"ART IS NEVER EASY"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 1955, Page 12

"ART IS NEVER EASY"

THE EXPATRIATE: A Study of Frances Hodgkins, by E. H. McCormick; New Zealand University Press, 30/-. WORKS OF FRANCES HODGKINS IN NEW ZEALAND, by E. H. McCormick; Auckland City Art Gallery and Oxford University Press, 25/-.

(Reviewed by

W. B.

Sutch

¢¢]RANCES HODGKINS is a painter who is beyond reach of time or fashion or critical whim. She has made her unique contribution to the traditions of European and English painting, and her place is with the masters. . . She belongs to the New Zealand Pantheon with those other folk heroes, Lord ‘Rutherford and Katherine Mansfield and Sir Peter Buck-all New Zealand born, all acknowledged abroad, all expatriates for the greater part of their lives." But did she have to go abroad for her "slow, laborious self-realisation’’? Why are New Zealanders, to quote John Mulgan, "a queer, lost, eccentric, pervading people"? Does the life of Frances Hodgkins illustrate an experience common to all expatriates? Does the world gain from the self-imposed exile of such people? These are some

of the questions Mr. McCormick has pondered as he has read and re-read the 400,000 words written by Frances Hodgkins to her family and friends over a period of more than fifty years-a period which amply permits her to write of the respective visits to London of Richard Seddon and Walter Nash. Here is a magnificent diary not meant for publication. Here is the life of Dunedin in the last quarter of the 19th Century-not the poverty and drabness, but the social life of the genteel, the merchants and the professional men and their families. "The picture is Victorian but not merely Victorian, it is provincial Victorian, and colonial provincial at that." (And, one is compelled to reflect, how much richer was the life of the Dunedin genteel with their art classes and their lectures than is the life of the merchant, manufacturer and professional man today.) Here are also the Richmonds, Atkinsons, Rattrays, Pharazyns, Fields, Hursthouses, Von Haasts, Downie Stewarts and the wonderful Maud England, "educated -in Dresden and Oxford." But not all are cultivated and unassuming. Here is Wellington society of 1904, "a loose aggregation of a couple of hundred women with their’ consorts-

judges and politicians, higher public servants and ambitious professional men, retired station-owners and successful merchants-revolving with some friction about the central magnet of Government House . . . the Art Gallery is used for the periodical wool sales . the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts had one solitary painting." Mr. McCormick says, and we can all agree, that New Zealand has not earned the right to be proud of Frances Hodgkins. There is ample proof that she could not have made her contribution to art if she had remained in New Zealand. Though her father and Dunedin gave her a good background of interest in the arts, and art teaching and sales of pictures enabled her by 1901 at the age of 32 to accumulate her fare to England, she could not begin to develop until her ability and character were linked with places where art was alive. And when she did grow and change New Zealand rejected her. To get money to live, she deliberately, in 1924, for example, painted pictures for the New Zealand market "straight-forward watercolours ... flower markets and red sails and blue Mediterranean." In one resentful letter to her brother she wrote of New Zealanders: "I grow sick of hearing from intelligent people that they wished I hadn't ‘changed my style.’ How do they expect progress except thru’ change? . .. All great Art at one stage or another requires the

help of Braille: to explain it to the semiblind and the wilful blind-Art is never easy." And in talking, in London, to the New Zealand artist May Smith, she said: "They're lovely people, the New

Zealanders, so hospitable and so charming. But for God’s sake don’t talk to them about art!" Why. did the expatriate, ~Frances Hodgkins, say this of her homeland? It was because New Zealand was. part of her. She dearly wanted to be recognised back home. Recognised and perhaps justified. For, hike many others who have left home to go abroad and who depended for help partly on the people left behind, she felt guilty-guilty because she loved her mother, her sister and her brothers, guilty because she had left the group. Long after Europe had acclaimed her and the British Government had granted her a special pension, New Zealand was cold and even hostile to her. She died in 1947, and among her last fragments of conversation were the words, "New Zealand is, at last, beginning to recognise me." All the poverty and the toil and the following of strong urges within her, all the homesickness and the conflict between self-expression and family loyaltv were justified, there were signs that the group would have her back. Mr. McCormick deserves our thanks and congratulations. In The Expatriate he has given us a full study of Frances Hodgkins and New Zealand. In the supplementary volume he _ has_painstakingly assembled the facts relating to the ownership of Frances Hodgkins’s works it, New Zealand, the record of her exhibitions, and other basic data supported by four enlarged plates and 32 reproductions in black and white. The Expatriate will, of course, have the wider public, but both works will be indispensable to those who in the future will want to write about wines Hodgkins and her times. And let us not forget that Mr. McCormick’s fine work could not have been possible without financial assistance and encouragement from the Auckland City Council, the Department of Internal Affairs, the New Zealand Literary Fund and the University of New Zealand. \