.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘Everyone has a “somewhere else” in their lives,’ said Howard Hodgkin (quoted in S. Sethi, ‘In stark black and white’, The Economic Times, 23 February 1992, p. 8). Distilled, abstracted and preserved within the glow of his memory, his paintings are grounded in the experience of place. Foreign lands and distant shores are called to mind through a streak of radiant colour. Familiar rooms, faces and conversations are invoked through the sweep of a brush. Typically executed on wood, and frequently incorporating heavy, painted frames, each work is an intense, concentrated jewel, extracted over periods of months and years from the depths of his psyche. His paintings dramatise the sensation of recalling times long past, and scenes half-forgotten. ‘I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances,’ he famously said. ‘I paint representational pictures of emotional states’ (quoted in S. Sontag, ‘About Hodgkin’, in E. Juncosa, ed., Writers on Howard Hodgkin, London, 2006, p. 104).
Hodgkin’s first ‘somewhere else’ was America. ‘My real career as a painter began by looking at pictures in New York,’ he explained (‘How to be an artist’, William Townsend Memorial Lecture, Slade School of Fine Art, London, 15 December 1981). Hodgkin was evacuated from England to Long Island during the Second World War, and spent his formative years in Manhattan’s museums. It was the start of his artistic awakening. ‘Here I was, aged nine or ten, learning about all those marvellous pictures by Vuillard, Matisse, Leger, and so on in MoMA,’ he recalled. ‘It would have been impossible in England because people simply didn’t collect them at the time’ (quoted in John McEwen, ‘Late Bloomer’, Vanity Fair, November 1984). If America was ‘somewhere else’, then so too was the art of the past. Over the years, the lessons of the Impressionists, the Fauves and the Abstract Expressionists would embed themselves in his consciousness, surfacing in his paintings with the same potency as people and places.
Over the years, Hodgkin travelled widely. India became a place of particular importance: ‘I couldn’t work without it,’ he said (quoted in M. Brown, ‘Howard Hodgkin paintings unseen for 20 years to go on public display’, The Guardian, 10 November 2014). The artist made his first visit there in 1964 with Robert Skelton, Assistant Keeper of Indian art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and returned almost every year. His impressions of the country—its dazzling sunsets, its monsoons, its cities, people and landscape—informed much of the character of his art, along with his substantial personal collection of Indian miniatures and other artworks dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Hodgkin’s paintings also made frequent reference to Venice, particularly after 1984 when he represented Britain at the city’s Biennale. The walls of his Georgian townhouse in Bloomsbury were covered with Iznik tiles and fragments of Persian carpets; two palm trees stood outside at the entrance to his studio. It was a place saturated in memories and reminders of other worlds.
Family Group, painted between 1973 and 1978, is a remarkable early work, capturing the breakthrough of what would come to be recognised as Hodgkin’s signature language. Formerly held in the Saatchi Collection, it takes its place alongside other major examples from this period, including Dinner at Smith Square (1975-1979, Tate, London) and The Hopes at Home (1973-1977, Manchester City Art Galleries). The work sings with the influence of Vuillard, which became increasingly pronounced in the artist’s paintings of the early 1970s. Hodgkin had also begun to introduce thick borders in his works of this period: ‘the more evanescent the emotion I want to convey, the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing, the more elaborate the border,’ he explained, ‘so that this delicate thing will remain protected and intact’ (quoted in P. Kinmonth, ‘Howard Hodgkin’, Vogue, June 1984). Here, a luminous band of red frames the centre of the painting like a cloud. Dabs of golden light—a hallmark of his practice—quiver at the centre, extending outward to the edge of the painting. Blue rectangular forms hover like jewels, while a strip of pale green evokes the eau de nil hue that Hodgkin so admired. The colour would later cover the walls of his house, as well as his exhibition at the Biennale.
The mid-1970s was watershed period for Hodgkin. He had mounted his first European solo show in 1971, followed by his stellar American solo debut at Jill Kornblee Gallery in New York. This exhibition, Hodgkin later reflected, marked the start of his career in earnest. By 1975, he told David Sylvester, he felt he was ‘beginning to be able to join everything up together,’ and the following year he mounted his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, curated by Nicholas Serota (quoted in Howard Hodgkin, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2006, p. 180). Shortly after its completion, Family Group was included in the Third Sydney Biennale in 1979. That year, however, amid accumulating professional triumph, he also separated from his wife, with whom he shared two adult sons. He would later enter into a lifelong relationship with the music writer Antony Peattie. Perhaps the work’s title hints at something of this dynamic, preserving the feeling of family as it slipped from his grasp.
Florida Garden, painted between 1996 and 1997, returns once again to the theme of travel. In luminous hues of orange, red and yellow, Hodgkin recalls the blazing warmth and sunlight of the American South. A dazzling streak of blue cannot help but invoke the glimmer of pools and ocean vistas. The artist had continued to spend time in America throughout his life, visiting David Hockney in Los Angeles as well as Miami, and between 1995 and 1996 had mounted a major exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas. While Florida Garden emits a distinctly Post-Impressionist glow, it also bears witness to his early interest in American abstract art, first encountered in the major touring exhibition The New American Painting at the Tate Gallery in 1959. Echoes of Rothko and de Kooning shimmer below the work’s surface, alive with light and movement.
