Strauss & co - 2014 Review

Don Giovanni in Hell signed, dated 1999/2000 oil and charcoal on canvas 119,5 by 90cm Sold R738 920, 30 June 2014 A similar point could be made about another high-selling piece by Hodgins, Artist’s Models (1991/2) which turned R409 248 in June 2014. Here likewise, with the artist himself present in a grouping of his artist’s models, the abstract qualities of paint and colour, depth and surface are exploited to create tensions between appearance and feeling, the inside of experience and its expression through visible tokens. In Artist’s Models the hot colour register and a cramping and pile up of motif in virtual space work together to conjure an all over and brooding discomfort, to present the models as a demonology as much as it is a dramatis personae of the artist’s consciousness. If Artist’s Models and the ambiguous Don Giovanni in Hell give on to relatively dark contents in Hodgins’consciousness as an artist, the 1996 painting Proud Professor , selling at R886 704 in November, is altogether more genial and wittier in its working. Striking a pose against a (probably faux-) antique sofa, the professor of the title has little piggy eyes and a riskily drawn hauteur of profile (precisely the kind of line that once found in pushing paint around would grow in Hodgins’ studio process into a painting). Overhead the stars of heaven recede in mannerly rows to a well-understood vanishing point in curved space. Topping a furniture antique, a clock, its face foreshortened to his view, gives the time at just before 12.15, its visible mechanism relating it to the professor’s masterful mind in self-perception. As against such assertions, however, Hodgins has generated moments of formal discomfort to undercut the professor’s pride. Notably, while the initial impression is of a relaxed and confident posture, the sofa is not invested with enough formal weight to bear the bulk of the professor’s torso. The disjunction is further emphasised by the way Hodgins asserts a two rather than three dimensionality in the adumbration of the professor’s buttocks, which fail to find any rest on the formal suggestion of the sofa’s seat. Along with this there is an uncertain floor plane and the professor’s feet seem to occupy it at two radically different and incompatible levels. Played off against the vanishing point of the heavenly firmament in procession overhead, the shifting uncertainties of space in the painting serve to debunk and explore elements of bathos in the academic’s pretension. This is Hodgins in a very different, a more playful register, finding the subtlest effects by the bluntest of means. But in common with Don Giovanni and indeed in the context of Hodgins’ work in general, importance needs to be wrested from the idiosyncracy of the artist’s personality, and brought within the frame of posterity. In part this construction of artistic presence is the work of criticism, but equally it is both negotiated and measured in the marketing of individual pieces. Especially in the case of an artist like Hodgins, who was, in life, curmudgeonly in this at least: he insisted on keeping his prices, except in the case of a small group of large-scale triptychs and the like that were expressly made for inclusion in public collections, at levels he considered reasonable enough for friends and ordinary people who wanted to own his work to afford. Charming and commendable though such idiosyncrasy may have been in life, it has left the work of bringing his output into a comparative frame to posthumous buyers and commentators. Ivor Powell 59