Cambridge blogger discovers story of painting on Fake or Fortune
"The painting came up for sale as some of the less important works from the Hertfordshire Council Pictures for Schools Scheme in 2019," said Mr Cantus."I went on a bit of a trolly-dash buying the works, as many where not expensive and there were many items in each lot."Mr Cantus needed illustrations for a book he has since written on Pictures for Schools.This was a 20th Century project, the brainchild of Nan Youngman, which bought modern British art to lend to schools and "give children artwork that was inspiring to look at". The council made more than £440,000 from its initial sale of the artworks. A council spokesperson said the sell-off followed a review of its collection and a public consultation. "We sold a number of works judged to have little or no significance to Hertfordshire at auction in 2019... with the money raised being invested in local services," they said."One of our aims in selling these works was to find them a better home than our storerooms where they could be properly displayed and appreciated, so whilst it may turn out that this specific painting was worth more, we are pleased that it has found a good home with a new owner."
Who was Frances Hodgkins?
Born in New Zealand, she left in 1901 and spent the rest of her life in EuropeA breakthrough in public recognition came in 1929 when her friend and fellow artist Cedric Morris suggested she should be selected for the Seven & Five Society, exhibiting alongside Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry MooreBy the 1940s, her work was being lauded in the British pressToday, she is little known outside her native New Zealand, where the galleries have been "very active in buying and repatriating the works", said Mr CantusSource: Art UK
Mr Cantus admitted he did not even want the picture, but he did want to acquire works by Vera Cunningham - and it was sold as a pair attributed to Cunningham."The Fake or Fortune picture had been put in a horrid 1970s frame, when the original frame was damaged," he said.The original labels on its back were lost and "then it is likely someone guessed it was a Vera Cunningham and wrote it on the back". Mr Cantus put a photograph of it on his blog and thought no more about it until 2021, when someone got in touch to suggest it might be by Ms Hodgkins.Taking it out of the frame, he discovered another painting on the other side of the canvas.
Having done as much investigating as he could, he got in touch with Fake or Fortune because "it gives members of the public the chance to get a painting validated"."I enjoyed what happened off the camera as much as on," he said."Then you have an out-of-body experience: 'Why am I up a hill, in Wales, with Fiona Bruce, looking at a Roman goldmine?'."The outcome of the investigation is not being revealed until the programme goes out."I stopped thinking of the painting when I cycled back from London with it in a Primark bag," he added.Fake or Fortune is on BBC One at 21:00 BST on Monday.
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A large outbuilding allowed him to more intensely explore sculpture, especially monumental heads and busts. You can guess the dominant subject. His next studio was on the Rue des Grands-Augustins in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district of Paris. Picasso liked it because the shabby 17th-century townhouse had a connection to Balzac as the residence for the painter Frenhofer, the main character in his novel The Unknown Masterpiece. It is where Picasso painted probably his second most famous work (the first being his 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon). Guernica was a commission from the Republican government for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris. • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews Maar found the vast attic studio for him — partly thanks to it being a meeting place for the resistance group Contre-attaque, of which she had been a member — and secured exclusive rights to document the painting's creation for the magazine Cahiers d'art. Quite different from Walter, whom the co-curator Janet McLean describes as 'dreamy and romantic', Maar was fiery and passionately left-wing, and as she documented his work, 'they were bouncing off each other … it was a meeting of minds for sure,' her political zeal influencing the direction of the painting. Sadly, Guernica doesn't travel, but several works from the period give a sense of the tension and confinement of those difficult years. 'I'm glad we're able to show these quite frugal paintings made in 1938, when there were a lot of refugees coming to France due to the Spanish Civil War,' McLean says. One such is Child with a Lollipop Sitting Under a Chair, donated by Maya to the Musée Picasso a few years ago. Painted in sombre monochrome, 'it's not a pretty picture of a child', McLean says; instead it has a huddled, claustrophobic feel. 