By the 1990s Hodgkin had achieved considerable acclaim, following his receipt of the Turner Prize in 1985. He had been awarded a knighthood in 1992; the decade also saw the publication of his first catalogue raisonné, and well as his first monograph by Andrew Graham-Dixon. Writing in Vogue, the latter described the 1990s as a moment of ‘resurgence’ in Hodgkin’s art: ‘a second self-liberation, which has led to further freedoms. Hodgkin’s pictures of the last few years demonstrate a greater economy … a pictorial simplicity which suggests an enhanced confidence’ (‘Portrait of the Artist as an Older Man’, Vogue, December 1996). Paul Levy, meanwhile—reviewing the 1998 exhibition in which Florida Garden was unveiled—wrote that ‘the colours sing, the forms and shapes move so much they practically dance, the brushstrokes are so bold they are thrilling. And there is heroism, too. In the face of today’s minimalism and installation art, Hodgkin’s work emphatically affirms the central place of painting’ (‘First he took Manhattan’, The Independent, 7 May 1998).
Echoes of ‘somewhere else’ resound throughout the rest of the collection. Pourville (1997-1998) is the largest of three paintings titled after the Normandy seaside village that had once inspired Claude Monet. Despite its ‘specificity and sense of place’, however—writes Levy—Hodgkin insisted it was ‘metaphorical’: an image of ‘Arcadian melancholy’ (‘Howard’s Hues’, Tatler, November 1999, p. 102). The opulent red curtains of Theatre (1998-1999), meanwhile, are more explicitly evocative, conjuring the parting of velvet drapes and the arcane light beyond. ‘Theatre is a conflation of two or three real theatres and the feeling of being in a theatre, the anticipation,’ explained Hodgkin at the time. ‘I like working in the theatre very much.’ The artist had recently designed the backdrop for the Mark Morris Dance Group which had come to Sadler’s Wells in London. ‘Mark sent me the music from America which I listened to and then I sent him the design, which was made into a backdrop,’ he recalled, ‘and then he choreographed using the music and the backdrop’ (quoted in J. Dyson, ‘Howard’s Way’, Independent Magazine, 6 November 1999, p. 55)
In the same article, Hodgkin spoke more broadly about his work in theatre. ‘The first time I ever saw a theatre design I’d done, for Covent Garden, I just couldn’t believe the scale,’ he recalled; ‘a tiny brush stroke ends up huge’ (ibid.). This effect—the transition from intimacy to grandeur—accounts for much of the wonder of his art. Powerful feelings are distilled to bursts of colour; entire journeys are summed up in the daub of a brush. The vagaries of ‘somewhere else’ are made concrete, sealed forever in the here and now. These four paintings bear witness to this process, each an exquisite record of the intangible.
Hodgkin’s first ‘somewhere else’ was America. ‘My real career as a painter began by looking at pictures in New York,’ he explained (‘How to be an artist’, William Townsend Memorial Lecture, Slade School of Fine Art, London, 15 December 1981). Hodgkin was evacuated from England to Long Island during the Second World War, and spent his formative years in Manhattan’s museums. It was the start of his artistic awakening. ‘Here I was, aged nine or ten, learning about all those marvellous pictures by Vuillard, Matisse, Leger, and so on in MoMA,’ he recalled. ‘It would have been impossible in England because people simply didn’t collect them at the time’ (quoted in John McEwen, ‘Late Bloomer’, Vanity Fair, November 1984). If America was ‘somewhere else’, then so too was the art of the past. Over the years, the lessons of the Impressionists, the Fauves and the Abstract Expressionists would embed themselves in his consciousness, surfacing in his paintings with the same potency as people and places.
Over the years, Hodgkin travelled widely. India became a place of particular importance: ‘I couldn’t work without it,’ he said (quoted in M. Brown, ‘Howard Hodgkin paintings unseen for 20 years to go on public display’, The Guardian, 10 November 2014). The artist made his first visit there in 1964 with Robert Skelton, Assistant Keeper of Indian art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and returned almost every year. His impressions of the country—its dazzling sunsets, its monsoons, its cities, people and landscape—informed much of the character of his art, along with his substantial personal collection of Indian miniatures and other artworks dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Hodgkin’s paintings also made frequent reference to Venice, particularly after 1984 when he represented Britain at the city’s Biennale. The walls of his Georgian townhouse in Bloomsbury were covered with Iznik tiles and fragments of Persian carpets; two palm trees stood outside at the entrance to his studio. It was a place saturated in memories and reminders of other worlds.
