Kāpiti art collection contributes to national Hodgkins anniversary celebration

Three Frances Hodgkins works from the Field Collection have been included in a major

Auckland Art Gallery exhibition to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth.

They will form part of Frances Hodgkins, European Journeys, which opens at Auckland Art Gallery on 4 May.

“Being asked to contribute work from the Field Collection underlines the value and importance of the Hodgkins’ works held in the collection,” says Mahara Gallery Director Janet Bayly. We are grateful to the collection trustees for making the paintings available.

They will join 147 other Hodgkins’ works from New Zealand and around the world in an exhibition which marks the 150th anniversary of Frances Hodgkins’ birth.

The three paintings from the Field Collection on loan are The Dye Yards and two works painted in the French port of Douarnenez.

Frances Hodgkins is celebrated as one of New Zealand’s most successful expatriate artists of the 20th century. She has an enduring legacy in both Europe and New Zealand.

The exhibition includes artworks produced between 1901 and 1946: from early watercolour travel sketches of the French Riviera, Morocco and Venice, through to Hodgkins’ first contact with modernism in Paris, and oil paintings from her later life in Britain.

Exhibition curator and Auckland Art Gallery Senior Curator, Mackelvie Collection, International Art, Mary Kisler says the exhibition is the result of almost a decade-long research project during “Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys will allow visitors to see what Hodgkins saw, and to understand how place influenced the way she painted.

Frances Hodgkins was born and grew up in Dunedin. She left for Europe in 1901 and apart from a brief return to New Zealand, spent the remainder of her life in England and Europe.

By the late 1920s, she had become an important figure within British Modernism, exhibiting with avant-garde artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Her links with Kāpiti were forged by her sister Isabel marrying local farmer, businessman and MP, William Field and settling in Waikanae. Frances Hodgkins’ ashes are interred in Waikanae cemetery.

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