Strauss & co - 20 May 2019, Johannesburg

187 292 Robert Hodgins SOUTH AFRICAN 1920–2010 Clubmen of America: Good Ole Country Boys 2001 signed, dated 2001 and inscribed with the title, the medium and a dedication ‘For Brenda Atkinson: Gratitude, Respect, Love. Rob’on the reverse oil on canvas 90 by 120 cm R800 000 – 1 200 000 PROVENANCE Gift from the artist to Brenda Atkinson LITERATURE Brenda Atkinson (ed.) (2002) Robert Hodgins , Cape Town: Tafelberg. Illustrated in colour on page 110. Clubmen of America: Good Ole Country Boys (2001) is a beautiful example of Robert Hodgins’talent for blistering social observation through a deliciously seductive aesthetic. Its figural composition anticipates A Day at the Office (2007), but it gathers energy quite differently. The Office painting is a minimalist study in disconnection (and perhaps mutual incomprehension), established against a blank white field. But Country Boys depicts a tight tableau of simmering male aggression that is shared and mutually endorsed against a backdrop that hints at rural anonymity. Its central figure backs up a younger man at left while extending a welcoming arm to a bald brute who enters from the right, his fist tinged with red. We register, slowly, the possible violence off-scene. The viewer is not made more comfortable by the way these smug, smudgy, dodgy, dark characters are enfolded in a palette of pastel blue tinged with buttery yellow. Hodgins made his Clubmen of America series twenty years after diving into a full-time painting career with his Ubu works, themselves inspired by the spirit of the Savage God 1 propelling Alfred Jarry’s titular despot in his play Ubu Roi . The Clubmen series gives more nuanced form to the Ubu-esque theme of absolute power and its inevitable corollary, absolute corruption. Country Boys is one of Robert’s most striking paintings and one of his most prescient. It’s not a representation of the unrestrained large-scale excesses of an Ubu/Trump/Zuma, but an insight into the small cultural moments that enable the Ubus on the world stage. The characters suggest a world in which self-preservation is possible through exclusion or eradication of difference. At a time when North America is run by clubs and divided by ideological bunkers, 2 this painting is more relevant and startling than ever. And Robert’s ever-present wit, precision, and insight blaze through. 1. The Irish poet WB Yeats was said to have called out, ‘After us, the Savage God!’, after watching a performance of Ubu Roi , Alfred Jarry’s wildly irreverent play about power and greed. 2. Brené Brown’s term, from Braving the Wilderness (Penguin Random House, 2017). Brenda Atkinson