Colour virtuoso led by example

The most famous artist born in New Zealand, Frances Hodgkins is again the subject of an exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery. The show is prompted by the results of a three-year technical investigation of her painting practice by the gallery's conservators, Sarah Hillary and Ute Strehle.

The exhibition fills three rooms and concentrates mainly on her work in still-life and landscape. It is called Leitmotif because, like Wagner's operatic music, it returns to the same melodies again and again.

It might be seen as an exercise in art history.

In no way can Hodgkins be considered a modern artist. The work that won her a considerable measure of fame was done in the 1930s and has very little to do with contemporary art practice.

Initially, the show looks repetitive and even drab despite her reputation as a colourist.

Why then is she important enough to warrant it, and the coincidental publication of a biography?

First, Hodgkins had an enormous talent. This is exemplified in the drawings which make clear the outstanding excellence of her ability to make every part of a drawing join into an overall composition where technique and detail cohere into a satisfactory whole. Her best work was done in Britain but, paradoxically, she was here when we needed her.

In the second half of the 20th century, this country's art needed a predecessor, a New Zealander who had made it, and her example contributed to the surge in size, assurance and dedication in our painting.

Hodgkins was the exemplar of an obsessively dedicated and self-sacrificing artist who continued to develop over a lifetime.

She had hobnobbed with big names like Henry Moore. She was the star of the first of the series of Penguin monographs on outstanding British artists.

In her quiet landscape and still-life way she was a courage-giver - although, like Katherine Mansfield, to whom she is constantly compared, she went to Europe and stayed there.

So how does her work look in this latest gathering of paintings which, importantly, includes a substantial painting on loan from the Tate?

The work is domestic in size. We have become accustomed to very big work that makes an immediate impact. These are different. They need close scrutiny to absorb each nuance.

The painting from the Tate - Wings over Water done in 1931 in Cornwall - has shells on a window ledge, a little vase of flowers, a balcony, cliffs and the sea beyond.

It is commonplace enough in subject but wonderfully orchestrated in colour, from the gleam of light on the sea, the rhythm of the cliffs reflected in the shape of the shells, to the bold squawk of colour of a parrot on the railings of the balcony.

The red of the parrot echoes round the painting and is modulated on the hills to chime with the curtains that frame the painting.

It is fortunate that a drawing associated with this painting is also here, on loan from Te Papa.

Nearby there are five paintings, all done in 1930-31 and representing the peak of Hodgkins' achievement in oils.

In one of them she is courageous enough to challenge John Constable.

Painted on the bank of the River Stour, opposite the view in Constable's famous The Haywain, Hodgkins shows Willie Lott's cottage and the river, but in her own spontaneous manner.

The flow of water is particularly well conveyed. Hodgkins is always good on the rhythms of water, notably in a nearby work called Pastorale (Mill Water). At times the rhythmic disposal of patches of colour across the whole painting becomes daringly abstract.

This, and the lovely work Kimmeridge Foreshore, on loan from Victoria University, are reminders of how advanced her work appeared in her time.

Hodgkins absorbed the achievements of Picasso and Matisse and incorporated their ideas into her own quieter personal manner as she progressed from the superb watercolours of her earlier career to the oils of her maturity. Above all, her originality lay in her colour. Henry Moore said: "You could tell a Frances Hodgkins from a long distance purely by the colour alone."

But the viewer must not expect vivid industrial colour. Hodgkins was working in a restrained tradition and her colour darkened with the approach of age and the war.

The best way to view these paintings is to come fairly close and see how each touch is harmonised into the whole and chimes with colour and shape in other parts of the painting.

Something Hodgkins learned from the early Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque was that each line and every touch of paint must be a meaningful incident, and lead to another colour or form to give the painting an independent existence and mood only loosely linked to the subject.

Although the still-life and the landscape are lovingly fused, the painter stroked and handled the plates and vases of her foreground still-lifes before painting them and they retain a tactile quality.

This quality and her inventiveness with colour are exemplified in the Auckland Art Gallery's own, much-reproduced Red Jug, with its wonderful terracotta vase in the foreground.

An art historian might meditate on her place in the British Neo-Romantic School of Graham Sutherland and John Piper, but we can all delight in the loveliness of such work.

The exhibition runs until the middle of January.