“Who is ever quite without his landscape?”

An old man, his bottom jaw clenched and slightly proud, is seated in a chair beneath a leafless tree. His pale blue eyes are focussed on a book, a novel. A cup of tea steams on a table next to him. It is a clear Highveld afternoon, winter but warm. But for the occasional whir of a helicopter, the intermittent cooing of doves, it is quiet. Then a familiar noise, followed by a feminine voice: “Rob, telephone.” The voice becomes a figure as it emerges from a single-storey residence. Wearing a pastel apron, the woman pads across the tawny lawns and hands the old painter a telephone handset.

“Sean, oh god yes, no I’m a very bad bastard. I’m sorry, I was supposed to ring you at least three hours ago.”

“It’s not a problem,” I tell Robert Hodgins.

“Well it is a problem because I hate breaking my word. Um, I know it’s quite sentimental and Boy Scout-ish, but never mind. Listen dear boy, when would you like to come?”

“I can’t come through because I’m in Cape Town,” I respond.

“Oh I see. Well, ask Business Day if they are willing to fly me down to the Cape.”

“I know what their answer will be.”

“I have a feeling I know too,” he chuckles. “Alright, perhaps you could go ahead with the interview now. What’s this piece about?”

“Um, its basically about you being South Africa’s preeminent living painter,” I offer coyly. The painter chuckles again.

Of course, I share the old man’s cynical disregard for these sort of glib one-liners but I’m trying to set the scene here, bear with me. This is a story about painter Robert Hodgins, a man working in a practice increasingly given over to self-doubt and worry, never mind the headline grabbing billionaire art collectors and their lust for oil on canvas. Over the last hundred or so years, painting’s prominence has steadily been eroded, to the point where it now struggles to define its place in the dispersed field of contemporary art production.

For some, this necessarily casts doubts on the place and status of Hodgins. What, to put it crassly, makes this old boy and his abstracted figurative paintings of stifled executives, clenched old molls, tight-lipped warhorses and sun-drenched rakes so special? What indeed. The short answer: his laconic brevity and acuity as a painter, added to which there is his simple goodness and grace as a human. None of which was a given at the start of it all. Some biography.

“I was born in England, 27 June 1920 – the illegitimate son of a working woman, by a Canadian who lingered in London from Wold War One, was a married parent back home, and wasn’t interested in further fatherhood,” Hodgins pithily introduces himself in his eponymous monograph from 2002. Soon banished to an orphanage, he found a modicum of under-age happiness in the countryside, with a family that wanted to adopt him. At age ten, Mother Hodgins interceded, so it was back to London. Four years later, this sensitive, literate youth was again uprooted, yanked out of school – because learning was an affectation and cash paid the shared bills.

“I had a very lonely childhood with few friends and a completely philistine background,” Hodgins succinctly described his youth to me during a 2007 interview. Books, he added, were his only refuge. “I quite early on at school discovered literature, which was my first form of discovery of art, something which entranced me, that was quite pointless, quite useless.”

His first job was as a delivery boy for a newsagent in Soho. Two and half years later he found a job answering phones. At age 18 his great-uncle in South Africa offered him a means of escape. Once in Cape Town, the London youth worked as an insurance clerk. It was a brief reprieve. In late 1940, Hodgins, now a matriculant, joined the army transport division. He didn’t have it all that hard during the war. In the deserts of Egypt, he was introduced to modern English poetry, Auden in particular.

“Who is ever quite without his landscape?” wrote Auden in 1937. It is a rhetorical question, perhaps, but one that helpfully explains why Hodgins opted to stay in England after the war. London, after all, was home, and home, as Auden wrote, is “the centre where the three or four things/ that happen to a man do happen”. Back in the “grey block”, as Hodgins has described London, he took up a job teaching art at an East End school.

For many years Hodgins buttered his bread, sugared his tea and paid his rent with the help of teaching cheques. First in London, then later, after studying painting at Goldsmiths, followed by another boat trip to South Africa, in Pretoria, at the old technical college. He joined the staff there in 1954, Pretoria introducing the immigrant painter to cheap good food, clothes, cigarettes and wine. Immigrant painter? Well yes. Hodgins’ art is all about that awkward sense of a frail, receding cultural memory encountering and engaging, in an excitedly cautious manner, the nuances and complexities of an adopted culture. But I’m jumping far ahead of myself here.

In 1966, having established himself as a painter on the scene, Hodgins putting on his first show at Johannesburg’s Lidchi Gallery in 1956, he took up a position at Wits teaching life drawing. This little distraction would keep him busy for 17 years. I ask Hodgins, the man seated in the warm winter sunlight, if teaching ever stifled his ambitions and abilities as a painter

“No, no, no,” he blurts out emphatically. “I said at my doctorate at Wits that I owe a great deal to the students. One ex-student said, ‘So tell me what?’ I couldn’t pin it down, but I think the fact is that you’re surrounded by people who are taking art seriously. It is not a reinforcement, but it allows an interplay, like two rugby fans who take rugby seriously. No I mean it. I don’t scorn rugby fans, although I can’t see what all the fuss is, but I can see that to really, really love rugby you have to know what rugby is about. Well, to really love art, you’ve got to be serious about it.

