Frances Hodgkins and Her Circle Exhibition: 12 November – 6 December
Three years in the making Frances Hodgkins and Her Circle is an exhibition that explores and celebrates the importance of community. At its core is an artist who had the enigmatic quality of drawing people to her. Over the course of seven decades Frances Hodgkins established a confrère of loyal supporters and friends. These relationships would prove vital in not only the development of her career, but also in turn the establishment of a number of significant artistic vocations for artists such as Owen Merton, Dorothy Kate Richmond, Beatrice Seddon and Amy Krauss. Hodgkins’ own career was in turn influenced by her friendship with artists such as Cedric Morris & Lett Haines, critics and writers John and Myfanwy Piper and art dealers Lucy Wertheim, Duncan Macdonald and Arthur Howell.
This exhibition brings together a series of works dating from 1888 to 1987 and while the exhibition focusses on the relationship between Hodgkins and her circle of friends and fellow artists, it also acknowledges the outstanding career of a number of prominent 20th century New Zealand and British artists. Upon their return to Aotearoa with fresh ideology and overseas experience, the influence of her students Dorothy Kate Richmond, Gwen Knight, Edith Collier and Flora Scales, to name but a few, cannot be underestimated. Their skill and particularly their ability to teach European Modernism and illustrate these ideas in their works had a profound effect on the development of New Zealand art in the 20th Century.
