Notes

Following the record achieved at Strauss & Co’s May 2011 auction, where a late painting entitled A Seated Figure, Red Room fetched R356 480, this major painting made during the high point of Hodgins’ career, should excite much interest, especially when so few of his best paintings come to the market.

Hodgins was a much-loved lecturer in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1966 until 1983, during the time “when the debate around abstract and representational art was in full eruption”.¹ Refusing to sacrifice figuration, Hodgins fused these apparently contradictory trends by ensuring that his works remained as much about content as about the nature of art and the processes of painting.

A bold composition with a wash of viridian bracketed by broad bands of intense ultramarine evokes the greatest abstractionists and Colour Field painters of the twentieth century like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. And yet, with lively humour, he references both green as a colour and green as a social issue. Not satisfied just with double entendre, he adds additional layers of meaning by alluding to Francis Ford Coppola’s famous mafia boss as well as to generations of pin-stripe suited characters and their nefarious deeds.

After retirement, Hodgins devoted himself fully to painting and produced many of his finest works. Exuberant explorations of colour and form and the layering of ambiguities provide a visual and intellectual feast, opening up the painting to multiple interpretations.

1. Robert Hodgins, Tafelberg Publishers, 2002, page 29.