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Uploaded 2/12/02
Howard Hodgkin: Large Paintings 1984-2002
August-October 2002, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh
Howard Hodgkin is regarded as one of the most
important artists in Britain working today. Born in 1932, he studied
in London and Bath. He first exhibited in 1960 and has gained recognition
since that time. He was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery and the National
Gallery, London, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1984
and won the Turner Prize in 1985. He was appointed a CBE in 1977
and was knighted in 1992. The summer exhibition in Edinburgh in
2002 marked the artist's seventieth birthday.
Scale is a central issue with Hodgkin. I remember visiting his
last exhibition in Edinburgh and meeting the artist, in December
1990. The exhibition, a British Council Travelling Exhibition then,
was Small Paintings 1975-1989. This year's show was Large Paintings
1984-2002. It consisted of 20 large paintings produced over two
decades.
Paintings such as Italy were only recently completed and were shown
in Edinburgh for the first time. A small catalogue with excellent
essays by Robert Rosenblum accompanies the show. Director of the
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Richard Calvocoressi points
out that while Hodgkin's pictures are immediately recognisable,
they do not hang easily together. The exhibition of small paintings
in 1990 was hung so that each painting had its own wall thus enabling
it to be viewed in a self-contained situation. In the summer exhibition
the walls were painted a dark colour to create a space that is 'more
amorphous, less immediately defined'. Regarding the question of
scale, Calvocoressi notes, 'With small paintings he does not have
to worry so much about the picture surface. "It's easy to make a
window, a hole in the wall, into which the viewer can look". With
large, human-scale paintings, Hodgkin is still trying to give the
illusion of "a space that is a box - a notional interior", but he
also feels it is vital to manipulate the picture surface and the
architecture of the painting in such a way that the viewer can relate
to it piecemeal as well as seeing the whole thing'.1
Hodgkin admits to only being able to manage a large picture space
in the past ten years or so, 'You have to keep the picture surface
alive "all over", in a way that you don't with smaller paintings.
You can't pretend the picture surface isn't there on a large scale'.2
Hodgkin's working methods are not typical. The painting Lovers (finished
in 1992) took eight years to complete. He works out many aspects
of a large painting in his mind - there are few preliminary works,
few props or aide-memoire. Hodgkin works in an all-white
studio without windows or a live model. He carries with him an extensive
knowledge of other artists' work. He believes that the media-dominated
culture in which we live is prompting a return to the lasting values
of painting.
'Working from his memory and imagination, he makes images evoking
the transitoriness of life, in which forms are ambiguous, blurred,
disintegrating. While the source for this may be autobiographical,
private feelings are transmuted into archetypal pictorial statements
through the impersonality of the artist's marks and brushstrokes.'3
A characteristic of Howard Hodgkin's work is the fact that the
painting is extended onto the frame, 'these frames seem to compress
and intensify the pictorial drama within their boundaries. The drama,
in fact, is almost literal, since the frames immediately set up
theatrical expectations, like prosceniums behind which events or
emotions unfold. And the play performed before our eyes is always
so alive, so startlingly present that these fictional frames seem
to respond in turn. Both inner and outer edges blur and heave, merging
with what is taking place on Hodgkin's pictorial stage, elusive
images of encounters and memories, both passionate and gentle, whose
potency can dissolve any efforts to fix them forever in a rectangular
box'.4
The interaction between canvas and frame continues the dialogue
within time. Created over a long period, Hodgkin's pictures reflect
'the flux of life and memory'. The remembrance of things past -
a Proustian experience is here created in visual terms supported
notionally by titles such as Rain, Memories or Italy, or Sunday
in Berlin or Memories of Max. It is difficult to imagine how Hodgkin
can allude to a particular Sunday in Berlin over four years; the
juxtaposition of specific personal images, formal painterly considerations,
fleeting moments. Rosenblum describes it beautifully, 'Their intimacy
and their focus on fleeting experiences remembered are basic to
their visual drama. We are in the world of diary rather than a full-length
autobiography, of a short story rather than a novel … The heaviness
and width of Hodgkin's fictional frames contribute to the intensity
of his psychological chamber music, distilling the paths of emotions
into ever smaller spaces, like boxes within boxes. And the frames
also distance the drama from the spectator, as if the realm of memory
were seen through a reducing glass.'5
Hodgkin's abstract paintings evoke themes such as sexuality, loss
and memory. Specific places are alluded to, moments of passion evoked.
Colour is used powerfully and economically. The effect of dramatic
weather is created, recalling the marvellous effects of Constable
and Turner. An ancestor of Hodgkin was Luke Howard who, 'in the
early 19th century, pioneered the science of meteorology, classifying
and naming cloud patterns in publications that triggered the poetic
imagination of Constable and his compatriots as well as of many
Romantic landscape painters on the Continent'.6
British weather for all its gloom and unpredictability is a constant
source of inspiration to Hodgkin who merges physical phenomena and
psychological experience, for example, Rain and Hope. Turner has
been a great inspiration for Hodgkin whose fluid painterliness evokes
emotional states. Hodgkin's work displays many influences, not only
British. In 2000, the National Gallery, London organised their millennium
exhibition around the dialogue between contemporary art and the
art of the past, using works from their famous collection. Some
24 artists were chosen for Encounters: New Art from Old. Hodgkin
chose Seurat's, Bathers at Asnières, producing a dramatic
and remarkable interpretation which was included in the Edinburgh
exhibition this summer. Rosenblum describes the process in this
way, 'The result, almost as imposingly large as Seurat's own mural-sized
painting, seems to transform public into private, as if the old-master's
stately, immobile structure had dissolved in memory and we were
looking instead at an image fading away behind closed eyes'.7
Hodgkin's vision is in fact closer to the private world of Vuillard
or Bonnard. The glowing, seductive interiors, masterfully constructed
in formal terms, and which so transfix the viewer's attention, share
something of Hodgkin's private, glowing worlds. Howard Hodgkin departs
from his nineteenth century mentors in his use of dramatic colour,
that owe more to the Abstract Expressionists such as Willem De Kooning
or Marc Rothko. Hodgkin visited New York in 1948 where he saw the
early work of these and other American artists. In London, in 1959,
he saw the pivotal exhibition The New American Painting, which influenced
many British artists at the time (See Ceri Richards review). Richard
Kendall refers to Hodgkin's 'reckless generosity'8 in paint. Rosenblum
concludes his fine essay, 'Always stamped with his unique presence,
his art offers an unfamiliar, but unforgettable marriage of the
abstract and the earthbound, of rhapsodic visual pleasures and quiet
memories of a life lived outside the studio walls'.9
1 Richard Calvocoressi, "Introduction", Howard Hodgkin, Large Paintings,
1984-2002, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2002, p.10.
2 Hodgkin quoted ibid, p.10.
3 Calvocoressi, ibid, p.10.
4 Robert Rosenblum, "On Howard Hodgkin", ibid, p.13.
5 Ibid, p.14.
6 Ibid, p.15.
7 Ibid, p.17.
8 Richard Kendall, "Panel Discussions: Howard Hodgkin's Large Paintings",
ibid, p.29.
9 Rosenblum, ibid, p.19.
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