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Finding Frances Hodgkins
by Mary Kisler
Massey University Press, Auckland 2019
KYLA MACKENZIE
Frances Hodgkins never owned a
home of her own, and therefore was
not ‘owned’ by a home. Untethered to
a conventional middle-class life, she
moved on average six times a year.
Her circle of friends and associates
in Britain included Ben and Winifred
Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth,
Myfanwy and John Piper, Christopher
Wood and art patron Lucy Wertheim.
Hodgkins thrived, struggled, rallied,
evolved. She achieved solid critical
success late in life. Her itinerant
lifestyle reflected various, shifting
needs, including: financial and
teaching imperatives, visual and
psychological stimulation, refuge and
peace, warmth, light, colour, and ease
of living. Her travelling also reflected
the ongoing European tradition of
sketching in idyllic villages. Curator
and author Mary Kisler sees part of
the artist’s modernism as a desire to
represent the ‘quotidian’.^1 However,
neither the quotidian realities of New
Zealand nor the everyday urban scenes
of Paris or London would sustain
this artist. The perceived simplicity
and beauty of life in largely non-
industrialised communities, along with
doses of urban cultural stimulation,
including modern art, did however.
The Frances Hodgkins Project,
with Auckland Art Gallery’s Senior
Curator Mary Kisler at the helm,
has produced a huge exhibition, a
sumptuous catalogue Frances Hodgkins:
European Journeys (which also includes
her Moroccan watercolours), an
evolving online catalogue, and a
more informal, personal output:
Finding Frances Hodgkins published
by Massey University Press. This
small, chubby book draws on many
years of Kisler’s research. Faced with
seemingly erroneous titles and dates
in the Auckland Art Gallery’s existingcatalogue, the need for more certainties
consumed the author: ‘it became
obvious that many of her paintings
were specific to place. But the question
was: where exactly?’ She elected to
visit the physical sites, hotels and inns
at which the artist stayed, in order
to ‘stand in the places [she] stood,... look at the same views,... breathe
the sea air and smell the wild herbs
and resinous forests.’^ Finding Frances
is, she says: ‘a kind of partner with
the [exhibition] catalogue [the latter
of which] focuses on the works...
allowing me to take you, the reader,
with me on my travels’.
This transparency is a point of
difference within the literature on
Hodgkins. Using the content of
emails home to followers and friends,
Kisler shares the discoveries, as well
as dead ends, the vagaries of travel
and accommodation, hustling for site
access, a changing guard of travelling
colleagues and friends, gourmet
delights, and describes an array of