Howard Hodgkin

Hodgkin's paintings are not about ideas. They are feelings declared in color--feelings triggered by places (Venice, Naples, Morocco, India, or rooms in London) or by memories of encounters (sociable or sexual), all embedded in pigment of quite shameless lushness. They are intelligent not in the way argument can be but in the way painting is--though, in most cutting-edge art, actually isn't. [Robert Hughes]

London (Guardian)
December 4, 1996

Howard Hodgkin at the Hayward Gallery
By Adrian Searle

Howard Hodgkin has a knighthood, a Turner Prize and new retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. But is he still the Norman Wisdom of painters? For a long time, whenever I thought of Howard Hodgkin I imagined a curious amalgam of mannered aesthete and Norman Wisdom, or of Walter Pater and Mr. Pooter. Here was an artist who, after months and possibly years of introspective study of his own unfinished painting, would suddenly rise from his chair, approach the carefully prepared panel - already framed in anticipation - take up a judiciously loaded brush and then, having determined the exact mark he wished to make, trip and stumble against the work, leaving half the paint accidentally lunged on to the painting and its frame, the rest on his jacket. Hodgkin would then retire, exhausted, and contemplate his next move over the coming months, or possibly even years. Thus, by degrees, his paintings would accrue the evidence of his contradictory, contrapuntal attacks.

Whenever I passed the whited-out window of Hodgkin's Bloomsbury studio I would listen for the sounds of lunging, and of curses. His paintings, I thought, were weird, and I failed to appreciate them, though plenty of interesting people, from Bruce Chatwin to Susan Sontag, did. The painter's progress, meanwhile, was charted by a growing number of respectful commentators, while the artist himself won the Turner Prize, was given a knighthood and held prestigious international retrospectives. And, little by little, some of his paintings insinuated themselves in my brain and stuck there: the collector E. J. Power as a green, egg-shaped blob, a Henry Moore sculpture painted as a tiny, querulous slug spied through the u undergrowth in someone's garden, paintings of interiors and landscapes that were always more seductive than decipherable. I remember only their heat, the taste of a colour combination - Hooker's green against cinnibar, whited viridian against ivory black. Or the painter's characteristic stacks of coloured bars, the internal framing devices, his feints and plunges.

A retrospective of Hodgkin's work from 1975 to the present - that is to say, from mid-career onwards - opens at the Hayward Gallery this week. Hodgkin's retrospective occupies the bottom two levels of the Hayward, installed by David Sylvester, doyen of picture-hangers, while a show of the Prinzhorn Collection, devoted to art and psychosis, occupies the top floor (more about that another time). The gallery has been stripped back to its original open space, the walls on which the paintings hang are a darkish grey, and the galleries are deliberately underlit, further dramatising Hodgkin's already flaring, aching, pressurised colour. The trouble is that, except in the first room -which contains a small number of largish, newer works, two of which are in memory of the late Max Gordon - the paintings are hung too close, dissipating their individual charge. "My pictures tend to destroy each other when they are hung too closely together," Hodgkin has remarked, and here, lined up as though for an identity perade, they do indeed lose their individuality. They sing for a moment as we pass, but leave little impression except as an overall sensation of painted slurs, drags and flurries and broken brushstrokes.

One is left with details, fragments and moments - hints of furnishings, window blinds, salmon-pink ruins, an exotic horizon, a glimpse of a boy on a bed, a palm tree, a raging yellow ellipse, too much red and green. But details, fragments and moments are what drive Hodgkin's art, concerned as it is with the emotional life, with intimacies of one sort or another. As much as Hodgkin's paintings evoke, they condense, and as much as they reveal, they conceal. This is both their strength and their weakness, as his paintings often end up both supercharged and wistful.

He is concerned with the recollection of atmosphere, of places and people, public and private moments. The paintings bear the traces - the titles tell as much - of those moments: "In Bed In Venice, Jealousy, Haven't We Met? Of Course We Have". They are discrete disclosures, the flavour of a moment distilled, the way the light once fell in a room, a momento of a particular place, a certain time of day." Venice Sunset," painted in 1989, takes a hoary old postcard subject and turns it into something new, a cancerous cinder of a sun floating on a table-top lagoon. Rather than sinking in the west, Hodgkin's sun is a sort of insult, blighting the painting, an otherwise routine green-over-red circumlocution of the picture surface, with its melancholy, moribund presence. But then Venice afternoons often end in a fractious mood.

Hodgkin's paintings are laudable for their necessarily failed attempt to recreate the emotional charge, or lack of it, that fixes a situation or an encounter in the memory. They are made often a long while after the events that inspired them, and part of Hodgkin's purpose is to deal with that distance in his paintings. No wonder things get blurry, overlaid, complicated by time.

Complicated feelings, complicated guy, complicated paintings. Hodgkin's paintings, in memory of dinners and afternoons, of travels and conversations, of sex and passion and its aftermath, are traced in the memory of the senses, of the body and of the eye, in a colour, a pattern, a shape. He makes the past reappear in tangible, physical form, not as biographical detail, but as memory repossessed, made concrete and present. Hodgkin is a Proustian who has never read Proust, a Freudian who has never studied Freud (as he admits in the exchanges with John Elderfield in the catalogue).

Hodgkin's preoccupations as a painter are appealing. The further they are removed from my mental image, from the painter's paroxysms and from the fashion of the moment, the stronger and more beguiling they appear. And what curious paintings they are, with their overpainted frames, their skewed stabs and swipes, their manic pointillisms, their dottiness. Their high taste and their shrill vulgarity, the mad cookery of their contradictory layers, their cancellations and revisions, make for a difficult and not altogether pleasurable experience. His larger works - apart from "Snapshot", painted between 1984 and 1993, and which seems to have got simpler as he worked on it - are failed machines. "When Did We Go To Morocco?", and "Writing", two large paintings completed in 1993, are particularly desperate and horrible, with their nasty, torn swipes of cobalt blue and smeary reds.

