Notes

Men wearing civilian and military uniforms are a constant in the work of Robert Hodgins. He depicted the financially and militarily powerful with mordant wit and equanimity. The title of two canvases, A Wicked Man Sumptuously Attired (1996) and Bad Man with Great Threads (1997) sold by Strauss & Co in 2016, capture the satirical spirit of these portraits. One of Hodgins's earliest depictions of a military figure is an etching of an officer in formal dress titled General Ubu (1960), a reference to French playwright Alfred Jarry's fictional French king Ubu Roi (1896). However, British-born Hodgins only started painting these figures with intent after his retirement from the art department at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1983. Canvases from this period explore his interest in the formal qualities of Francis Bacon's approaches to figuration. He placed these formal investigations in conversation with the fraught politics of late-apartheid South Africa.

A Cadet Watching TV from 2007 saw Hodgins return to a favourite and enduring subject. But his military man here is a mere junior, a cadet. He occupies less than a third of the canvas. The frame within a frame is another stock device from the Hodgins armoury. Isolated against a red backdrop, the stiff cadet is both spectator and guard to the corpulent figures that dominate the composition. These figures are rendered in a confident gestural style, which artist and critic Sue Williamson parses in her discussion of this painting: "Hodgins develops his image from an amorphous haze of seemingly randomly applied splotches. Accents of blue and red suggest a group of figures. The depiction of sadly lumpen, graceless bodies suggests a cruel humour."¹

Completed three years before the artist's death at age 89, this painting showcases Hodgins's tireless innovation in the studio.

The work includes areas of canvas filled in with automotive spray paint. Hodgins was interested in street art, especially British artist Banksy, and began incorporating new materials into his later paintings. Art critic Michael Smith interviewed Hodgins when he exhibited a suite of similar paintings in 2007. "[Hodgins] says that he certainly never enters the studio with a definite idea of what it is he's going to paint that day. Instead he insists that, when painting, he thinks like a surfer, bobbing up and down while waiting for a good wave... His open-ended formal process seems to be the wellspring of his conceptual creativity and relevance, and allows for the fluidity of his social observations."²

1. Sue Williamson. (2009) South African Art Now, New York: Collins Design. Page186
2. Michael Smith, Robert Hodgins at Goodman Gallery, ArtThrob.co.za, Issue No. 116, April 2007: http://www.artthrob.co.za/07apr/reviews/

goodman.html

Literature

Sue Williamson. (2009) South African Art Now, New York: Harper Collins. Illustrated in colour on page 186.