Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys

By Independent Publishers Group

A vivid and revealing book published alongside a landmark exhibition focused on one of New Zealand's most internationally recognised artists, Frances Hodgkins. Marking the 150th anniversary of the artist's birth New Zealand-born Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947) arrived in London in 1901 and, by the 1920s, had become a leading British modernist, exhibiting frequently with avant-garde artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Published to coincide with a touring exhibition of her work initiated by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, this book explores Hodgkins as a traveller across cultures and landscapes—teaching and discovering the cubists in Paris, absorbing the landscape and light of Ibiza and Morocco, and exhibiting with the progressive Seven & Five Society in London. Complete with a rich visual chronology of the artist's encounters abroad, alongside over one hundred of Hodgkins' key paintings and drawings, the book is an illuminating journey that moves us from place to place through the writings of a number of distinguished national and international art historians, curators and critics: Frances Spalding (University of Cambridge, England), Alexa Johnston (Auckland-based writer and curator), Elena Taylor (University of New South Wales, Australia), Antoni Ribas Tur (Ara newspaper, Spain), and Julia Waite, Sarah Hillary, Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: May 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781776710409

Book preview

Contents

Foreword

Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947) remains one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most independent and significant artists and she was the first to achieve international recognition, celebrated in her lifetime as one of Britain’s leading modernist painters. Enthusiastically reclaimed by New Zealand after her death, the artist’s work is yet to be reinserted within the European context in which her practice flourished. The exhibition Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys undertakes this important task with fresh research and insight. With infinite care and forensic fascination, the exhibition’s curator Mary Kisler has examined the key significance of place and locale in Hodgkins’ work, and in doing so has illuminated her practice in unexpected ways. This, coupled with the launch of an online catalogue raisonné, makes this endeavour one of this country’s most important and extensive art-historical research projects in recent years. Underpinned by generous research funding from the Stout Trust, the Decorative and Fine Arts Society of New Zealand and NZ–UK Link, the exhibition will tour New Zealand and the United Kingdom and introduce new audiences to this exceptional painter and her remarkable legacy and influence.

This publication, which accompanies the touring exhibition, is generously supported by the Friends of the Auckland Art Gallery Incorporated and the Joy Marchant Bequest. It is one of the most ambitious yet published on Hodgkins and is the first exhibition catalogue to bring together new scholarship on the artist from both international and New Zealand writers. In addition to the illuminating chapters written by Mary Kisler, we are tremendously grateful to the book’s accompanying contributors: Frances Spalding, Elena Taylor and Antoni Ribas Tur on Hodgkins in England, France and Spain respectively; Alexa Johnston and Mary Kisler’s detailed chronology, Julia Waite on the St Ives period and Sarah Hillary’s examination of Hodgkins’ modernist painting techniques and technical experimentations. Edited by Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler, who jointly led the Hodgkins project at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, we were thrilled to work with Auckland University Press on this publication, not least because of their long and enduring publishing legacy on Hodgkins, including many of the key texts by her biographer Eric McCormick and Linda Gill’s consummate Letters of Frances Hodgkins.

Gathering together and researching the works of Frances Hodgkins’ vigorous six-decade long artistic career has been an immense task. It has required enormous dedication by gallery staff and a team of volunteers including senior curator Mary Kisler, librarians and archivists Catherine Hammond, Caroline McBride and Tamsyn Bayliss, photographers Jennifer French and John McIver, volunteer Chloe Steer alongside registrars Naomi Boult and Rachel Walmsley. This work has been supported by the guidance of the project’s steering group comprised of Hodgkins experts Iain Buchanan, Roger Collins, Linda Gill, John Gow, Alexa Johnston and Linda Tyler. Their willingness to generously share their knowledge of and passion for the work of Frances Hodgkins has been invaluable.

We also extend our gratitude to the many lenders to this exhibition from both public and private collections in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, and to our New Zealand touring partners Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington. In particular the support of Tate in London and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington has been vital: by providing access to their extensive archival holdings on Frances Hodgkins, as well as collaborating on the digitisation of significant material, our ability to tell the Frances Hodgkins story for a new generation has been immensely enriched.

