Notes

Robert Hodgins taught in the Art Department at the Pretoria Technical College (now Tshwane University of Technology) from 1954 to 1961.. He described a new staff member, Ernest de Jong, as being ‘full of America’. ‘We worked a lot together, pouring duco all over the place,’ remembers Hodgins, ‘and that, to some extent, broke my way of painting. But the mood of painting – once I’d got over the intoxication of America – via de Jong – started to alter. Plumb ladies became heavy women, thick-thighed; Greek warriors became hulky threats.’¹ The present lot, Torso, may well have been part of this new approach to painting, the upshot of which was a two-person exhibition with De Jong at Gallery 101, in Johannesburg, in 1961. Torso could well have been included on that exhibition.

1. Brenda Atkinson (2002) Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg, page 29.