Robert Hodgins - 'Fifty Years a Painter' at the Sasol Art Gallery
by Hazel Friedman
One can imagine Robert Hodgins as a snotty-nosed kid, making mud pies, messing around with finger paints and getting groin-deep into all sorts of creative mischief. And 50 years after he decided to make the canvas his personal and professional playground, that boyish sense of adventure remains, albeit in a more mellow form.
This much is evident in his 50-year retrospective. The exhibition showcases examples of his work from as early as 1953 to today, providing a panoramic overview of his output over the past half-century. It's a joyous tribute, showcasing Hodgins' forays not only into painting but also print, porcelain and of course those unforgettable animated collaborations with William Kentridge and Deborah Bell.
The works on display have been selected from the artist's personal collection and those owned by friends and former colleagues - including art critic Ivor Powell, who has penned a monograph on Hodgins and probably knows more than most about his creative machinations; and art history professors Sandra Klopper, Michael Godby and Rayda Becker. They were among his champions at a time when the market was largely unfamiliar with his work, and today they own some of the best Hodginses around.
Overall, the sheer volume of his output is overwhelming - from the dark, post-British war paintings to his "Pop" phase and the garish Weimar vision that seemed to encapsulate the mad, bad years of apartheid. Also present is Ubu - his reinterpretation of the scandalous creation of 19th-century poet Alfred Jarry. Hodgins was well into Ubu - the grotesque personification of human greed and ignorance - back in 1960, at a time when subsequent Ubu masterminds like Kentridge were still in nappies.
He has even adopted a Picassoesque "pink phase", and his candyfloss pastels collide relentlessly with acid greens and eye-sore oranges. Sometimes his works exude an almost hallucinatory intensity, like the aftermath of a hectic acid trip. They deal with Jungian, nihilistic and existential themes. Variously they wag fingers and pull tongues at the arseholes of history. Sometimes they are even sweetly sentimental. And they are also not always entirely successful in their reinterpretation of themes and experiments with different media.
In the last 15 years critiques of his output have been nothing short of adulatory. His "canvases of smeared mud" have earned him titles ranging from "arguably South Africa's finest contemporary painter" to "one of the prime bridge builders between the 20th and 21st centuries".
It's easy to overlook the fact that his oeuvre has not been a linear path up the ladder of progress. He, like all artists on that eternally winding learning curve, has made many mistakes - not all of them happy. And it's quite an eye-opener to check out some of his earliest efforts - for example, the painstakingly earnest rendition of Men Bathing, a gender-inverted variation on Cezanne which he painted in 1958. Even in the humorously overbearing Dame au Camelia, also executed in 1958, there seems little to anticipate the riotous displays of colour and whimsical strokes that would become his signature tunes in later years.
Mind you, in paintings such as the 1956 Figure with Hood, one can see the seeds being sown for his seminal Weimar phase. In these works he conveyed - in caustic, crude expressionism - the dandified, grotesquely disfigured reality of South Africa's notorious States of Emergency. This was the era of torture, hit squads naked repression and necklacing - the final death rattle of a disintegrating society. It was also the era in which South African contemporary art came of age, with Hodgins as one of its principle torchbearers. At the ripe young age of 65.
Until then Hodgins belonged to a coterie of artists who were largely unappreciated, despite - or maybe because of - their relentless questioning of society. It is extraordinary that at an age when many artists are starting to sag against the ropes, Hodgins was fighting fitter than ever. Having retired from academia, in the early 1980s he had begun painting obsessively - sometimes working on several works simultaneously as the mood took him.
His eye for irony became more acute, as did his historical insights and understanding of the contradictions of being human. Yet it is ultimately his relationship with paint that remains indelibly tattooed on the viewer. His paint flows, bleeds and stains the canvas. Sometimes sections are left blank to convey a sense of existential void. Sometimes the paint gushes with an almost maniacal gusto. It's as though his sense of the profane and the perverse, the literary and the historical, all converge and combust into a raucous explosion. Yet there's a sense of incredible alertness and control, as well as total immersion in the alchemic process of continuous construction. It's as though each painting spawns an extra bit of life - growing, breathing and heaving with each stroke.
A few do require the kiss of life, however. Some of the "pink pieces" (my own appellation) painted between 1999 and 2000 appear more as bland space-fillers than passion works. Some appear casual, experimental afterthoughts. For example, the Punch Bag collage - although crudely cute - doesn't exude the raw power of most of his paintings, even those in which he's clearly playing with paint. Take A Car in the Karoo (2001), for example, which captures the nostril-searing heat of the desert with an intensity free from sentiment. And A Transvaal Still-life (thundercloud, mine dump, vaguely ethnic rug) is vintage Hodgins in quirky, fighting form.
Hodgins once remarked that painters are normally painting the day before their final heart attack. It's hard to imagine any finale from an artist forever young.
Until February 3
Sasol Art Museum, 52 Ryneveld Street, Stellenbosch
Tel: (021) 808 3524
Fax: (021) 808 3669
Email: usmuseum@maties.sun.ac.za
Hours: Tues - Fri 9am - 4pm, Sat 9am - 5pm, Sun 2pm - 5pm
Tour schedule:
Gertrude Posel Gallery, University of the Witwatersrand
March 12 - April 26 2002
Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg
May 7 - June 9 2002 (dates subject to confirmation)
