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Lot Essay
Second Prize has gone to 'Cafeteria at the Grand Palais' by Howard Hodgkin whose retrospective exhibition will shortly be touring the North. This smaller, more intimate, but punchy and colourful painting, we are told, is commemorating a lunch with Louis Hodgkin during a visit to the exhibition 'Le Centenaire de l'Impressionisme'. Hodgkin uses spots stripes and blocks of colour to give an impression of two people in an interior and their relationship to one another. (M. Ingham, 'John Moore's Liverpool Exhibition 10,' Arts Review, 28, May 28, 1976)
"The picture is instead of what happened. We don't need to know the story; generally the story's trivial anyway. The more people want to know the story, the less they'll look at the picture." (Howard Hodgkin quoted in R. Hugues, Nothing if not Critical, London 1987, p. 284).
Framed with two bold continuous strokes of blue and radiating with the warm colours of a sunny autumn day, Cafeteria at the Grand Palais is an essentially abstract picture that, like many of Hodgkin's paintings resonates with feelings and suggestions that hint at a description of its subject. Evidently referring to memories of a lunch at the Grand Palais cafeteria, it is tempting to see the work from an aerial perspective and the daubs of contrasting colour as referring in some way to the impressionist technique of the artists whose work was then on show inside the museum. Nothing however is made explicit, the remarkable ambience of the work is articulated purely through Hodgkin's extraordinary sensitivity to the effects of scale and colour and its uncanny ability to stimulate an emotive response in the viewer.
"The picture is instead of what happened. We don't need to know the story; generally the story's trivial anyway. The more people want to know the story, the less they'll look at the picture." (Howard Hodgkin quoted in R. Hugues, Nothing if not Critical, London 1987, p. 284).
Framed with two bold continuous strokes of blue and radiating with the warm colours of a sunny autumn day, Cafeteria at the Grand Palais is an essentially abstract picture that, like many of Hodgkin's paintings resonates with feelings and suggestions that hint at a description of its subject. Evidently referring to memories of a lunch at the Grand Palais cafeteria, it is tempting to see the work from an aerial perspective and the daubs of contrasting colour as referring in some way to the impressionist technique of the artists whose work was then on show inside the museum. Nothing however is made explicit, the remarkable ambience of the work is articulated purely through Hodgkin's extraordinary sensitivity to the effects of scale and colour and its uncanny ability to stimulate an emotive response in the viewer.