FRANCES HODGKINS
FRANCES HODGKINS: with Biographical Note by Mytanwy Evans. Penguin Modern Painters. Penguin Books. [F Frances Hodgkins had painted nothing after 1930 she would still rank as one of the best painters in England this century. In her later work, however, she continued to develop, becoming bolder and more lyrical as she went on. Some of the paintings she produced during the war years show. a greatly simplified and highly persona) type of graphic symbolism, combined with elements of texture and shape that have almost the immediacy of nature itself. The whole effect is, as a rule, poetic in quality, and must be approached on this level if it is to be understood and appreciated. Frances Hodgkins might almost, in fact, \be "taken as the archetype of the "neo-romantics." Her strong personal vision, and her boldly imaginative flights in which nature is at once displayed intimately and transcended in terms of art, are characteristic of the most recent de-
_ velopment in English painting, the most vigorous that has appeared for a century. Towards the end she was _ using natural images and fragments drawn from the man-made world, and combining them in new and exciting patterns. Her "Walls, Roofs and Flowers," painted in 1941, is almost an anthology of various shapes, brought within a pattern worked out in her bright imagination; and "Dorset Farm" (1946) is, in the same way, a sort of inventory of the farm, ex-
pressed in graphic poetic symbolism. It is doubtful if she could have developed much further; but for what she attained to, we must be profoundly grateful. Her eye was bright, her imagination unimpaired, until the very last; and she died,,as she would have wished to die, at the height of her powers, There was no fading out. On the contrary, she ended in a blaze of glory. This is a logical, and (for New Zealanders especially) a welcome addition to the Penguin Modern Painters series. Myfanwy Evans’s text is beautifully written, and gives the reader just the right amount of sensitive and intelligent comment to guide him to a fuller appre-
ciation of the paintings.
A.R.
D.F.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 529, 12 August 1949, Page 15
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355FRANCES HODGKINS New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 529, 12 August 1949, Page 15
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