In Brand Renovation masterclasses, one of the examples that I use is the wonderful Kylie Minogue. Has there ever been a singer more skilful than her at consistently re-inventing her public self?
But it’s not only in pop music that artistic renovation happens. The New Zealand-born painter, Frances Hodgkins, managed to stay current through six decades - and through several radical changes of artistic fashion.
First, in the 1890s in her hometown of Dunedin, she fell under the spell of the Italian impressionist, Girolamo Pieri-Nerli.
Then, in the period before the First World War in Europe, she was influenced by the Newlyn School in England, and particularly the work of the Scottish colourist, Arthur Melville. .
After the war in the early 1920s she embraced the Post-Impressionists Matisse and Derain and the Cubists - Braque, Picasso and others.
In the latter part of that decade, when she was already sixty years old, Hodgkins was invited to join the Seven and Five Society, a group of younger British modernists, including Ben Nicholson and his then wife Winifred, Christopher Wood, David Jones, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and John Piper. With them she moved steadily towards abstraction.
Through the thirties and forties, she continued to evolve, becoming closely identified with the leading Neo-Romantics – Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, John Craxton, John Minton and others.
Altogether an extraordinary creative journey of a fine artist.
Time for a major exhibition of her work in Britain?
Above: Frances Hodgkins, Self portrait: still life, oil on cardboard, c. 1935, Auckland Art Gallery
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