Rita Moiret (1912-1994) enamel composition, abstract, signed, 25 x 34cm.

Provenance: Estate of the artist.

Rita, was born Henrietta Huppert in Vienna on November 9th,1912. Her father was a banker and also an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Cavalry. Her mother, Greta, was the youngest daughter of a very successful Haute Couture dynasty, clothing the aristocracy of Vienna and also furnishing the Schonbrunn, Vienna's imperial palace. The headquarters of this business was completely faced, inside and out, in marble and still exists in Vienna today.

From the very beginning, Rita was blessed with striking features and beauty. Her mother, Greta, despite the seven-year difference between them, insisted on dressing Rita and her younger sister Kitty, in identical outfits, which Rita understandably detested. Although Rita was a beautiful child, her younger sister, Kitty, was not. Rita was always mischievous and never paid any attention at school. One of the stories she told was how she regularly managed to deface her exam reports so that her father could not read her results. Kitty, on the other hand, was studious, learned the violin and, among other things, became an ice skating champion. Both sisters went to Art College in Vienna, learned dress-making, pattern-cutting and design with the intention that they would graduate naturally into the family business to continue creating the high end fashion couture for which the family was reknowned.

As a beautiful young woman growing up in Viennese society, Rita was a loud, flamboyant, good-time party girl, revelling in and trading on her beauty. She spent her time going to balls at the Palace and trips to Italy with posh parties at the Lido di Venezia and at Rimini. On a school skiing trip to the alps when she was 16, she and a couple of school friends regularly climbed out of their dormitory window to go night-clubbing. During one of these illicit excursions, she met Peter Moiret who, at 18 was also on a school skiing trip. Their courtship developed into an eight-year year long relationship. During these years, in Germany Hitler was gathering momentum as a force to be watched and feared and in 1936 he invaded Austria.

Peter Moiret was born in 1910, the only son of the theosophist, honorary professor and celebrated Secessionist sculptor, Odon Moiret (1883-1967). Peter had a troubled relationship with his father and as an aspiring young architect, overshadowed by his father's fame, found it difficult to make a name for himself in Vienna. So, for both personal and also political reasons, in 1935 Peter emigrated to England. A year later he telephoned Rita, who was on a work placementin Switzerland and asked her to come to England and marry him.Three days after her arrival, on May Ist 1936, and not understanding a word of English, they were married at Caxton Registry Office. They rented a flat in Kensington and Peter together with a colleague set up his architectural practice, Moiret & Wood, with offices in Bridge House at Blackfriars overlooking the river. Peter spoke fluent English, but Rita did not and, throughout her life never entirely lost her German accent. When the War started, in 1939, Kitty and Greta got out of Austria and came to join Rita and Peter in the UK where Kitty soon married a Gl and emigrated to America, where she too became a successful fashion designer.

Within a year of their marriage, Rita and Peter had moved into their own house in Willifield Way in the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Both had both grown up in large apartments in Vienna complete with a cook and house-maid. In London, as was typical for the 1930s and 40s, while Peter went off to the office every day, Rita stayed at home, doing the shopping, cleaning and cooking. As time went on, Rita felt that this was tantamount to being demoted to servant status and it was certainly a far cry from the former care-free, glamorous, career and socialite lifestyle she had enjoyed in Vienna, Italy and Switzerland. While Peter went to the City to pursue his career, Rita did not succeed in merging with the English housewives around her who no doubt found her, with her Mediterranean colouring, flamboyant ways and foreign cooking, very strange and exotic, and she found herself left alone at home. As the

war progressed, she became more and more isolated: a real fish out of water. To add to her predicament, sometime during the War, Peter developed Tuberculosis and had to spend a year in a sanatorium out in Hertfordshire leaving Rita to go through the Blitz on her own.

Shortly after the war in Europe ended, their only child, Caroline, was born. Peter was out busily rebuilding bomb-ravaged London while Rita stayed at home with the baby, becoming more and more unhappy and frustrated. The relationship between Rita and Peter deteriorated and there were frequent violent exchanges between them. During this time, however, Rita got into the habit of travelling into central London, wheeling the pushchair with its reluctant occupant and spending the day visiting the big department stores, museums and art galleries. Rita also never gave up going to the annual Paris fashion shows where she would invariably sketch the designs on the cat-walks and regularly find herself being arrested by the Police and having her sketches confiscated. This always seemed to be a source of great amusement to her and nothing ever seemed to come of it.

In the 1950s Rita had begun attending life drawing and pottery classes. She discovered modern art: artists such as Stefan Knapp and, in particular, Jackson Pollock. At first she had experimented with making pots and other ceramic objects but then moved on to making jewellery in silver, hammering out exotic shapes and sometimes insetting some of the amethysts she had inherited from her mother. Rita was completely unlike the usual delicate "English Rose' in colouring and proportions of the women around her. with her strong features and colouring she was still striking and she designed her jewellery and clothes to suit her own looks and proportions. She would lay fabric out in the garden and then paint it before making up her own outfits. She also cut her own hair - much shorter than was usual for the time. Rather than being delicate and flowery as was the fashion round her, her work was large-scale and free-style. She also became good at promoting herself and began to sell her jewellery at Heals in Tottenham Court Road. She started to experiment with enamels, and soon progressed to cutting and hammering out shapes from copper sheeting and creating dishes in unusual shapes, covered in colourful enamels which were then fired in a kiln. She discovered a boys’ school in Hornsey, where she could use a workshop at night, firing larger and larger pieces in their kilns. As her pieces continued to grow she ultimately found space in a factory where they had kilns big enough in which to fire her work. She finally designed and had a quantity of copper tiles made up for her which were flanged so that they could be mounted.

The dining room in Willifield Way became her studio and also housed a large kiln where she could fire these tiles. Her designs flowed over groupings of tiles which were then fired in the kiln and which Peter then mounted for her. From then on Rita had many exhibitions up and down the UK and frequently also worked to commission, designing wall panels for people's private swimming pools and for commercial premises. She was also commissioned to paint the walls of a children's playground in the East End. This was Rita's finest, most productive and successful period, her work featured in leading galleries and West End stores including The Grosvenor Galleries, Heals, Sanderson’s, Jaegar and Selfridges. She was good at promoting herself and getting herself interviewed regularly by various newspapers. She was in her element; productive, happy, spontaneous and unconventional. Her striking looks and unconventional dress sense also went well with the vibrancy and free expression of her work. From being unhappy and housebound, constantly in violent fights with Peter, for several years she became once again flamboyant, noisy, unconventional and outrageous. However, by 1967 things had deteriorated once again and Peter had virtually moved out. Rita became increasingly house-bound and seemed unable to return to life-drawing classes or any other sort of environment where she might meet other people and she slowly started to go down hill. She was even sectioned and although she only stayed in hospital for a month and refused all medication, her creative output dwindled. Rita died on 20th June, 1994 aged 81.

Although Rita Moiret’s career was brief, it was a vibrant as she was, capturing the spirit of the age in abstract explosions of colour, her enamels are immediately redolent of the prevailing Scandinavian style of the 60s, the present works are all by family decent from the artist and this auction represents a rare opportunity to acquire trending work by an artist rarely seen at auction.