The art of travel
Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys
Edited by Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler
AUP, $75
All hail Auckland Art Gallery for the exhibition and remarkable accompanying publication Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys!
This year is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Hodgkins, New Zealand’s most internationally fêted early-20th-century modernist artist.
Hodgkins could be considered core business for the gallery, but her career comes with reservations. The best of her work belongs overseas. Not only was her subject matter foreign, but so, too, were the ideas underpinning it. In a country obsessed with national identity, it would be easy to imagine her career slipping between the slats of New Zealand regionalism. Artistic reputation here, however, has always pitched and tossed between waves of myopic self-examination and New Zealand’s incessant need for affirmation overseas.
And no other artist has satisfied this country’s need for international recognition more completely than Hodgkins.
By its very nature, then, is like train travel through distant lands. Through its many magnificent full-page images, there is an impression of passing at speed. Of