Rhana Devenport, ONZM

Director, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2013–2018

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Locating Frances Hodgkins

Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler

She was a highly intelligent woman whom I thought was an extremely good painter and that is how I regarded her and is the reason why I loved her. She was part of us – with no parish, country, climate or anything else attached to her. She was just herself and she was such a sensitive person that she was very good at adopting the colour of the climate she was in – like a fish on the bottom of the sea. – JOHN PIPER¹

FIGURE 1.1

Frances Hodgkins, mid-1930s

Frances Mary Hodgkins (1869–1947) has always been difficult to locate within existing art-historical frameworks. Resistant to any particular style, forever on the move, her place within modernist art has never been settled. Born in New Zealand in the second half of the nineteenth century, she exemplified the progressive attitude and spirit of the ‘colonial woman’: a single, talented local artist who left for Europe in her early thirties. From that point onwards Hodgkins seldom had a fixed abode, and determinedly avoided any encumbrance, without property or any family of her own, her entire life. Instead she worked, as she wished, as an independent professional artist in a career that spanned six decades, drawing inspiration from the changing scene around her that her freedom and transience afforded.

It was not until Hodgkins was approaching the age of sixty that she began to establish a central place for herself within British modernism. In 1929 she was elected to the influential Seven & Five Society and exhibited with key members of the British avant-garde such as Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. Yet, as Graham Sutherland noted, ‘She was already speaking the language which gradually spelt freedom in art.’² Her highly acclaimed solo show at St George’s Gallery in 1930 was a defining moment, as Barbara Hepworth recalled: ‘I always remember, with considerable excitement, my first acquaintance with the painting of Frances Hodgkins … The work had great strength and purity and was so individual it was like discovering some new world.’³ Raymond Mortimer’s review in the New Statesman of her 1940 exhibition at Lefevre Gallery reached new heights of praise, describing her as ‘unique’, ‘personal and original’, ‘visionary’ and ‘the most inventive colourist in England’.⁴ M. H. Middleton’s review in the Spectator of Hodgkins’ 1946 retrospective exhibition simply stated: ‘she is one of the most remarkable woman painters of our own or any country, of our own or any time’.⁵

Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys traces the impact of the ever-changing locales on Hodgkins’ development as a modernist painter. She travelled a long and singular artistic journey from late Victorian watercolourist to twentieth-century modernist, and if her style kept evolving it was due in large part to the constant exposure she had to new places, people and ideas. Hodgkins’ openness and curiosity, so apparent in her letters, meant she was perfectly poised to accrue within her work many of the artistic developments she was surrounded by. But the influences, for example, of Paris prior to World War I, London in the late 1920s and Spain in the 1930s were also filtered through her own strong sense of artistic self and by her ‘outsider’ status: female, antipodean, alone and impecunious. Not that she was without supporters: Hodgkins had a talent for friendship and built up a loyal circle around her – including Hannah Ritchie and Jane Saunders, Arthur Lett-Haines and Cedric Morris, John Piper and Myfanwy Evans, Geoffrey Gorer and Eardley Knollys – who championed and collected her work. Their admiration and backing, along with that of her family, played a critical part in her capacity to keep practising her art.

Looking afresh at Hodgkins’ work through this lens of changing locale has resulted in an exhibition, and a catalogue, that investigates the critical places in her artistic life with all their specificity of history, topography, light and colour, people and cultural milieu. They also speak of the turmoil and disruption of the first half of the twentieth century: more than once Hodgkins was forced to abandon a place that had suddenly become too dangerous, and her portraits of refugees are among her most evocative works. Her landscapes and still-life works distil the particularity of the sights and objects that attended her in each new place, elements to which she then applied a burgeoning modernist sensibility and, in doing so, elevated them into something emblematic and timeless.

FIGURE 1.2

Self-Portrait: Still Life, c. 1935

We begin this book with Frances Spalding’s overarching discussion of Hodgkins’ place within British modernism and her period of alignment to a group of younger avant-garde artists with whom she maintained an important coterie of friends. The chapters that follow take the notion of place as their starting point: Mary Kisler on Hodgkins’ beginnings in Dunedin, at the time New Zealand’s cultural and economic capital, through to her first trip to Europe and North Africa at the turn of the century. Elena Taylor introduces Hodgkins’ Paris of 1908, then at the height of the belle époque, whereas Mary Kisler focuses on the more experimental of her works created during this period. Julia Waite writes of her move to St Ives in Cornwall during World War I where restrictions on outdoor sketching resulted in a series of superb portraits. Mary Kisler then focuses on two of the turning points for Hodgkins’ modernism: the south of France in the 1920s and, with Antoni Ribas Tur, writes about the seminal influence of Spain on the direction of her work in the 1930s. Kisler then discusses the final decade-and-a-half of Hodgkins’ career when she was at the height of her fame in Britain. Finally, Sarah Hillary’s analysis of two of Hodgkins’ works from a materials perspective provides new evidence to support her developing use of modernist painting techniques.

