Notes

This large canvas depicting a naked figure in a window rehearses many of the formal and thematic concerns that occupied Robert Hodgins during his later career. The lumpy pink figure at the centre of the composition epitomises his unflattering approach to the human form. A woman rather than a girl, his figure is redolent of numerous indelicately rendered female protagonists (including Tart, shown at the South African National Gallery in 1986), but also shares affinities with various older naked male figures. This ambiguity pervades the setting of his painting. The central figure occupies a recess within a band of purplish blue flanked on each side by wedges of black; further stripes of yellow and coral pink add to the verticality. Notwithstanding his figurative persuasions, Hodgins frequently rendered architectural space as a rudimentary choreography of bold colours. Sometimes additional line work locates the action in some or other interior or exterior setting. Is this an urban vista? Are the George Grosz-like male figures at bottom kerbside patrons? It is possible that the scene dramatises aspects of the artist’s early London biography, when he worked as a factotum for a newsagent in Soho. His labours included delivering magazines to sex workers in their parlours. Commenting on the recurrence of these formative experiences in his late-career paintings, Hodgins in 2007 remarked: ‘It isn’t called up, but I suddenly recognise it – a Soho street, a Soho prostitute.’¹ Hodgins, though, was not a social realist painter. ‘What interests me is a sense of the incongruity of the way we all live together in this world,’ he said in 1984, at the start of his revival as a painter. ‘One is in a way trying to find a metaphor for the wonder and horror of a world in which terrible things and beautiful things exist together.’²

1. Interview with artist by Sean O’Toole, November 2007, Menlo Park, Pretoria.
2. Ivor Powell (1984) ‘One of My Own Fragments: An interview with Robert Hodgins’, De Arte 31, page 42.