Notes

In 1976, R.B. Kitaj coined the term 'School of London' to describe a group of figurative painters brought together in his exhibition The Human Clay at the Hayward Gallery, London. The show, which featured Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Hockney and others, took its title from a poem by W.H. Auden. Given his steadfast commitment to figurative painting, love of Auden, and frequent references to Bacon, Robert Hodgins might initially appear to be a provincial example of this London school. Yet his mature paintings, developed after a formative visit to Europe in 1975, resist such neat classification.

While Hodgins's London upbringing and formal training at Goldsmiths' College undeniably shaped his practice, his influences were far more eclectic. He engaged deeply with French painters like Degas, Daumier, Monet and Rouault; with the biting satire of Weimar artists such as Dix and Grosz; and, significantly, with American painters like Pollock and Guston. In 1968, reflecting on post-war American art, Hodgins observed: 'Americans are poets of materialism. They make lists of things, they detail ordinary actions, and you have an American vision. One might have predicted that American art when it emerged would be about the thingness of things: Pollock's painting was about the paintness of paint'.¹

This lot exemplifies Hodgins's delight in paint - both as substance and subject. While the schematic interior space may nod to Bacon, the tonal lightness and casual figuration are more reminiscent of Guston, whose work Hodgins viewed with great enthusiasm in Boston in 1981. Guston famously turned away from abstraction toward a comic-book-inflected visual language with political bite. Hodgins arrived at a similarly irreverent satirical style in his breakthrough Ubu series (1981-84), inspired by Alfred Jarry's absurdist drama Ubu Roi (1896) - and by Guston. For the remainder of his career, Hodgins continued to doff his cap to Guston, sometimes more overtly than in this assured work of a painter in full commend of his medium.

¹ Robert Hodgins (1968) 'SA Art: Has it made it?', News/Check, 20 December, p.16.