Frances Hodgkins and Her Circle

‘A Sense of Time, Place and Hope: Frances Hodgkins and her Circle’ by Richard Wolfe, Art New Zealand, issue 178, 2021, pp 96-99, “Two other New Zealanders, Gwen Knight and Flora Scales, who were born in Wellington and Lower Hutt respectively, joined up with Hodgkins in 1931 at St Tropez, and both later had a connection with Hans Hofmann. Hodgkins introduced Knight to the work of the German artist, who took her on as a pupil in Munich, and she later urged Scales to enrol at his School of Art. Scales studied Hofmann’s principles of modernism, which discouraged an dependence on naturalistic perspective and representation and, upon her return to New Zealand in 1934, she met and inspired Toss Woollaston with the ideas she has absorbed in Europe. Recognised as a pioneer, in 1975 Scales was given a solo exhibition at the Auckland City Art Gallery, arranged by Colin McCahon (who also wrote the catalogue Foreword). She was represented in Frances Hodgkins and Her Circle with an exquisite watercolour from the 1920s, of shipping in Wellington Harbour which displayed the early influence of Dorothy Kate Richmond and was in contrast to the broader brushstrokes that would distinguish her increasingly abstract landscapes in the 1950s.”