Frances Hodgkins’ final decade saw her based primarily in England and Wales, working productively through another war in her studio at Corfe Castle. In these years her career culminated with her selection as one of Britain’s artists for both the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and the ill-fated 1940 Venice Biennale, along with her highly regarded retrospective in 1946 at Lefevre Gallery in London. After her death in 1947 her reputation in England peaked again with the publication of Myfanwy Evans’ Frances Hodgkins in the Penguin Modern Painters series and her memorial exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1952.

This was Hodgkins’ standing as an artist in 1952 when Eric Westbrook arrived in New Zealand, from a role at the British Council in London, as Auckland Art Gallery’s first professional director. He immediately set about establishing a collection of her works for Auckland, enlisting the help of local art historian Eric McCormick, who identified what was already held in New Zealand and travelled to Britain to search for potential acquisitions. Many of these works were eventually shown in the first major Hodgkins retrospective held in New Zealand, The Paintings and Drawings by Frances Hodgkins, in 1959. It was a cause for celebration that a number of Hodgkins works had come ‘home’ and that her reputation, considered secure in England, would now be permanently established in New Zealand after so little recognition in her lifetime.

In the intervening sixty years the major part of Hodgkins’ oeuvre has returned to New Zealand. This has enabled close studies of the artist by many local scholars – including Eric McCormick, Charles Brasch, Elizabeth Sheppard, June Opie, Linda Gill, Tony Green, Gordon H. Brown, Michael Dunn, Elizabeth Eastmond, Christina Barton, Joanna Drayton, Linda Tyler, Alexa Johnston, Iain Buchanan, Roger Collins and Rodney Wilson – and we are indebted to their research. Repositioning Hodgkins back within the European and British contexts in which she made her work has also been dependent on archival research into the material that remains, to varying degrees, in many of the places where she lived, worked and exhibited, in France, Spain, England, Wales, Holland and North Africa. The Frances Hodgkins Online Catalogue Raisonné that accompanies this exhibition allows researchers worldwide that complete view of her practice which has only been possible in New Zealand. Above all, it will serve to reintroduce Hodgkins’ intense and lyrical visions of place to the people who live in the many locations where she made her works and allow future generations, in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, to locate Frances Hodgkins for themselves.

Frances Hodgkins had her own eccentric spelling style, which we have retained in all quotations from her letters.

Recent research has resulted in the re-dating or retitling of some of Frances Hodgkins’ works – former dates or alternative titles are noted in brackets in the list of works.

CHAPTER TWO

Frances Hodgkins and British Modernism

Frances Spalding

I have dined with Profr. Alexander … He would like to know what goes on inside me – or any artist, when they are creating a picture! As well ask the hen why it lays an egg – I told him creation is governed by material. He must make his own philosophic abstractions …

– FRANCES HODGKINS TO DOROTHY SELBY, 8 DECEMBER 1926

FIGURE 2.1

Cedric Morris, Portrait of Frances Hodgkins, 1928

As a young artist living in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand, Frances Hodgkins expressed a preference for white frames over the more conventional use of gold. This was in 1892. It would seem that even at this stage in her long career she had identified a propulsion towards modernity that would eventually gain her membership of an exhibiting society, called the Seven & Five, which in the late 1920s became a focus for Britain’s avant-garde. In the following decade the fashion for white, not just for frames but also in art, design and architecture, signalled the dominance of international modernism. Hodgkins did not engage with the extreme purity of this abstract style. Nevertheless her 1892 letter to her brother-in-law-to-be, Will Field, predicted a shift in taste in which she was to share. ‘I dare say I am very obstinate’, she wrote, ‘but I intend to persevere with those white frames. I know you dont approve of them but some day, Will I hope to persuade you personally that they are suitable to some pictures which gold would only kill.’¹

