Robert Griffiths Hodgins was a celebrated artist when he died in Johannesburg in 2010, just short of his 90th birthday. A lunch he had planned from his own culinary repertoire for the occasion went ahead without him and as a testament to his popularity, there wasn’t an empty seat.
In 1996, Suzanne Brenner made a documentary about him and other than its original television broadcasts on Arts Unlimited, it was barely seen by the public. After inadvertently destroying the last DVD copy she had, Suzanne decided it was time to post it on YouTube (watch below).
Robert was a man of many parts. Artist, lecturer, cook, gardener, performer, writer, raconteur, and most importantly, painter.
“It’s been said very often I’m a very English painter in the tradition of Freud and Bacon but where I really come from is an immense love and respect of the idea of art – of it carrying weight; of it carrying importance, of it carrying personal intensity. I don’t think I live more intensely than when I’m in front of a canvas.”
Born in London in 1920 to a single mother without the means to give him the education he deserved, Robert had an extremely hard childhood and was frequently left to his own devices. Cold and bare foot, he sought shelter in London’s National Gallery where some of the attendants took pity on him and allowed him to linger and even talked to him about paintings he liked. He often credited those times with igniting his passion for painting.
Neil Dundas, Research and Archive Consultant at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, is a respected expert on Robert’s work and counted him among his closest friends. Neil picks up the story.
“As a child in Depression-era London, Robert met ‘punch drunk’ retired boxers, beaten men who were gruffly kind to him, ladies of the night, dance hall girls and crooners; circus folk and ne’er-do-wells, who were later to become favourite subjects in his paintings.”
Other popular themes in his “theatre of life” work were the power games of military men, New York cops and pinstriped businessmen.
Robert left school at 14 to become a newspaper delivery boy, a life he escaped when his great-uncle, who owned Cape Town’s Harbour Café, invited him to South Africa in 1938 and encouraged him to return to his studies. When World War 11 broke out, he had matriculated but he opted to join the Union Defence Forces.
Robert served his country in North Africa but in 1945 he returned to England and his studies, with a view to becoming a teacher but his plans took a turn for the better when he was accepted at the prestigious Goldsmith’s College of Art, and he pursued his first love.
Times were tough in London and in the absence of finding a teaching post, he had to make a decision about his future. He returned to South Africa where he combined writing art criticism for Newscheck magazine and lecturing, first at Pretoria Technical College, and later at the University of Witwatersrand, where he continued teaching until 1983.
“Closing the door on his teaching career was liberating for Robert,” says Neil. “He flourished in his new freedom, which enabled him to focus on painting, printing, drawing, ceramics and learning new art techniques. “He chose satire in his skilled and witty paintings – examining petty bureaucrats or powerful men in suits and
uniforms, which disguised their venality with a semblance of respectability while they concealed their misdeeds.
“Robert would reference great works of art, poetry, opera, music and history with an accurate memory, believing firmly that the present always had much to gain from the past.
“He tackled all human behaviour with a hint of understanding and complicity – he was an acid social critic with a conscience, but also had a well-developed sense of the absurd,” says Neil.