'It's interesting to show Picasso connected to the world, because he really was.' It's not known why Picasso elected to remain in Paris as the Second World War intensified — he was unable to exhibit, the Nazi regime considered his work 'degenerate' — but he kept working away in his attic, photographed there in 1944 by Brassaï. A shot from this series will be in the exhibition, alongside Bust of a Woman with a Blue Hat, a portrait of Maar made the same year, just after their not-quite-definitive break-up (they continued to see each other intermittently until 1946). One of the aims of the exhibition, McLean says, is to show 'Picasso's versatility as an artist. While he considered himself primarily a painter, he was exceptional in his ability to turn his hand to any medium.' A wonderful example of this is his playful ceramics, influenced by the studio he took from 1948-55 at Vallauris, a small town on the Côte d'Azur. It was home to a number of ceramic factories, depicted in Picasso's 1951 canvas Smoke in Vallauris, where thick black puffs pump urgently into the sky from the wood-burning kilns. Inspired by Georges and Suzanne Ramié, the owners of the Madoura Pottery, he bought a villa nearby and set about learning from Suzanne, saying: 'I don't think I'm a ceramicist, next to ceramicists who are real ceramicists, I'm just […] an unfortunate amateur and an ignoramus. I try, I listen, I look, I try to pass my time.' He produced more than 3,600 pieces in just a few years, several of which will be on display, including a dove modelled ingeniously out of a few flops of folded clay. He got so into it that an American newspaper referred to him as 'left-wing ceramicist artist Picasso'. He was, at the time, active as part of the Movement for Peace and the French Communist Party. He enjoyed collaborating with his fellow artisans, and was active in the community, attending local bullfights and openings of pottery exhibitions, for which he designed the posters (free of charge), and portrayed his family life in pictures as part of a simple creative ideal. • My journey through the French region most famous for its artists A touching example of this is the 1954 canvas Claude drawing, Françoise and Paloma, a harmonious image depicting his two youngest children with their mother, the painter Françoise Gilot, whom he had met in 1943 (he 61, she 21) — except that Gilot is shown oddly only as an outline, curved protectively around her children. She had left him and returned to Paris with them the year before. Still, his time in Vallauris was transformative for his output and for the town. In 1949 he donated his sculpture L'Homme au mouton (Man with a sheep) — it's still on the market square — and in 1951 he created the War and Peace cycle in a local chapel. His presence, McLean says, 'revitalised the ceramics industry in that region'. Man of the people he may have been, but he was also very rich, and in 1955 he acquired La Californie, a des res in Cannes, where for the first time he lived and worked in the same space, which must have been inconvenient for his family (he had met his new partner, Jacqueline Roque, in 1952, when she was 26 and he was 70), given the rapid accumulation of artworks that filled every inch. The three adjoining rooms on the ground floor served as studio and living area, with rounded windows that opened onto a lush garden into which his sculpture spilled (the show features a great 1960-61 photograph of him there by André Sonine). He seems to have seen La Californie as a sort of extension of himself, judging by the vigour with which he depicts it in his art. 'This was the first time he had paid so much attention to his studio,' Snrech writes in the catalogue, 'to the extent that these works can be seen almost as self-portraits.' Several will be on display, including a magnificent 1956 canvas made in homage to Henri Matisse, who had died in 1954. The room is empty of people, but the painter's presence is suggested by paintings and objects, and in the centre a blank canvas sits expectantly on an easel. Picasso called these paintings 'interior landscapes'. Eventually the lack of privacy in fast-developing Cannes drove him out. In 1961 — the year that he married Jacqueline at the town hall in Vallauris — he moved to his final studio, the Notre Dame de Vie farmhouse in the nearby town of Mougins. Surrounded by work from across his life (an entire wing was dedicated to the display of his sculptures), this was the scene of a final flowering, a period of insane productivity. He produced about 200 paintings between September 1970 and June 1972, and he created more portraits of Jacqueline than of any of his other partners. In contrast to the hurly-burly of La Californie, he worked in relative solitude, assailed by memory — in a series of etchings, La Suite 347, created when he was 86, he returns to motifs such as bullfighters, circus performers, artists and models, mythology and literature, musketeers and animals — and by an urgent need to innovate, seen in the free, gestural brushstrokes of paintings such as Reclining Nude, 1967. It was here that he died, in April 1973, probably from a heart attack. According to Paris Match, Jacqueline called his doctor in the early hours of the morning; he died a few hours later, at 11.45am, at the age of 91. There was no will, of course (not his problem), and more than 45,000 unsold works strewn across his various studios. An artist, first, foremost and only, to the last. Picasso: From the Studio is at the National Gallery of Ireland, October 9 to February 22,
