Howard Hodgkin: ‘My entire life is in my paintings’

The British novelist Julian Barnes tells a story about a seaside holiday that he and his wife once took with their friend Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017). The artist took a fancy to a black towel that he saw in a shop window. After going inside to make a purchase, he was unimpressed with the choice of seven or eight towels that the shopkeeper offered him from the shelves. None of them, Hodgkin said, was as black as the item in the window.

To resolve the matter, the shopkeeper brought out the towel in question — and was surprised to find that it was indeed a shade blacker than the others. A sale was then concluded. According to Barnes, ‘You know, intellectually, that painters have a more highly developed sense of colour, but this was a brilliant, and unwitting, public demonstration.’

It’s fair to say that, even among painters, Hodgkin was a standout colourist. Proof of this can be found in his painting Goodbye to the Bay of Naples (1980-82)— which fetched £1,688,750 at Christie’s in 2017, the highest price ever paid for a work by Hodgkin at auction. At its centre is a bar of brilliant cobalt blue (representing the sea), above which can be seen a touch of cerulean blue (the sky) and a piercing flare of yellow (the sun).

Sir Nicholas Serota, who as director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford gave Hodgkin his first institutional show in 1976, called him a ‘hue-perfect’ artist.

Not that Hodgkin was a painter who delighted in colour for its own sake. It would be better to describe him as a great user  of colour, because — as will be set out below — the uses he found for it extended far beyond decoration.

Hodgkin was born in London in 1932. His father was an executive at the chemical company ICI, and the family had a number of celebrated figures as ancestors. These included Thomas Hodgkin, who in the mid-19th century had discovered the disease Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

In his youth, Howard didn’t seem destined for great things himself. He made a habit of running away from the boarding schools that he had been forced to attend, before going on to study at Camberwell School of Art and Bath Academy of Art. His style, broadly speaking, shifted from figurative to abstract as his career progressed.

He received his first solo show in 1962, at Arthur Tooth & Sons gallery in Mayfair. Commercial success and critical praise were still some way off, however. As Hodgkin himself remembered in later life, ‘Until I was middle-aged, [nobody] seemed to want to look at my pictures at all.’

The mid-1970s is the period when it is generally agreed that Hodgkin’s art matured. His friend Bruce Chatwin attributed the change to the liberation he felt upon leaving his wife Julia at this time and coming out as gay.

Hodgkin himself never subscribed to this theory, nor did many others. However, his work undeniably grew bolder and freer thenceforth, with more complex colours. It also appeared to move close to complete abstraction, devoid of any of the oblique figurative references of the recent past.

Hodgkin represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 1984. He won the Turner Prize in 1985. He was knighted in 1992, the same year that he designed a mural for the British Council’s new Indian headquarters in New Delhi. In 1995 he received a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Success followed success. Hodgkin insisted, however, that despite appearances and despite myriad commentators suggesting the contrary, he wasn’t  actually an abstract painter.

As he put it, in a much-repeated phrase, ‘I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.’ He meant that his imagery amounted to distilled memories, to evocations of past encounters and experiences.

As such, the works are loaded with feeling. This is reflected in their intense colour — and the vivacious sweeps, stabs and slashes of Hodgkin’s brush, which often covered even a picture’s frame in paint.

In many cases, the memories were painful; in some cases, they were positive (perhaps recalling a happy moment in his relationship with the writer Antony Peattie, Hodgkin’s companion for his final three decades). Either way, the recollections were emotionally charged.

The artist preferred to work on wood rather than canvas, as it proved more resistant to the attacks of his brush. Some pictures took years to complete, with Hodgkin progressively adding more and more marks.

‘Painting is agony,’ he said on several occasions. He was also known to pour himself a cocktail after completing each picture. The sense is of an artist who grappled constantly with his past, with the end result representing a kind of catharsis.

Catharsis for Hodgkin, that is. For everyone else, the pictures are visual riddles to be solved. ‘My entire life is in my paintings,’ Hodgkin said, but viewers won’t know what episode in that life they’re looking at — especially given the lack of figurative references.

It’s true that the titles occasionally help. Goodbye to the Bay of Naples, for example, does at least give a sense of place. As do Scotland (1994-95) and the many paintings with ‘Bombay’ in the title (referencing the almost annual trips Hodgkin took to India). In terms of our grasping the particular incident in Hodgkin’s memory, however, knowing where is still a far cry from knowing what.

An alternative way of engaging with his pictures is to forget their source and simply dive into them, promptly summoning memories or associations of one’s own.

The artist himself was never prescriptive. Indeed, he was always loath to discuss his work — telling one interviewer who asked for the inspiration behind a painting, ‘What do you want, a shopping list?’

Hodgkin’s art is so rich and allusive that the journey on which it takes each viewer is utterly unforeseen.

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