FRANCES HODGKINS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26471, 27 May 1947, Page 2

FRANCES HODGKINS

APPRECIATION IN THE TIMES Special Correspondent LONDON, May 16. Under the heading " Style and Experience in Painting,” The Times, in an appreciative notice on the work of Miss Frances Hodgkins, the former Dunedin artist, who died at' her home in Dorset this month, at the age of 77, gives an interesting review of her development after she left New Zealand in 1900. After visiting Holland, Palestine, and Morocco, she settled in Paris, where she was the first woman to teach at Colarossi’s, and from 1910 to 1912 she ran an art school of her own. Occasional works of this period exhibited in London are fairly described as mildly impressionistic, though when they contained figures there was evident in them a pronounced feeling for character. " But it was not until some years after the 1914-18 war, when she was nearly 60, that an exhibition of her paintings and water colours at the Claridge Gallery informed the world of a new and original talent,” the writer in The Times continues. “ This exhibition was followed by one at the St. George's Gallery, which left no doubt about the matter, and which contained a number of paintings of young girls in landscape, painted in the Constable country, and in them was noted some resemblance to Marie Laurencin in their sympathetic appreciation of adolescence. This exhibition also contained some studies of still-life objects in landscape, under such t ties as “ Flowers in Landscape," “ Still Life in Front of Courtyard," and " Still Life Before Landscape." a form of composition which Frances Hodgkins was to make peculiarly her own. In a sense these paintings were surrealistic, but with a difference. What they had in common with surrealism was a pooling of impressions from the different layers of consciousness; where they differed was in singular power of discovering relationships in form and colour in the assorted materials.” Some of her most characteristic and “ youngest" work was produced between the ages of 60 and 70. Naturally, it was rather baffling to .those who look for literal representation in pictures, and in Spain, shortly before the outbreak of civil war, she. was once arrested for painting too near sonic military objective. The official before whom she was taken asked to see her work, but when he saw it he tapped his head significantly and ordered her Immediate release. The artistic merits •of her work were well recognised by responsible judges, and at an exhibition of works by contemporary British artists held at Hertford House by permission of the trustees of the Wallace Collection in 1940 she was. giyen a room to herself; she was also represented by water colours in the exhibition of " British Painting Since Whistler ” at the National Gallery in the same year. A retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Lefevre Gallery last November.