Trevor Hodgson

There are two letters and a hand-printed Christmas card, all dated 1958, from Trevor Hodgson to Ruth Borchard. The first is on 'AIA - Artists International Association' headed notepaper. Ruth had seen the artist’s works on show there. In his second letter, Hodgson writes: 'As you probably realise from my AIA show, I am not a portrait painter in the conventional sense. However, I often paint abstract portraits [in the A.I.A. show were Portrait of a God and Portrait of a Landscape], and I do have a recent "self-portrait" titled "Self"! This may interest you and so I shall bring it with me on Thursday (to the A.I.A. gallery).'

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1931, Trevor Hodgson studied at Lancaster College of Art and the University of London. Ruth kept the black-and-white card for an exhibition, 'paintings & drawings [sic]: TREVOR HODGSON' at the A.I.A. gallery (probably from Spring 1962), which states 'His career includes such varied occupations as photographer, clerk, scenic artist, jazz musician, school teacher and industrial designer. He is now lecturer on Graphic Design at Blackpool School of Art.' On one side it illustrates an abstracted painting of sculptural-looking curved and angular forms, including what may be interpreted as a sexless head and shoulders; on the other is a photo of the artist in semi-profile, with short, dark hair, dressed respectably in white shirt, tie and checked tweed jacket – an image of a lean, sensitive-looking young man.

Signed 'Hodgson' in a prominent flourish of black script, the self-portrait dates from 1958, when the artist was twenty-seven years old. Self is undoubtedly one of his 'abstract portraits'. It is as far removed as is possible from the photographic image of Hodgson as a clean-cut young man. This image has a contemporary avant-garde sculptural look. The face of Self looks rather as though it has been cast in rough concrete. Its deliberately primitivised form, its abrupt, raw edges and lumpen textures, find parallels in 50s bronzes of the human form by leading British sculptors, notably Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick and Bernard Meadows. But it also looks back to the far more radical French artists of the 1940s and early 50s, such as Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) and the TachisteJean Fautrier (1898-1964). Dubuffet's compassionate yet bizarrely caricatural paintings of human beings were inspired by Art Brut and children's art, and painted with a composite mud-like medium, haute pâte, paint blended with sand, tar, gravel. Fautrier's haunting paintings of excruciatingly battered heads and torsos give a disquieting effect of appearing to be composed of ash, excrement, grass and blood; he also made sculptures of mutilated, truncated heads, which, like his disfigured painted portrayals, were inspired by the tragic fate of French Resistance hostages tortured by the Nazis. Another contemporary parallel can be made with the matière paintings of the Spanish artist, Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012).

Although Hodgson's Self is not painted using the haute pâte medium, it evokes textures and materials such as weathered rock or roughcast concrete, even charred materials in the dense black lines in and around the face (which has its own Cubist aspect in that, to left and right, there appear to be double profiles). The spindly, freely spiralling lines scratched onto the concrete 'skin' have a look of primitive graffiti on a wall or automatic writing derived, surrealistically, straight from the unconscious. Some of Hodgson's preoccupations at the time are shown by the titles of some of his pictures from this period: Blue Ernst, Brown Rousseau, Numbers Game, Vertical Solitaire.

There is something barren, inhuman even, about the way Hodgson has depicted himself. The pliant softness and resilience of human skin has been replaced by harsh black and greyish-brown matière. The top of his head has given way to an almost colourless void. Yet Self also seems to exude gentle, impishly mocking humour: the glowing amber background (seeping through the void of the mouth too) brings what may seem a serene, healing accent to the picture.

That said, one could interpret this image as suggesting a person wounded in a nuclear attack, set against a luminous radioactive background. Such an intuitive interpretation is not so far-fetched. Hodgson was a politically aware artist. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been founded in November 1957, and its first public meeting was held at Methodist Central Hall, Westminster on 17th February 1958; thereafter, A.I.A. newsletters intermittently encouraged the society's members to go on CND marches. 1958, when Self was painted, was a time of acute public anxiety over the nuclear threat: on March 11th, a nuclear weapon had been accidentally dropped over Mars Bluff, South Carolina by a B-47 bomber, detonating the conventional explosive trigger, so creating a deep and substantial crater and injuring several people; then on March 25th, the German Bundestag approved the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in West Germany.

In 1956, John Osborne's play 'Look Back in Anger' had had its debut on the London stage. The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, wrote enthusiastically about this ground-breaking play, saying that it portrayed 'postwar youth as it really is […] All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage – the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of ‘official’ attitudes, the surrealist humour.’ These were qualities understood and experienced directly by young radically minded artists such as Hodgson. Interestingly, Tynan also wrote that another quality of 'postwar youth as it really is', as embodied by the play's mordantly angry and frustrated protagonist Jimmy Porter, was 'the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for'; as Greg Buzwell (a Curator at the British Library) has written, 'Tynan’s point regarding ‘the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for’ is important. There were several campaigns Jimmy Porter could have embraced – from joining the anti-apartheid movement to protesting against the proliferation of nuclear weapons – but his anger is directed inwards. There is no political activism involved.' It seems, by contrast, that Hodgson in 1958, as a member of, and frequent exhibitor at, the A.I.A (an exhibiting society founded in London in 1933 – and active until 1971 – with the aim of holding exhibitions and events supporting and promoting a variety of left-of centre political causes – though in its final stages the art it showed was increasingly depoliticised) was more politically aware than Osborne's young introverted firebrand character, and that his social conscience percolated then with vehement wit into artworks such as Self.

Hodgson later taught at the Blackpool College of Art, subsequently moving to the United States, where he taught at Bellarmine College (now University) in Louisville, Kentucky. He then moved to Canada, teaching at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. In 1977, he became the Director of the Dundas Valley School of Art in Hamilton, Ontario (which had been founded in 1964), helping radically transform and improve the school's teaching facilities and aims, including introducing international artists for workshops and masterclasses; he remained Director for twenty-two years.

His later paintings (oil on wood panel) show none of the searing, subversive vision of his early self-portrait but rather present a serene vision of abstracted bird, wave, sun and flag forms set against delicately coalescing blue and grey backgrounds.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004