It took a while for\u00a0Francis Hodgkins\u2019 vision to be recognised,\u00a0Lucy Hammonds\u00a0writes.<\/p>\n
In 1924 Frances Hodgkins was living in Provence in the southeast of France. By this time, she had been living away from Aotearoa New Zealand for more than 20 years and spent the first five years of the 1920s moving between England and France.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Red Cockerel\u00a0brings the austerity of Hodgkins\u2019s post-war years in Europe together with her unrelenting quest for innovation and modernity. The painting captures the experimentation that sits at the heart of her work, as she merges cubism, expressionism and surrealism into a single composition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Red Cockerel\u00a0was Hodgkins\u2019s most abstract painting to date, and she felt keenly the challenge that it presented. In her letters home she wrote frequently of her disappointment in the lack of interest in her experimental works, and she held few exhibitions at this time.<\/p>\n
By the late 1920s, however, the world was catching up with Hodgkins\u2019s modern vision. Back in England, she was becoming more widely recognised and acknowledged as a leading figure of British contemporary art of the day. She was exhibiting alongside artists including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Henry Moore, who were all part of the London-based Seven and Five Society (est. 1919).<\/p>\n
As a group credited for helping initiate an abstract art movement in Britain, works such as\u00a0Red Cockerel\u00a0would have clearly established Hodgkins\u2019s status as an artist committed to progress and innovation. She was invited into the Seven and Five Society in 1929 and remained a member of the society until 1934.<\/p>\n
The momentum of Hodgkins\u2019s artistic practice continued to build and in 1939 she was selected to represent Britain at the 22nd Venice Biennale. Due to the outbreak of World War 2, Britain ultimately cancelled its presentation. However, the works were exhibited in London in 1940. By this time Hodgkins was being described as a \u2018\u2018painter of genius\u2019\u2019 – a far cry from her despair at the reception to her earlier forays into abstraction with works such as\u00a0Red Cockerel.<\/p>\n
In 1957\u00a0Red Cockerel\u00a0was purchased for the collection of Dunedin Public Art Gallery by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Society. It is the most radical painting by Hodgkins in the gallery\u2019s collection, marking a critical moment of change within the career of \u014ctepoti Dunedin\u2019s most famous artist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took a while for\u00a0Francis Hodgkins\u2019 vision to be recognised,\u00a0Lucy Hammonds\u00a0writes. In 1924 Frances Hodgkins was living in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127132,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-127131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}