Description
This semi-abstract landscape by New Zealander, Frances Hodgkins has surrealistic undertones, lurid colour and a strange spatial ambiguity between the foreground and background. A number of metal or wooden objects that resemble enlarged pieces of military equipment are scattered in front of a building. Painted in 1937, Tanks, Barrels and Drums hints at the strain and anxiety that the artist, by then in her 70s and living in Dorset, England, was feeling at the prospect of the imminent outbreak of war.

Hodgkins never married. Her greatest and most persistent relationship was with the artist Dorothy Richmond (1860–1935), whom she described as ‘the dearest woman with the most beautiful face and expression’. Like many women of her time, Hodgkins was not open about her sexuality but had a number of close women and gay men friends. It is of course problematic to use labels like ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ when describing artists in the early half of the twentieth century. These are modern terms which cannot be easily applied to an era when the whole concept of same-sex desire and attraction was altogether more fraught and complex. Hodgkin’s painting has been chosen to mark the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, New York in June 1969, a moment that is commonly accepted to have kick started the modern gay rights movement around the world. In this context, it is interesting to speculate about the effect on previous generations that the Stonewall Riots might have had if they had occurred earlier. Would this defining event, when gay men and lesbians all over the world were finally given their rights, have helped individuals like Hodgkins to be more open about who they were?

Frances Hodgkins was born in 1869 in Dunedin, New Zealand. She came to Europe in 1901, and travelled a great deal, settling in Paris in 1908. An exhibition of her work in 1928 was a big success and gained her membership of the influential 7 & 5 Society. Since her death her reputation as an influential colourist and significant modernist painter has continued to grow.