Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art

Live Auction, 20 May 2019

Evening Sale

Sold for

ZAR 450 000
Lot 287
  • Robert Hodgins; A Transvaal Still Life (Thunder Cloud, Mine Dump, Vaguely Ethnic Rug ... )
  • Robert Hodgins; A Transvaal Still Life (Thunder Cloud, Mine Dump, Vaguely Ethnic Rug ... )
  • Robert Hodgins; A Transvaal Still Life (Thunder Cloud, Mine Dump, Vaguely Ethnic Rug ... )
  • Robert Hodgins; A Transvaal Still Life (Thunder Cloud, Mine Dump, Vaguely Ethnic Rug ... )


Lot Estimate
ZAR 700 000 - 900 000
Selling Price
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
ZAR 450 000

About this Item

South African 1920-2010
A Transvaal Still Life (Thunder Cloud, Mine Dump, Vaguely Ethnic Rug ... )
signed, dated 2000 and inscribed with the title and the medium on the reverse
oil on canvas
90 by 90cm excluding frame

Notes

In June 2000, the year the present Lot was painted, Robert Hodgins turned 80. The occasion was marked by an exhibition titled New Works at the Goodman Gallery, in May and June. At the dawn of the 21st century Hodgins commanded, if somewhat belatedly, both the critical acclaim of his peers and the appetite of his collectors and dealers alike.

Schooled in the Post-War tradition of English Modernism, Hodgins’ early education at Goldsmiths, University of London, would result later in the wry classicist seen here, flirting with the sublime in this brooding still life. Completed after his birthday exhibition, the work toured as one of the few still lifes on the travelling retrospective Robert Hodgins: 50 Years a Painter in 2001/2.

Having championed painting in the 1990s, a decade when it was conceptually out of fashion, Hodgins came to be regarded quite differently by many in the new millennium, as South Africa’s greatest contemporary painter. As Kendell Geers notes, his was ‘a voice of reason in an age when video (had) all

but killed the painting star’.1 For Elizabeth Rankin, Hodgins would ‘reinforce the concept of painting as the encounter of mark against mark’,2 while Ivor Powell described his work as a painterly intention to ‘make colour so real that it dominates or even creates the picture’.3

Employing the revolutionary manoeuvre made by Henri Matisse in L’Atelier Rouge (Red Studio) (1911), Hodgins uses a warm base colour to flatten his pictorial perspective, challenging the viewer’s perception of space. Moving through the warmer gradations of the spectrum, the painting presents a rose-tinted atmosphere full of glowing forms, described by radiating lines of cooler complimentary colours. Within the interior of this pink field, a lavender thunder cloud casts a gloomy red shadow over the corner of a table of fruit. Outside, visible through a window, a green and yellow mine dump looms. Below this view, floating in a pool of orange, lies a red rug, decorated with green horizontal stripes. Hinged to the upper left of the composition is a closed door, outlined in blue.

While the title of the painting indicates the mise-en-scène, a more ominous association is carried by A Transvaal Still Life… As Hodgins confessed in a conversation with William Kentridge and Deborah Bell, the ‘violence I paint is always removed. It’s always somewhere else in history, somewhere else in geography’.4 In many ways this statement exposes the deeper resonance of the painting which is between both time and space.

Characterising Hodgins’ painting as a type of allegorical purgatory, the late Colin Richards observed that each of his works ‘is an atrocity of association and allusion. He presents heaven, a hell and a hiatus between. His works liquidate what sticks, and liberate the free-flow, or free-fall of desire. His is a wry, literate, apocalyptic art. His approach is of a lapsed romantic, an antagonist, and a funny one at that. And it is in all these that the imaginative possibilities lie for us as viewers in this artist’s immense creative generosity’.5

1. Kendell Geers (2002) ‘Undiscovered at 82’, in Brenda Atkinson et al., Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Page 62.

2. Elizabeth Rankin (2010) quoted in Neil Dundas ‘Robert Griffiths Hodgins (1920–2010)’, South African Journal of Science, vol. 106, no. 7/8, article 347.

3. Ivor Powell (2002) ‘Through Ubu’s Eyes’, in Brenda Atkinson et al., Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Page 45 and 46.

4. Brenda Atkinson (2002) ‘Conversations, Collaborations’, in Brenda Atkinson et al., Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Page 60.

5. Colin Richards (2012) ‘Vaguely Disreputable: The Printmaking of Robert Hodgins’, in Anthea Buys et al., A Lasting Impression: The Robert Hodgins Print Archive, Johannesburg: Wits Art Museum. Page 100.

Literature

Brenda Atkinson (ed.) (2002) Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Illustrated in colour on page 83.

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