ART
With flying colours
BRYAN ROBERTSON
The Commonwealth Institute in Kensington has an excellent gallery almost continually filled with a flow of exhibitions that receive scant critical attention—mostly, perhaps, because critics have a slight feeling that these are 'duty' exhibitions in which artistic stan- dards may be subordinate to socio-political motives, however humane these may be. All the more reason, then, to welcome the retrospective exhibition devoted to Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947), a true artist, who was also a New Zealander, and one hopes the pride of her country, but spent most of her life in Europe and gradually settled into England. This was fortunate for us, for she was one of the best painters working in England in the 'twenties, 'thirties and 'forties: in fact her contribution to the art of the period was at a level that can only be described as surprising for its time and remains, even from the vantage point of today, considerably ahead of many of her better known contemporaries'.
Why has this artist's work passed from public attention? And if one cannot go on paying attention indefinitely to an artist's qualities when, after death, they are bound by the static condition of a known body of work, then why does work by Frances Hodgkins not appear in official résumés of art of the period; why is her work never referred to and why is it unknown to a younger generation? The answers are, first that there has been for some while a fairly stiff resistance to the painting (and writing and everything else) of the nineteen-forties, and this kind of attitude to the zeitgeist cannot be shifted: it is best left for the time being. Second, Frances Hodgkins'
extraordinary achievement, particularly in her late work, would really have been most interesting in the mid 'fifties, when artists were very conscious of a fresh emphasis on gestural spontaneity, of abstract ex- pressionism, in fact—nobody bothered to bring her work forward at that moment, when it would have aroused the keenest sympathy and recognition, and now the possibility has passed because art is con- cerned with different issues.
Frances Hodgkins was not heavily produc- tive, her scale was the scale in which every- one worked at that time and therefore modest (a three foot by four foot painting is big, for her), and most of her supporters in the commercial art world are now dead. Her paintings stay alive as treasured possessions in private collections or a few public galleries, but no one is really actively engaged, it seems, with her reputation. Eric Newton wrote of her work with special warmth and belief, and one of the most beautifully written and exact appreciations of her work I can recall was the essay by Myfanwy Piper for the Frances Hodgkins paperback in the old 'Penguin Modern Painters' series, now out of print. Just what were the strengths of this artist which inspired so much affectionate support at one time, were so peculiarly relevant to another and later time, and now rest in obscurity for most people?
Whatever form her talent found for itself in later years, it had great initial strength. This can be seen in early portraits, groups of people in rooms, and landscapes, in which the very strong colour is matched by an extreme formal confidence, shown most clearly in the vigorous drawing. These draw- ings, of rare delicacy and concentration, shown in silver grey, almost shimmering pencil strokes and gradations of light tone
on the white paper, are absolutely constant throughout her life: they flash in and out of her paintings like recitatif before the arias, and I am certain that they must include some of the very best drawings of this cen- tury—a large statement, but study them before dismissing the possibility. At the Commonwealth Institute, Leaves and a Pot (no 67), Drawing with Landscape (no 66), or Sewed Woman (no 48) would be' hard to refute as examples oil inspired draughtsmanship that could hold its own anywhere. The next phase in her working process is a key work: Arrangement of Jugs (no 86) in which the precision and unassertive strength of the drawings move with the freer marks of painting. This work has a floating structure, a lack of weight, and a sharpness of calligraphic 'summing up' which one enjoys in Chinese art, but Frances Hodgkins was more obviously stimulated by modern French painting, notably Matisse, and by the more or less contemporary English artists of her ac- quaintance who were similarly affected by French art: Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Ivon Hitchens and Christopher Wood.
It is tempting, if unpatriotic, to think that Frances Hodgkins made a mistake in leaving one island for another. She lived and worked a good deal in France and Spain, but some of her earliest years outside New Zealand were spent in St Ives (1914-20) and she is mainly known for her paintings of Pem- brokeshire and Dorset in the 'thirties and 'forties. The best of these remain as beautiful as ever, by any standards; but I have sometimes wondered whether working con- sistently away from England might have strengthened her work still further, for a lot of provincialism, however sophisticated, was in the English climate at that time.
Landscape through her eyes is given the intimacy and particularity of still life but still retains the gleam and flash of the out- doors. The sense of lovingly observed detail, as obvious in her drawings as the swelling arabesques which unify them, is translated in her paintings into floating vignettes of barn, picket fence, cows, roof tops, fields and ponds. Her colour is unique and unforgettable: chocolate bluish-brown, col- oured whites, riverweed greens, French blue and mauve-grey. The paint is always silky, and bland in surface: the actual marks and brush strokes alive, pointed, and mean- ingfully beautiful in themselves. This artist really had a vision, and caught it.
The show may not perhaps live up to these claims, for it has been compiled, so the catalogue says, `to assemble not necessarily the "best" works but a fully representative selection covering a painting life that lasted half a century.' I seem to have memories of some large late paintings that are not to be found in this show which would have strengthened the total disclosure: and with the photographs of the artist, her family, and her homes, on screens, one is left somehow with a feeling of a life rather more than the work itself. This is not disagreeable: you leave the show with an image of a gifted, perhaps isolated, female presence in your mind rather like those likeably eccentric heroines of Patrick White. in certain of his novels, but there is still the feeling that the work might have been more strongly selected.
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