Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez, Southern France

First title and date supplied by the artist for Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, exhibition, Helen F V Scales, 1975-1976. Listed as artwork no. 1 in this exhibition. Second title supplied by Art and Object, Auckland, New Zealand, Tim and Sherrah Francis Collection, 07.09.2016, Lot 34. Third title from The Fletcher Trust Collection, Wellington, New Zealand, documentation.

It is possible that this painting was brought back to New Zealand by Flora Scales's sister, Mrs Marjorie Hamersley, when she and her husband visited Scales in St Tropez in 1939 after the wedding of her daughter, Patience, in Malta.

This assumption is based on the fact that this painting, along with Mediterranean Village [BC019], Untitled [Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez] [BC020], St Tropez [BC022], St Tropez [BC023] and Greniar [Graniers], St Tropez, Southern France [BC024], was safely in New Zealand by 1942 when Scales discovered the loss of potentially hundreds of artworks stored in Paris, plundered by Nazis.

This is the old town of St Tropez, France. The church is L’Eglise Notre-Dame de l’Assomption.

In this painting Scales has chosen to work from a high viewpoint which with an overall intensity of colour brings distance nearer to the picture plane. Planes of colour nudge and nestle together across the lower half of the canvas to portray the ancient town in contrast with the smooth expanse of the sea and the flowing hills beyond. This procedure shows her intelligent understanding of Hans Hofmann's spatial concepts [see Related image 1 from Untitled [loose leaf pages] [BC112]].

There are three paintings in the group based on the basilica and lighthouse in St Tropez from the late 1930s, Mediterranean Village [BC019], Untitled [Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez] [BC020] and Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez, Southern France [BC021]. It seems that Scales did not return to St Tropez after 1939. These are the last known of her sunny, colourful, cubist compositions.

Taking heed of Hofmann's theories, in these works Scales has adjusted the role of the curved path. Reduced in scale and curved towards the vertical of her canvas it plays its part in the formal arrangement of colour, geometric planes and diverging diagonals to suggest the space and vitality of the scene without recourse to traditional rules of perspective.

The V-shapes of the agaves marking the curve of the path are reminiscent of the ship's rigging seen in Scales's work of the 1920s [Shipping, Wellington Harbour] [BC128]]. The agaves also bring to mind the derricks of the 1950s [Untitled [Mousehole Cornwall 2] [BC029]] and the forked tree trunks of the late 1960s and early 1970s [Bry-sur-Marne, Orchard] [BC069]], in which this shape becomes a tool for her construction of dynamic pictorial space.

The V-shapes of the agaves, trees and derricks, significant elements in her work during and after the 1930s, begin to form the vocabulary of her Modernist work following Hans Hofmann's instruction to do away with single-point perspective.

As well as the equilibrium established by the balanced vanes of the V-shape, there is also an immanent sense of movement. Hofmann said, "We have to experience the object as vital in her existence in space" (Dickey, Tina, Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann, Trillistar Books, Canada, 2011, pg 27). Hofmann explained that volumes revolve on their axes to create a sense of movement and counter-movement, which animates and gives depth to the flat surface of the picture plane.

Scales's use and manipulation of the V-shape is one of several examples in her work which demonstrate the way she assimilated, and made her own, the teachings of Hans Hofmann. This example in particular shows her personal interpretation, without imitation, of his theories about the creation of plastic space, which were crucial to the development of her modernism.

The accompanying wall panel text for this work in the exhibition Modern Women: Flight of Time, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand, 2024, written by curator Julia Waite, reads, “Flora Scales stopped for a time in St Tropez, where she sketched this view over the bay in Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez, Southern France, 1939, with Our Lady of the Assumption Church jutting up into the gulf. Features in the small-scale painting appear as compressed blocks of colour that softly fuse into each other, anticipating the almost complete erosion of pictorial structures in Scales’ later work. In 1932, she became one of only two Antipodean students to train at the Hofmann School of Fine Art in Munich, where she learnt the principles of how to make a modern painting. Instead of ascribing a simple formula, the Hofmann School instilled in its students the importance of personal vision and a belief in the power of intuition.”