Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art and South African Fine Wine

Live Virtual Auction, 26 - 28 July 2020

Monday Evening Sale

Sold for

ZAR 546 240
Lot 292
  • Robert Hodgins; Landscape with Heads
  • Robert Hodgins; Landscape with Heads
  • Robert Hodgins; Landscape with Heads
  • Robert Hodgins; Landscape with Heads


Lot Estimate
ZAR 400 000 - 600 000
Selling Price
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
ZAR 546 240

About this Item

South African 1920-2010
Landscape with Heads

signed, dated 2003 and inscribed with the title on the reverse

oil on canvas
90 by 90cm excluding frame; 122 by 122 by 6cm including frame

Notes

Throughout his many and incremental stylistic evolutions after retiring from teaching in 1983, Robert Hodgins repeatedly painted human subjects. Sometimes these accumulations of line and colour claimed to be portraits of notables from Hodgins’s lifetime – among them the composer Igor Stravinsky (2000), writer Jean Genet (1999) and British art historian and Soviet spy Sir Anthony Blunt (1995) – but even these works with titles attaching to distinct personages have little claim to being likenesses. Hodgins was a fabulist with his brush, not a keeper of records. His figure studies and portraits are characterised by their whimsical economy of means. His subjects, whether singularly portrayed, or gathered in pairs or crowded groups, are, in the main, always generic. They will have eyes, noses, mouths and ears, often cursorily evoked, but as often they will present with far less – as with the eight heads presented in an unspecified landscape of hot colours. The scene is teasingly ambiguous. Are they beachgoers? Proxies for the monumental stone statues of the Easter Island? Buried captives? Menace frequently stalked Hodgins’s austere scenes of human action. Are the pools of red attaching to each head shadows cast by an oblique sun, or something more sinister? The answer may in fact be benign. In a contemporaneous work, A Family in a Barren Field (2003), Hodgins used brilliant red to depict the silhouettes cast by his three related figures.

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