Frances Hodgkins: Leitmotif - Auckland Art Gallery

leitmotiffig.2 evening 1932-33 oil on canvasprivate collection, aucklandIn Red Jug a sense of depth is created by the inclusion of a baretree, again a favoured motif. Hodgkins had always preferred thesimplicity and structure of trees in winter and early spring. InEngland once she wrote:We had gone to bed under blue skys & woke up under low grey ones hangingover long reaches of red ploughed land broken by hedges & little clumpsof leafless trees looking like delicate etchings against the skyline. They are sobeautiful these leafless trees …I hate the idea of spring with its foolish greenleaves & sentimentality everyone here is babbling about it, the first primroseetc…. The beech trees are brown with bud & in a week or two the wretchedleaves will be out. They are to me infinitely more beautiful in their present stateand I must hurry up & get some sketches before they turn. 3A number of paintings from the early thirties are differentiated bya radical treatment of the sky which is comprised of broad bandsof colour, giving a prismatic effect of atmosphere. While it is oftendifficult to locate Hodgkins’ paintings, which she invariably signedbut hardly ever dated, works that demonstrate particular painterlyeffects generally indicate a particular period. Green Urn c.1931 bearsthe same striated sky as Red Jug, although the precarious positionof a vase beside melons on the lip of a large urn is a compositionpossibly influenced by an earlier work by Picasso. 4 In these paintings,still life objects – vases, jars, urns, jugs – are judiciously placedto create diverse readings of their relationship to the landscapebeyond. In Red Jug and Green Urn they dominate the foreground sothat we have to look through them to the countryside, whereas inanother Ibizan painting, Evening 1932-33 [fig.2], the table is like analtar and we look over the vases to a broader landscape beyond. Therosy tones of the land seem to cast light back over the table, whilean isolated white house stands in the background, framed in themiddle ground by grape leaves on a residual loggia. Hodgkins oncedescribed working on an indoor still life, ‘I bought 2 white lilies togive it the white note – it just gives it that ‘kick’ as a composition. The