oil on canvas

Artwork date: 2002
Signature details: signed, dated and inscribed with the artist's name, the title and medium on the reverse

(1)

90 x 120 cm; framed size: 93 x 123.5 x 5 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Johannesburg.

Notes:

As it happens, the year 2002 in which Big Sulk, Cosy Gossip was painted, saw the publication of both Robert Hodgins’ own book, The Human Race, and Robert Hodgins, the volume commemorating his fifty years as an artist.[1] Besides affirming his stature in the South African art world, both books provide valuable insight into Hodgins’ work and thinking at that time.

In The Human Race, Hodgins identified his invariable subject-matter – and his ambivalent attitude towards it. Citing Sir Walter Raleigh’s doggerel from 1923, “I wish I loved the human race;/ I wish I loved its silly face;” etc., Hodgins concluded “My problem is that more and more/ I like the human race to … draw”! And he filled the book with studies of socialites, executioners, bathers, trapeze artists, office workers and others, all displaying signs of self-absorption and alienation ranging from the comic to the dangerously manic. The style in which these monochrome drawings are done ranges from naturalistic description to graphic tests of the very limits of representation.

In the interviews in Robert Hodgins, the artist discusses what was important to him as a practitioner at that time. For example, in ‘A String of Beads’, an interview that, absurdly, he conducted with himself, Hodgins identifies the transformative power of art in the image of Velazquez, faced with yet another portrait of the unprepossessing Philip IV, conjuring magic from three simple colours; and in a Matisse Still Life of oranges against a dull green wall, he sees a compositional togetherness – “a kind of knittedness” – that he aims for in his own art. In the conversation with artists William Kentridge and Deborah Bell in the same book, Hodgins talks about the excitement of “a thousand atoms of thought and experience and molecules and decisions and references [are] all coming together” each moment he is painting – which was surely his experience in creating Big Sulk, Cosy Gossip at this particular time.

Unlike most figurative artists of his own time or before, who would use their medium to illustrate and interpret their given subject, Hodgins often found his subject – and title – in the process of painting. Starting with some detail of a figure – an outline or a gesture – he would allow the formal elements of colour, shape and line to work together with the “thousand atoms of thought” to create a socialite, an executioner, a ‘Big Sulk’ or whatever reference seemed to express the direction of his thoughts at that time. Each figure is a combination of observed physical features and expressive formal elements that define both the figure and its pictorial context. Hodgins’ figures, such as ‘Big Sulk’ and, elsewhere on the canvas, ‘Cosy Gossip’, obviously relate to his imaginative family of figures but in themselves, in their contexts and in their relationships with one another, each is unique: ‘Big Sulk’ reminds one of Hodgins’ many businessmen, ‘gents’ and office workers, albeit subject to an unusual moment of self-doubt; and ‘Cosy Gossip’ relates in both figures and mood to the painting A Cosy Coven in Suburbia (2002) and other work of this time. But their juxtaposition in this painting, while apparently arbitrary, sets off a dynamic of unanswered questions that is expanded and yet somehow “knitted” together in the gloriously dramatic background setting.

Michael Godby

[1] Robert Hodgins, The Human Race, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, 2002; Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2002.

Collections:

The artist is represented in numerous local collections, notably, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg.; Javett Art Centre, Pretoria.; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town.; UNISA, Pretoria and Wits Art Museum, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.