Notes

Clubmen of America: Good Ole Country Boys (2001) is a beautiful example of Robert Hodgins' talent for blistering social observation through a deliciously seductive aesthetic. Its figural composition anticipates A Day at the Office (2007), but it gathers energy quite differently. The Office painting is a minimalist study in disconnection (and perhaps mutual incomprehension), established against a blank white field. But Country Boys depicts a tight tableau of simmering male aggression that is shared and mutually endorsed against a backdrop that hints at rural anonymity. Its central figure backs up a younger man at left while extending a welcoming arm to a bald brute who enters from the right, his fist tinged with red. We register, slowly, the possible violence off-scene. The viewer is not made more comfortable by the way these smug, smudgy, dodgy, dark characters are enfolded in a palette of pastel blue tinged with buttery yellow.

Hodgins made his Clubmen of America series twenty years after diving into a full-time painting career with his Ubu works, themselves inspired by the spirit of the Savage God¹ propelling Alfred Jarry's titular despot in his play Ubu Roi. The Clubmen series gives more nuanced form to the Ubu-esque theme of absolute power and its inevitable corollary, absolute corruption.

Country Boys is one of Robert's most striking paintings and one of his most prescient. It's not a representation of the unrestrained large-scale excesses of an Ubu/Trump/Zuma, but an insight into the small cultural moments that enable the Ubus on the world stage. The characters suggest a world in which self-preservation is possible through exclusion or eradication of difference.

At a time when North America is run by clubs and divided by ideological bunkers,² this painting is more relevant and startling than ever. And Robert's ever-present wit, precision, and insight blaze through.

1. The Irish poet WB Yeats was said to have called out, “After us, the Savage God!”, after watching a performance of Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry's wildly irreverent play about power and greed.

2. Brené Brown's term, from Braving the Wilderness (Penguin Random House, 2017).

Brenda Atkinson

Provenance

Gift from the artist to Brenda Atkinson

Literature

Brenda Atkinson (ed.) (2002) Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg. Illustrated in colour on page 110.