It’s a painting so recognizably Hodgins, this ambiguous portrait of power—the oversized suit; the patterns; the Matisse-ish blocks of bright color on the face; the thin moustache, its shape echoed in the shoestring tie; the festive bunting against an otherwise plain background. The portrait, A Gentleman from Mexico, is coming up for auction in Johannesburg this month. Sales estimates are as high as R600,000 ($76,600) .
When I think of Robert Hodgins, I think of the line from TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: “There will be time, there will be time, to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” because it prefaces the wonderful book simply titled Robert Hodgins; because he was 63 when he started painting seriously; because I called him about a year before he died—I wanted to do a video interview with him and he complained that his face was too wrinkled and nobody would want to look at it; because I’d met him at an exhibition and knew his face (he was wearing, I think, black-and-white striped trousers, he looked spry); and because the faces in his paintings are so often disguised, or only broadly suggested—they are brutish, they speak of baseness, they are ape-like, distorted, grotesque.
Hodgins captured something real in his paintings; a bit like Francis Bacon, but not the same: tortured but funny and sad too, something real about the world and about our particular Garden of Earthly Delights.
It’s how I’d buy and how first-time buyers are advised to buy: buy what you like, then if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter; you’ll experience the intangible joy of owning an artwork to look at, to think about. But I’ll not be bidding at the next auction—the pace is too fast, the pressure too great. I’ll be merely watching the collectors, the experts, the investors—those who’ve been studying price histories as an indication of both how much to pay and how much to expect in future—auction databases are particularly useful for this, some going back as far as 1652.
Part of the anticipation around A Gentleman from Mexico is linked to the records Strauss & Co has lately set for a Hodgins: starting with his A Seated Figure, Red Room that sold for R356,480 in May 2011; followed by Greenpiece ’99 No 3 (A Godson of the Godfather) selling for R612,700 in September 2011; and culminating in Igor Stravinsky & Four Women that sold for R724,100 ($87,785) in February.
According to the fine art auctioneer’s managing director, Stephan Welz, the auction is likely to raise between R30 and R40 million ($3.6-5.1 million). Irma Stern’s Arab could fetch as much as R9 million ($1.15 million). Strauss & Co sold Stern’s Two Arabs for R21,166,000 ($2.7 million) last year, the highest price achieved for any painting at auction in South Africa. Out of a total of 305 works on offer, 280 will be local, Alfred Thoba’s 1976 Riots among them.
The auction takes place on Monday, June 11 at the Johannesburg Country Club in Woodmead.