canvas had leapt to $500.

In 1976 the porcupine shot its quills. A Clairmont triptych was offered at $1,250 in a starburst exhibition that attracted journalists to the artist's Waikanae home like addicts to the gluepot. Against the hedonistic Clairmont, Rob Taylor mounted seven large oils with colours indicating a nervous freedom, a medulla-scratching sense of detail. Tony Fomison presented an exhibition of intricate and metaphysical thought, an interest in the mediaeval that had parallels in some recent poetry but not in painting. It was curious indeed that as these artists were scrabbling off the walls into the arms of a new generation of collectors, into embassies in foreign parts in some cases and into the new attroupements of galleries like the Govett-Brewster, Don Binney was guest artist at the Academy's annual beanfeast. These former were not the only new workers to attract attention.

Elva Bett's receptivity to the new and the young had attracted also, for example, Joanna Harris with her traceries and rhymes and the self-taught painters Gary Griffiths and Allen Maddox. These people too are making noises at the edge of something great and significant. This should not be taken as evidence that the Gallery is a low-rent bon Marché for passing bohemians and gadflies: 'If someone walks into the gallery and says "I would like to hire your gallery for an exhibition", the immediate answer is "No you can't". The next thing is that before anyone has an exhibition, I want to see their work and see if it fits our format, which has almost worked around to a young contemporary format. This has become the card the Gallery plays so you don't want to compromise your standing. The work must have content to your liking, perhaps even before quality. This has nothing to do with sales potential."

The very survival of Elva Bett in the art gallery circuit is sufficient to argue her business acumen but can in no way give an adequate idea of the fidgets of the actual business of dealing. Ms Bett has tacked a difficult course between the realism of selling for what the market will bear and the idealism of her credo: the buyer needs to know what he is getting. There have been the calculations and guesses of a disparate group of art critics and society writers for the capital city's daily papers to be hedged and educated as well. There have been buyers as well, of course: 'I have had one time when someone has come in, like in a fable, and said: "I'll take that, that, that and that," with me rubbing my hands and then gone upstairs and said: "I'll take that, that and that", with me rubbing my hands and thinking oh dear, here it comes. And then that awful feeling, I wonder if he's a con-man; I wonder if he's got any money!'

In 1976, Catherine Duncan departed the partnership and the gallery became simply Elva Bett. The breaking of the old firm was doubtless amicable but there is reason to suspect that Ms Duncan's eclectic tastes clashed with Elva's syntactic point of view. Ms Bett says categorically: 'I was a printmaker and a painter. Now, I.know painting from the canvas out; I know printing from the plate out and I'm prepared to work with things I know...I suppose I'm a purist. When all is said and done, I think there is a content in painting which goes beyond just the pictorial or the gimmicky or the adventuresome or the experimental - it has a content which includes what painting through the centuries has been about'.

It is this uncompromising attitude which has attracted .to the gallery artists like John Drawbridge (perhaps the gallery's best seller). It is a constancy to duty which enables her to continue stocking sophisticated non-sellers like Robert Franken and Robert McLeod, to exhibit etchers like Gary Tricker, and to further the reputations of nervous and reclusive talents like that of Robin McPherson.

It is clear that Ms Bett relishes flying solo: 'Of late, I've come to terms with myself. There was a comment that the gallery was tainted with "amateurism" it doesn't matter whether it hurt or not - but it's the sort of thing that makes you stand up and have a really good look at yourself. It was a very anonymous thing that I was looking at, not even a person. But there is now a group of people coming here who are forming policy as much as I try to force a policy. It is not the market forcing particular policies but rather these people developing as painters!'

Elva Bett has exhibited young and misunderstood artists for no return except her dedication to the art and now that these young dudes are set to move out into the market without compromises, Elva Bett is with them measuring swords with the establishment. As her artists of promise go for their fame, Ms Bett will bring them to market; she has no fear of losing at cards with the colporteurs. 'I've never felt as strong in my sense of purpose as I do at the moment. I really feel a strength under the gallery which is the young artists. There is some reason for them to be bandied together even though they don't all know each other (which is very interesting). This is the direction I would like to go, that's promoting this strong group of young people who are going to be the next company of artists. But different things dictate the future; the lease runs out next year! You leave it up to fate and circumstance. This little game you play each month to keep solvent, it must be economic or else it becomes a foible'.

ELVA BETT, Born Dunedin 1918, Artist member New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. Hon. member New Zealand Print Council. Represented in the following collections: Netherlands legation, Waikato University, Hawkes Bay Art Gallery, New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. Director, Elva Bett Gallery, 147 Cuba Street, Wellington