“Teaching art is a very interesting experience. I loved it, I must say. I am very glad that Wits was so nasty to me, well not Wits but the head of the department, Alan Crump. He was so nasty to me that he made me leave. I am very glad he did, he didn’t realise what a favour he did to me.” A favour? Well, in hindsight yes, but when Hodgins left Wits in the early 1980s he was a retiree with a paintbrush and a modest track record. Hardly a promising prospect, really.

I ask the painter about the big holes in his CV. After an intense burst of activity in the late 1950s when, for example, he showed alongside Alexis Preller at the Pretoria Art Museum, he seemed to go nowhere before announcing himself as a serious proposition with a roguish gallery of military figures, in the mid-1980s.
“Ja but you know, one thing that perhaps you don’t remember or don’t even know is that up to I suppose the middle or late 1980s, there was quite a lot of small galleries, in particular the gallery attached to the Market Theatre, where one was always in a big group show with people who have now become very interesting, like Paul Stopforth, William Kentridge, you know, and you popped in and out of those.

“One was constantly showing, and because it wasn’t terribly remunerative, you didn’t make much money out of it, you had to earn your living doing teaching or something else. Because of all that one went on painting, but first you didn’t have all the time to paint and secondly there wasn’t that big excitement about South African art there is now, even in South Africa. You were painter, you exhibited; you were a sculptor, you exhibited, bada-bada-bada.”

I wonder out loud if this slower working pace, particularly when compared with his routine now of almost one solo exhibition a year, had an adverse effect on his evolution as a painter. After all, repetition breads rigour, and rigour is the measure of a practicing artist.

“I’m not sure about that, Sean,” he muses. “No I must say I think you are right. I think in those early days I was making paintings, now I am a painter.”
One bit of biography that has always intrigued me about Hodgins, and perhaps stems naturally from his affinity for writing, is his not so brief detour into art criticism. In the late 1950s Hodgins ditched his Pretoria teaching job, working for four years as an arts journalist for a magazine called Newscheck.

“I was perfectly willing to see whether I could perform as a writer, as I wasn’t bad,” he says without any sense of immodesty. The mood of the times also played its part in this decision.

“In the sixties and even in the seventies, there were about three people earning their living as painters. I mean three reputable people, not people who were churning out comforting little pictures of the Malay quarter, I’m not talking about them, I am talking about people who were trying to advance themselves and advance their work,” he says, mentioning the names Walter Battiss and Alexis Preller. When he did paint, it was almost as a hobbyist. “So in the sixties, I don’t think I was yet a professional artist, I was a professional amateur.”

One person who witnessed firsthand Hodgins transformation from hesitant amateur into unstoppable professional is Neil Dundas, a curator at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery.
“I first met Rob in the old Goodman Gallery at Hyde Park, around May 1983 when I was still rather new to the art world and the gallery,” says Dundas, whose insights into the painter are illuminating, notwithstanding the commercial relationship.

“I worked quite closely with him from 1984 onward, for his own solo exhibitions as well as Wits group shows, and collaborations with printers, ceramists and, of course, Deborah Bell and William Kentridge,” he explains. “I was always particularly struck by the way in which he was able to deal with social horrors, ugly aspects of human frailty, random violence and political venality without a judgmental stance. Rather he enjoyed the actual process of painting onto the canvas, teasing shapes out of clay, experimenting with effects on a plate, and allowed that evident skill and pleasure to add the humane touch to the subject.”

The result of all this spry activity is an oeuvre that, in the view of dealer Warren Siebrits, rarely disappoints. “There’s almost no such thing as a bad Hodgins,” Siebrits is quoted in Art South Africa. “And he’s probably the most important living South African painter.”

Not everyone necessarily agrees with this assessment. A rival Cape Town dealer once told me that Stanley Pinker, a contemporary of Hodgins, is far more adroit as a painter. And then there’s the matter of Nigerian curator and tastemaker Okwui Enwezor’s stinging aside in a 1996 Frieze magazine review: “I cannot imagine that paintings such as Hodgins’ – which look like Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon on a very bad day – represent the best of what could be seen in Johannesburg during 1995. These pictures… are formalism gone awry. They snuggle into a psychic space no larger than a one rand coin.”

Funnily enough, the novel Hodgins was reading when I called anticipated this part of our conversation.

“I am just reading a book by Julian Barnes, who quotes Sibelius: ‘You will notice there are no statues of critics in any town of France.’ Don’t you like that?” He laughs raucously. But, truthfully, what does the old man make of his critics?
“Sweetie,” he says, injecting a bit of camp into his occasional routine of speaking epigrammatically, “I have hardly ever been criticised by somebody terribly intelligent.”

The book on his lap also anticipates another, slightly less frivolous concern: “It is quite a long book. The author is only 60 and he is thinking about death. Here I am knocking 90, shouldn’t I be adjusting myself to this thought?”

“Then again you have rather more prosaic concerns about 90 because you have deadlines to deliver for next year’s big exhibition,” I respond.

“Yes, theoretically, but if I fall down dead in that deadline, tough. The gallery will have to make do with what they’ve got, won’t they. I hope it is not happening. I have this great ambition to be 100, and be the first South African 100-year-old painter who starts a new painting in their centenary year.”

But that is next year.

“I am now going to get off my butt, the shadows are coming in, the sunset is coming on slowly,” says Hodgins. “I am now going to my studio to put some Windsor red on a new painting.”