Frances Hodgkins

Frances Hodgins

Frances Mary Hodgkins (born April 28, 1869 in Dunedin , New Zealand , † May 13, 1947 in Dorchester, Dorset , United Kingdom ) was a New Zealand painter who lived and worked in Europe for most of her life. She is seen as a representative of the English avant-garde of the 1930s and 1940s and is considered one of the most important artists of her generation and her country.

Life

Frances Hodgkins about 1890

Frances Hodgkins was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1869 as the third of seven children to the Australian Rachel Owen Parker and her husband, the lawyer (and amateur painter) William Mathew Hodgkins. Dunedin was a thriving city in the middle of the gold rush at the time - her father co-founded a local art association in 1875 and co-initiated the opening of an art gallery in 1884. So the daughters grew up in an art-loving atmosphere and at a time when society was opening up to women in art. The two sisters Isabell and Frances were educated in private schools, and the older, Isabell, initially received more attention than Frances for her talent for drawing, which emulated her father and his " Turner manner". Frances' first works were charcoal drawings, and she had her first exhibitions in 1890 in art associations in Christchurch and Dunedin. Motifs from this period were Victorian-style rural everyday scenes, such as a girl feeding chickens or portrait drawings.

Lessons she received since 1893 by the Italian painter Girolamo Nerli (1860-1926), who greatly influenced - not only technically, but also in their choice of subject, there emerged a series of portraits of Maori women's and 1895 a portrait of an old woman, reminiscent of Dutch portraits. During this time external influences increased further - painters who traveled to New Zealand or settled there and introduced them to Impressionism , for example .

After her sister Isabell married in 1893 and her artistic career stagnated, Frances Hodgkins looked for her own way to earn a living and studied at the Dunedin School of Art and Design from 1895 to 1996 , which also allowed her to work as an art teacher . From 1896 she gave private art lessons, sent exhibitions with her work and made illustrations for newspapers and magazines. This enabled her to save enough money to continue her studies in England from 1901.

In London she studied at the Royal Polytechnic Institution and in 1902/03 went on drawing excursions to France, Belgium and the Netherlands with Norman Garstin , who brought her into contact with the Newlyn School . She made friends with the painter Dorothy Kate Richmond, who was a few years older than her, and traveled with her to southern France and northern Italy. The works created during this time resulted in a gallery exhibition in London; however, she continued to regularly send exhibitions in New Zealand, where painting sales made a living. A first major success was the inclusion of one of her pictures - taken after a stay in Morocco - in an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts , which was repeated in the following years.

In late 1903, Hodgkins returned to New Zealand with Richmond and opened a small studio. An engagement to an English writer was broken off after a short time and she decided in 1906 to return to Europe, where she stayed for the next few years. She worked closely with other painters and got in touch with Norman Garstin again. Short stays in Great Britain resulted in her first solo exhibition at Paterson's Gallery. For over a year she spent in the Netherlands, four years in Paris, where influences which Picasso - Braque -School of Matisse and Bonnard were reflected in their work.

Hodgkins exhibited in the Paris salons in 1909 and 1910 and taught watercolor painting at the Académie Colarossi - as the first woman in the college. As a result, she opened her own school for watercolor painting. By that time she had made a final decision to stay in Europe. She only traveled to New Zealand and Australia for exhibitions - where her work was much more successful than in her home country and was bought up for private and public collections.

Hodgkins spent the First World War in Cornwall , where she made friends with a number of young English artists. In the 1920s she was constantly on the move - despite her success, she sold relatively few and was by no means free from financial worries: She was supported by her family or lived temporarily with wealthy friends, only to return to simple accommodation at her own expense France to live and work. In 1925 she therefore accepted a permanent position as a designer for a textile company in Manchester for some time . It was not until the early 1930s that a gallery represented it. During this time she winters regularly in Spain or Ibiza; the years are considered to be one of the most productive of their life.

She spent the Second World War , burdened by her age and health problems, in connection with the restrictions caused by the war, in England. Nevertheless, she exhibited at the 1940 Biennale di Venezia , where she was chosen to represent Great Britain. From 1942 onwards she was awarded a state pension for her services ("more of an honor than an enrichment"). A major retrospective in London in 1946 showed her life's work.

In late March 1947 she was admitted to a psychiatric clinic near Dorchester and died two months later. Their ashes were returned to New Zealand and buried in the family grave in Wellington.

In 1962 the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship was established in her honor at the University of Otago . A series of stamps with their motifs was issued by the New Zealand Post Office in 1973 .

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Hodgkin's style has evolved over the course of her career from Impressionist watercolors to the modern age of the 20th century.

At the beginning of her career until around 1928, her motifs remained quite similar - people, especially women and children, as well as street and harbor scenes. Towards the end of the 1920s she became more introspective and integrated dream scenes and imaginary landscapes into her work.

The earliest known oil painting by Hodgkins is Loveday and Ann: two women with a basket of flowers from 1915. In terms of material, however, she mostly remained faithful to watercolor painting and from the 1930s also used gouache , which combines the advantages of both materials. Drawings are also part of her oeuvre .

In her works she remained representational throughout her life, but her later paintings contain elements of expressionist abstraction.

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  Mrs. Hellyer

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  Spanish peasants

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  The Lake

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  Flatford Mill

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  Arrangement of Jugs (1938)

Exhibitions (selection)

• 1924: Paris Autumn Salon
• 1939–1940: Centennial Exhibition of International and New Zealand Art, National Art Gallery , Wellington
• 1940: National Centennial Exhibition of New Zealand Art, Wellington
• 1940: Biennale , Venice
• 1969: Frances Hodgkins centenary exhibition (100th birthday exhibition); Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand

Works in public collections (selection)

• Tate Gallery
• Auckland Art Gallery
• Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
• British Council Collection

Awards

• 1911: Whitney Hoff Prize for watercolor painting

Web links

Commons : Frances Hodgkins  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Grace Alty: Frances Hodgkin's: The Expatriate Years. (No longer available online.) In: jgg.co.nz. Archived from the original on January 22, 2016 ; accessed on February 23, 2020 (English). 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Linda Gill: Hodgkins, Frances Mary. In: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage Te Manatu Taonga, 1993, accessed February 23, 2020 . 
3. ^ ^{A b} The Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, Otago Fellows, University of Otago, New Zealand. Retrieved February 23, 2020 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b} Hodgkins, Frances . In: Ulrich Thieme, Felix Becker (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists from Antiquity to the Present Over 250,000 biographies on one CD . Hek-Hof. Seemann, Leipzig 2008, ISBN 978-3-86502-177-9 , pp. 429 .
5. ^ Death of Frances Hodgkins. In: nzhistory.govt.nz. NZHistory, New Zealand history online, accessed February 23, 2020 . 
6. ^ Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand (Ed.): Frances Hodgkins centenary exhibition . (Catalog). S. 38 ( digitized via assets.aucklandartgallery.com [PDF]).
7. ^ Artist - Frances Mary Hodgkins Biography. In: franceshodgkins.com. Jonathan Grant Galleries, accessed February 23, 2020 . 
8. ^ Tate: Frances Hodgkins 1869-1947. In: tate.org.uk. Retrieved February 23, 2020 . 
9. ↑ Frances Hodgkins. Retrieved February 23, 2020 . 
10. ↑ FRANCES HODGKINS | Current | Exhibitions | British Council - Visual Arts. Retrieved February 23, 2020 .