Family Group, painted between 1973 and 1978, is a remarkable early work, capturing the breakthrough of what would come to be recognised as Hodgkin’s signature language. Formerly held in the Saatchi Collection, it takes its place alongside other major examples from this period, including Dinner at Smith Square (1975-1979, Tate, London) and The Hopes at Home (1973-1977, Manchester City Art Galleries). The work sings with the influence of Vuillard, which became increasingly pronounced in the artist’s paintings of the early 1970s. Hodgkin had also begun to introduce thick borders in his works of this period: ‘the more evanescent the emotion I want to convey, the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing, the more elaborate the border,’ he explained, ‘so that this delicate thing will remain protected and intact’ (quoted in P. Kinmonth, ‘Howard Hodgkin’, Vogue, June 1984). Here, a luminous band of red frames the centre of the painting like a cloud. Dabs of golden light—a hallmark of his practice—quiver at the centre, extending outward to the edge of the painting. Blue rectangular forms hover like jewels, while a strip of pale green evokes the eau de nil hue that Hodgkin so admired. The colour would later cover the walls of his house, as well as his exhibition at the Biennale.
The mid-1970s was watershed period for Hodgkin. He had mounted his first European solo show in 1971, followed by his stellar American solo debut at Jill Kornblee Gallery in New York. This exhibition, Hodgkin later reflected, marked the start of his career in earnest. By 1975, he told David Sylvester, he felt he was ‘beginning to be able to join everything up together,’ and the following year he mounted his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, curated by Nicholas Serota (quoted in Howard Hodgkin, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2006, p. 180). Shortly after its completion, Family Group was included in the Third Sydney Biennale in 1979. That year, however, amid accumulating professional triumph, he also separated from his wife, with whom he shared two adult sons. He would later enter into a lifelong relationship with the music writer Antony Peattie. Perhaps the work’s title hints at something of this dynamic, preserving the feeling of family as it slipped from his grasp.
Florida Garden, painted between 1996 and 1997, returns once again to the theme of travel. In luminous hues of orange, red and yellow, Hodgkin recalls the blazing warmth and sunlight of the American South. A dazzling streak of blue cannot help but invoke the glimmer of pools and ocean vistas. The artist had continued to spend time in America throughout his life, visiting David Hockney in Los Angeles as well as Miami, and between 1995 and 1996 had mounted a major exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas. While Florida Garden emits a distinctly Post-Impressionist glow, it also bears witness to his early interest in American abstract art, first encountered in the major touring exhibition The New American Painting at the Tate Gallery in 1959. Echoes of Rothko and de Kooning shimmer below the work’s surface, alive with light and movement.
By the 1990s Hodgkin had achieved considerable acclaim, following his receipt of the Turner Prize in 1985. He had been awarded a knighthood in 1992; the decade also saw the publication of his first catalogue raisonné, and well as his first monograph by Andrew Graham-Dixon. Writing in Vogue, the latter described the 1990s as a moment of ‘resurgence’ in Hodgkin’s art: ‘a second self-liberation, which has led to further freedoms. Hodgkin’s pictures of the last few years demonstrate a greater economy … a pictorial simplicity which suggests an enhanced confidence’ (‘Portrait of the Artist as an Older Man’, Vogue, December 1996). Paul Levy, meanwhile—reviewing the 1998 exhibition in which Florida Garden was unveiled—wrote that ‘the colours sing, the forms and shapes move so much they practically dance, the brushstrokes are so bold they are thrilling. And there is heroism, too. In the face of today’s minimalism and installation art, Hodgkin’s work emphatically affirms the central place of painting’ (‘First he took Manhattan’, The Independent, 7 May 1998).
Echoes of ‘somewhere else’ resound throughout the rest of the collection. Pourville (1997-1998) is the largest of three paintings titled after the Normandy seaside village that had once inspired Claude Monet. Despite its ‘specificity and sense of place’, however—writes Levy—Hodgkin insisted it was ‘metaphorical’: an image of ‘Arcadian melancholy’ (‘Howard’s Hues’, Tatler, November 1999, p. 102). The opulent red curtains of Theatre (1998-1999), meanwhile, are more explicitly evocative, conjuring the parting of velvet drapes and the arcane light beyond. ‘Theatre is a conflation of two or three real theatres and the feeling of being in a theatre, the anticipation,’ explained Hodgkin at the time. ‘I like working in the theatre very much.’ The artist had recently designed the backdrop for the Mark Morris Dance Group which had come to Sadler’s Wells in London. ‘Mark sent me the music from America which I listened to and then I sent him the design, which was made into a backdrop,’ he recalled, ‘and then he choreographed using the music and the backdrop’ (quoted in J. Dyson, ‘Howard’s Way’, Independent Magazine, 6 November 1999, p. 55)
In the same article, Hodgkin spoke more broadly about his work in theatre. ‘The first time I ever saw a theatre design I’d done, for Covent Garden, I just couldn’t believe the scale,’ he recalled; ‘a tiny brush stroke ends up huge’ (ibid.). This effect—the transition from intimacy to grandeur—accounts for much of the wonder of his art. Powerful feelings are distilled to bursts of colour; entire journeys are summed up in the daub of a brush. The vagaries of ‘somewhere else’ are made concrete, sealed forever in the here and now. These four paintings bear witness to this process, each an exquisite record of the intangible.