Notes

In 1954, Robert Hodgins took up a lectureship at Pretoria Technical College (now Tshwane University of Technology). His accommodation was a flat on Church Street. Post-war South Africa was, initially at least, “like heaven”, recalled London-born Hodgins in 2002.¹  Its virtues included cheap good food, clothes, cigarettes, wine and a circle of artist friends. But, as he got to know the country, he recognised that “everything was not as kosher as it looked”.² His paintings began to reflect this, his once-handsome figures becoming “cumbrous” and “heavy” and “distorted”.³ He was tentatively and very slowly moving in the direction of his mature style. That style is typified by its urbane themes (notably power and human frailty) and the painter’s almost whimsical treatment of the figure. His subjects emerge out of the very material of his paintings rather than present themselves as fully defined marks on its surface.

Hodgins only occasionally directed his spirited and critical intelligence as a painter to scenes of middle class domesticity. It was a world he entered late and never fully immersed himself in. In the early 1960s, Hodgins, who was orphaned for a period as a child and spent time in Kenya and Egypt as a soldier, temporarily gave up teaching to work as a critic for News/Check, a current affairs magazine based in Johannesburg. During this period he settled in Waterkloof, a pillar of Pretoria affluence, living in a cottage on a property owned by Timothy Neethling, the brother of artist Jan Neethling.⁴ It was his only sustained immersion in the kind of affluent suburban setting suggested in this painting. Hodgins left Pretoria sometime in 1967 or 68, initially settling on a smallholding near Fourways. Shortly afterwards he bought a house in Westdene, a stolid National Party enclave, where he lived until 1989. He briefly moved back in with the Neethling family, describing himself to friends as “a Johannesburg artist in exile in Pretoria”.⁵ Roundabout 1991, he moved in with Jan Neethling on a smallholding in Midrand, where Hodgins lived until his death in 2010. It was during this rusticated period that Hodgins, in the manner of novelist John Updike in his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick, composed this study of corpulent women, possibly witches if we follow the letter of his title, their hands nefariously placed, performing a contained suburban magic.

1 Robert Hodgins. (2002) ‘A String of Beads”, in Roberts Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Page 27.
2 Rayda Becker. (2002) ‘Made in Africa?’, in Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Page 32.
3 Ibid. Page 21.
4 Karin Skawran. (2014) ‘In conversation with Jan Neethling about his life and his art’, in Jan Neethling, Cape Town: Erdmann Contemporary. Page 13.
5 Interview with Retief van Wyk, 20 April 2015.

Literature

Fraser, Sean (ed.) (2002) Robert Hodgins, Tafelberg: Cape Town. Illustrated in colour on page 89.