Strauss & co - 2014 Review

HODGINS Robert 1920-2010 Art history tends to favour obsessives and curmudgeons, artists romantically possessed by some vision of overwhelming import, simultaneously transfixed and tortured by the significance of their every creative gesture. It is somehow in their suffering and unrequitedness that the genius of such artists as Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh is guaranteed. Correspondingly, it is in their unceasing struggles that the transcendent value of their productions is invested, guaranteed and, in the market, measured in hard currency. Robert Hodgins was an artist of an entirely different, more worldly and, in many ways, more problematic order. Far from single-minded, alienated obsessive, driven by demons to art making, Hodgins – though certainly not without seriousness – was, like Japanese painter and printmaker Hokusai in his own words “drunk”with paint. Hodgins was also famously gregarious, constitutionally generous, much given to frivolity and the unashamedly inconsequential delight, not infrequently, acid in his judgement, sometimes catty and given to intrigue and petty vendetta. As to intellectual temper, he habitually characterised himself as an intellectual jackdaw, as an autodidact and a collector of usually bright, though not infrequently sombre impressions, memories, thought- echoes and things. Such proclivities are worth mentioning because they translate in his art into an oeuvre that is diverse and varied rather than single mindedly resolute or “possessed”, that develops in loops rather than lines, constantly interrupting the flow of its own gravitas to explore painterly fancies – occasionally even frivolities – in passing. Indeed Hodgins himself distinguished in his own production between what he called “big paintings” and “little paintings” by which he meant to invoke, as I understood it, as his frequent interlocutor in the 1980s and 1990s, not so much a distinction in literal scale (though usually the big paintings were of larger dimension) as a magnitude and complexity of intention. In essence the “little paintings” were, for the most part, visual conceits, more or less singular ideas expressed in the languages of colour, paint and line – and thrown into intellectual acid relief by the literary references he characteristically used in titling his works. Suurbek signed, dated 2003 oil and graphite on canvas 45 by 60cm Sold R386 512, 13 October 2014 The Golden Wall, comprising twenty five individual paintings all signed, dated 2001/2 oil on canvas; oil and screenprint on canvas each approximately: 55 by 55cm Sold R1 818 880, 10 November 2014 RECORD FOR THE ARTIST 56