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.