Hodgkin himself complains when people describe his paintings as beautiful. He'd doubtless complain, too, if we described them as ugly, over-ripe and gawky. Their pleasure, often, is that they almost teeter over into incoherence, saved from disaster by a swerve, a sudden jolt, an unexpected reversal.

Even at his most indecisive, Hodgkin drags something back from the margin of chaos, and that, I think, is one of his haphazard strengths as a painter. If life is chaotic in spite of what we do to impose order on it Hodgkin, in his paintings, invents his own chaos, only in order to use it as a metaphor and to conquer it. It's easier in painting than in life.

"Howard Hodgkin and Beyond Reason: Art And Psychosis" are at the Hayward Gallery, London, from Friday until Feb 5

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TIME Magazine
January 22, 1996 Volume 147, No. 4

DELIGHT FOR ITS OWN SAKE FEELINGS, NOT IDEAS, ARE WHAT MATTER TO HOWARD HODGKIN, AND HE EVOKES THEM IN COLORS LIKE NO OTHER IN MODERN PAINTING
ROBERT HUGHES

THE ENGLISH PAINTER HOWARD Hodgkin, whose work is on show at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art through Jan. 28 (and will open at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, on March 31) is not for those art-world puritans who would rather have their art difficult than enjoyable. If anyone painting today believes in the pleasure principle, it is Hodgkin, and if you think that optical sensuous delight for its own sake has somehow become unkosher since Matisse, and that ideas are mainly what count in art, don't go.

Hodgkin's paintings are not about ideas. They are feelings declared in color--feelings triggered by places (Venice, Naples, Morocco, India, or rooms in London) or by memories of encounters (sociable or sexual), all embedded in pigment of quite shameless lushness. They are intelligent not in the way argument can be but in the way painting is--though, in most cutting-edge art, actually isn't.

Hodgkin, whose good-luck god is the French intimiste Edouard Vuillard (he of the dots, of the closely tuned interior scenes that vibrate with a sense of life amply lived and yet separate from public events), is a connoisseur and collector as well as an artist. The two don't necessarily go together. Good taste never made a new picture yet. There is, and ought to be, something immoderate and crazy about painting that goes beyond acts of taste and comparison. Hodgkin's failures may be the outcome of too much taste, not too little, but he is a glutton through and through, and his expertise about such areas of art as Indian miniature painting doesn't mean that his own paintings end up imitating the objects of his affection.

His paintings carry stories, but only in their titles. The blue lintel and green tongue of paint in Gossip, 1994-95, are not going to tell you what the gossip was about. Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, 1984-88, commemorates a meal prepared at an art dealer's lodgings during the Venice Biennale 12 years ago, but Hodgkin's cadmium red extravaganza, with its broad serpentine shapes buttressed by planks of green, does not offer the slightest clue about the food, the company or the room.

The paintings tend to be objects: thick wooden boards, never canvas, and heavily framed. The paint is constantly reworked--not fiddled with, but glazed and obliterated over the years by successive coats. Each is a palimpsest, one improvisation partly burying another but leaving hints of it behind. Pigment covers the frame as well as the board, wanting to overrun the confines of surface. Even when Hodgkin's paintings are on the wall, you think of picking them up, the small ones especially, and hefting them in your hand. Dense, resistant lumps of color, real things in the real world--a status reflected by one of Hodgkin's wittier titles, A Small Thing but My Own, 1983-85. Distantly, they are related to medieval gold-ground paintings; more recently, to Cubist collage objects--except that there is no collage, only paint.

Having set up these constrictions of size and solidity, Hodgkin then pushes against them as hard as he can, and the tension that results can be magic: small panels with huge brushstrokes, subtle and fleeting effects of glaze and scumble contrasting with the rigidity of their support, and frames (with frames of paint inside, as well) that squeeze speckled, color-saturated vistas into distant postcards. The window effect isn't just a mannerism. It speaks of a certain anxiety, the desire to guard memory in the act of revealing it: "The more evanescent the emotion I want to convey," Hodgkin once remarked, "the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing, the more elaborate the border, so that this delicate thing will remain protected and intact."

Since the late 1960s, Hodgkin's images have had a pronounced architectural character, influenced by Fernand Leger's "tubism" as well as by Vuillard. Grantchester Road, 1975, is an interior with a fireplace, and the indoor plants are of the same pictorial species as the green spreading palms in Hodgkin's Indian paintings. The separation of room and gaze gives Hodgkin's work its basic trope, that of peeping and peering--from culture (the room) into nature (everything else) and back again. It's not about seeing here and now but about the memory of having seen; not complete and ordered possession of a sight but the turbulence of memory, inflected with a sense of loss at its elusiveness.

Hodgkin's complete originality is in his color, which, as art historian Michael Auping says in the catalog, "has a strange quality of simultaneously seeming totally invented, yet completely natural." Its reds and lemon yellows, its blackened viridians and fiercely luminous blues, its swoony Whistlerian grays are like no other color in modern painting. They give his work a perverse to-and-fro between the intimate and the operatic--Aida done in a marionette theater. Such color isn't just showy. It can be extremely tender, intelligently seductive, in the way that art has every right to be. It also insists on distinction--the need to feel one thing at a time, and to remember not what it looked like but what it felt like. Hodgkin's shapes may be nebulous, but his feelings, or so the paintings persuade you, seldom are.