WORK OF FRANCES HODGKINS

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25767, 31 March 1949, Page 5

WORK OF FRANCES HODGKINS

Exhibition Staged At London Gallery CRITICS’ ENTHUSIASTIC PRAISE (Special Correspondent N.Z.PA.) (Rec. 8.30 p.m.) LONDON, March 30. “Homage to Frances Hodgkins” is the title of an exhibition of 38 paintings by Miss Hodgkins, who was bom in Dunedin and who died two years ago at the age of 77. The exhibition is at St. George’s Gallery Lopdon, -and consists mainly of paintings borrowed from prominent private collections. They are a carefully chosen cross-section of nearly 30 years’ work. The art critics are almost unanimous in their praise of the exhibition, and several say without qualification that Frances Hodgkins was the greatest woman painter ever to work in England. The “Sunday Times” says: “Everything has the air of having been done in a moment of exceptional awareness. Her inventiveness, or rather her Sower of discovery, was inexhaust»le.” The “Art News” says: "Miss Hodgkins was the most poetic of painters, as well as the most observant. Her imagery bewitches both the eye and the imagination.” The art critic of “Time and Tide” says: “Miss Hodgkins convinced enough people of the authenticity of her personal vision of the earth to be accepted as one of our greatest contemporary English painters at the time of her death.” Miss Hodgkins’s Career Miss Hodgkins’s father was a successful solicitor and an amateur water colourist of considerable ability. After her father’s death, Miss Hodgkins went to Europe. She travelled in France and Morocco, and was well known in Paris art circles. She exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy in London. She revisited Australia and New Zealand in 1912, and after successful and profitable exhibitions, returned to Paris through Italy. At the beginning of the First World War, she settled at St. Ives, in Cornwall. She painted her first oils in 1919, and in the 1920’s began an experimental phase which led to the • "oduction of her works which are so much admired to-day. Her work continued to improve almost to her death.