The significance of England to Frances Hodgkins is undeniable, even though so much of her life was spent in other countries. England had become her goal for some years before she finally left New Zealand in 1901, aged almost thirty-two. The death of her father in 1898 had left her, the remaining unmarried daughter, and her mother with limited financial resources and from then on her need to earn her living remained imperative. Determined to attain her goal and to experience the wider horizons offered by Europe, she embarked, successfully, on a fierce period of fundraising to earn the necessary money for her fare, giving piano lessons as well as using her artistic talents, for she had already acquired a distinctive reputation in her own country, chiefly through her portraits and her paintings of Māori. With her lively intelligence, she had kept up to date with developments in art elsewhere, and her awareness of European art deepened when she took lessons from Girolamo Pieri Nerli (1860–1926) at the Dunedin School of Art. Even before she set out on her long journey to England, she had, with the help of Studio magazine, gained a good knowledge of recent British art.² And at the start of her journey she added to this by visiting Australia’s public galleries and giving special attention in each one to their British collections.

FIGURE 2.2

Postcard of Marseille, early twentieth century

Her long journey was a rite of passage, in part owing to the serious illness she suffered en route. But she had recovered sufficiently, by the time the boat approached Marseille early one morning, to respond acutely to the call of Europe. Wandering around the town’s ancient streets, where rubbish and decay merged with a quaint beauty, she began to take an interest in unexpected combinations of objects, which later reappeared in her still-lifes and in the scenes of dereliction that she painted during World War II. Certainly this long journey, with its pleasures and pains, left her well prepared for the nomadic lifestyle that became her habit, if also a way of surviving: from the vantage point of England, she often found it cheaper to live abroad, and in places that more readily satisfied her painter’s eye.

On arrival in London she toured various exhibitions with a sharp, energetic, questioning mind. The Royal Academy was one port of call, as was the New English Art Club, which she encountered by chance in Piccadilly. Both disappointed her, for she disliked the English habit of making watercolours look like oil paintings, often with an eye to pleasing the jury for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, where oils were the favoured medium. Hodgkins was, after all, already a skilled watercolour painter and eight years later, in 1909, was to gain a job teaching watercolour painting at Académie Colarossi, a leading art school in Paris, where she became the only woman on the staff. After viewing one London exhibition, Hodgkins remarked: ‘The best water color in the room was … a freshly painted coast scene vigorous and strong. Most of the modern watercolors are tremendously worked up … and it is quite a relief to see crisp, unworried-looking canvases.’³

A degree of disappointment with London may explain why she left it only three months after her arrival and made her way to Caudebec-en-Caux in the Seine Inférieure department of Normandy, to the summer school run by Norman Garstin (1847–1926). From then on her restlessness was often to the fore: it took her in the winter of 1902–03 to Morocco, and then to Gibraltar. In 1907 there was more extensive journeying, to France, Scotland, and to Holland, where she admired the work of the Maris Brothers and Anton Mauve. That same year also saw a return visit to New Zealand. In 1910, she spent time at Concarneau, where she joined a school of Anglo-American watercolourists focused around Charles Morice, who had known Gauguin and at a later date became his biographer.

FIGURE 2.3

Postcard of Caudebec-en-Caux, c. 1903

Frequent moves remained the pattern of her life during the 1920s and early 1930s, but during the pre-1914 period Paris became her preferred base, where, after teaching for a year at Colarossi’s, she set up her own watercolour school. Her dominant interest in watercolour painting may have restricted her response to modern art. At a time when London was buzzing with reactions to the two post-impressionist exhibitions organised by Roger Fry, held in 1910 and 1912, which together enabled a British audience to catch up with developments in French art that had taken place over the previous thirty years, Hodgkins, despite her interest in Gauguin and van Gogh, refrained from the more extreme experimentation which post-impressionism engendered. In Chapter 3 Mary Kisler, on the grounds of new evidence provided by a group of works recently acquired by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, argues that Hodgkins was cognisant of post-impressionism. This is not in doubt, but in Hodgkins’ watercolours Berthe Morisot remained more influential than Matisse. She always spoke admiringly of the receptivity to new ideas which she encountered in Paris, yet her watercolours at this time retain a naturalistic and semi-impressionist mode, the only noticeable advance being the way she began drawing with the brush. This aided the spontaneity and freshness she achieved by working fast, registering light and atmosphere, and, where desirable, making the colours glow.

In 1912 she made a second return visit to New Zealand. Her art met with huge success