Frances Hodgkins Show At McDougall Gallery

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28983, 26 August 1959, Page 15

Frances Hodgkins Show At McDougall Gallery

The Auckland City Art Gallery’s collection of works by Frances Hodgkins, which is at present on show at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, represents the only attempt so far made in New Zealand to make a representative collection of her work. The galleries at Dunedin and Wellington have a few pictures each and one has a hard-won place in the McDougall’s permanent collection.

The Auckland Gallery has collected an excellent selection of her work, showing its development and containing paintings which are among her finest. It demonstrates what can be done when an art gallery is in the hands of properly-trained professional staff. Perhaps one day the City Council will put the McDougall Art Gallery on the same footing as other civic departments and appoint a qualified and experienced director who will be able to formulate a coherent purchasing policy—something which is at present conspicuously lacking.

Incidentally, it is high time that the policy of closing the gallery all day each Monday was abandoned. If the ritual cleansing—which is presumably the purpose of the closure—cannot be carried out in public it should be done at night or before the gallery opens in the morning. Born in Dunedin Frances Hodgkins is a New Zealand painter only because she was born and brought up in Dunedin, New Zealand. There is nothing specifically New Zealand in any of her painting, even the work she did in the 30-odd years she lived in this country. It was oriented towards Europe, like all painting done in New Zealand at that time (the last decade of the 19th Century). She is generally included among British painters by British art historians but her work is more closely related to French painting in style and flavour. She left Dunedin for Europe in 1901 at the age of 32, but paid two more visits to the Dominion before finally leaving in 1913. This exhibition, with two exceptions, takes up her story about 1916. when her aptitude for colour, line and design was already strongly in evidence. This can be seen in “Landscape” and “By The Brook,” of that period. The latter is a fine painting in its own -right, with brilliant colour and more form than her biographer, Mr E. H. McCormick, finds in it. Values Confused

But her values were confused at this time, as can be seen in the panel of her comments on work submitted for criticism by Mrs Hannah Ritchie. Among the bromides, however, there are a few acute observations on composition.

Two 1919 watercolours show an interest in rectilinear division of space. In the late 1920’s her work becomes more freely composed but the colour is more conventional. Then in the early 1930’s the true Frances Hodgkins begins to emerge, notably in “The Spanish Shrine,” a large—for her —oil painting, with the luminous elusive colour which was to become the essence of her painting. The forms are more sharply defined than in her later work though this is the case in most of her oil paintings. Oil paint was not her best medium; she used it with charm but often as though it were gouache. Gouache, however. she used with rare understanding and style. It seems to have been the medium she liked most, because even in her watercolours there is a tendency to seek gouache effects.

The finest painting in the exhibition are three gouaches painted in her late years (she died in «■

1947). “Study for Pembrokeshire Landscape (1938),” “Ornaments (1942),” and “The Root Crop (1943)," show her at the zenith of her powers as the creator of rapturous colour, often with the unlikeliest ingredients, such as the dark brown, ochre yellow and pink with which she works her magic in "Ornaments.”

Frances Hodgkins is not among the greatest of the century's painters but she is one of the most perfect of the smaller figures and the absence of overtones of the darker emotions in her work makes it immediately enjoyable. With this exhibition and the Japanese show both there, a visit to the McDougall Gallery is uncommonly pleasant. Auckland Painter

A very different way of using colour from that of Frances Hodgkins is shown by the Auckland oainter Milan Mrkusich. who is having a one-man exhibition at Gallery 91. He builds up static, orderly compositions out of little square dabs of bright colour, playing the colours against each other in a sort of contrapuntal way.

Mr Mrkusich is too intelligent a painter to be uninteresting, but in some of these pictures the interest lies almost solely in the permutations of a number of bright colours.

His method owes something to the impressionists but he does not use dabs of colour as they did to create a vibrant glow. At a distance his colour makes little effect because the various complementaries cancel each other out. although the individual colours are brilliant.

The even size of the brushstrokes results in monotony in most of his oils but there are signs that his painting is becoming freer and more lively.

In his watercolours and gouaches Mr Mrkusich’s colour is more subtle, but there is reliance on the quirks of the medium to a disturbing degree. As in his oils he has not succeeded in infusing expression with the considerable intellectual qualities of his work. —J.N.K,