| Howard Hodgkin Prints - An essay by David Acton
Painting is the focus of Howard Hodgkin’s creative
life, and it defines the artist’s very concept
of himself. Sometimes he has been dismissive of
his truly remarkable accomplishments as a printmaker.
In the artist’s maturity he has concentrated on
easel paintings in oil on panel, often with integral
painted frames. Hodgkin paints slowly, reworking
methodically, and teasing out images in the course of
the creative process itself. Just so, over four
decades he has conducted a gradual search for a personal,
inimitable way of making prints that possess all the
poetry and energy of his paintings. Hodgkin has
created about 130 editions, collaborating with many
different printers and workshops. The artist thinks
of paintings and prints very differently, especially
in the way that their physical presence speaks to the
viewer. He conceives of prints as comparatively
simple and direct, and has been quite selective in his
exploration of printmaking technology.
As a student, Hodgkin encountered the centuries-old
academic hierarchy that places painting at a creative
summit and condemns the graphic arts as little more
than craft. Brief experiments with lithography
proved that he lacked the fascination with process and
machinery that infatuates many printmakers. Yet
he remained curious, realizing that the way prints can
be made in layers, and options for variation among those
strata, suit his creative mode. The serial quality
of the graphic arts also intrigued Hodgkin. So
did their relative accessibility, compared to the ratified
formality of a picture hanging in a gallery with a gold
frame and a label. For example, in the nineteenth
century, the commanding posters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
or Jules Chéret communicated effortlessly from
Paris hoardings. They combined forceful drawing
with intense colours in a restricted palette.
In design the posters of the Belle Époque straddled
the verge between planarity and dimension, between definition
and pattern, in a mode concocted in the marriage of
Japanese and French design. Their style influenced
the work of artists like Édouard Vuillard, Pierre
Bonnard, and Henri Matisse, artists important to Hodgkin.
In all of his work Hodgkin uses form and colour to
communicate feeling and aesthetic experience.
His images are often inspired by momentary events or
memories, recalled not only visually, but with all their
attending sensory, emotional, and psychological meaning.
The artist aims for his art to carry an indivisible
impact that strikes the viewer immediately whether he
can recognize a subject or not. Hodgkin’s
pictures have been compared to passionate love songs
in a foreign language: evocative, compelling in melody
and instrumentation, and delightful for their obvious
emotion, while on one level they remain enigmatic.[1]
The paintings in Hodgkin’s first solo exhibition,
at Arthur Tooth and Sons in London in 1962,
already had many of the qualities of his mature work.
Freely-applied pigment compressed flat passages of vivid,
interstitial colour, operating on the boundary between
flat pattern and illusory space. These paintings
reflected the artist’s knowing awareness of art
history and the work of his contemporaries. They
also revealed the influence of traditional Indian miniature
painting, which he had been collecting for over a decade.
The artist made his first trip to India in 1964, and
he has returned to the subcontinent almost ever year
since.
Later in 1964 Hodgkin created his first professional
print for the landmark Institute for Contemporary Arts
portfolio. For this project, Chris Prater of Kelpra
Studio worked with twenty-five noteworthy artists to
make their first screenprints. The genial Prater
explained the rudiments of the medium to the artists,
and suggested its more complex capabilities. When
he demonstrated the blockout technique—in which
pieces of paper or film are affixed to the screen to
make a hard-edged stencil—Hodgkin recognized a
familiar process. The artist returned to his studio
and took his own time on the colour collage for Enter
Laughing (Cat.no.1; Heenk 1) using Matisselike
papiers découpés. The title
provides stage direction for a figure that tumbles into
a composition enclosed by a proscenium. Afterwards
Prater made up printing screens with hand-cut stencils
and photo-transfer for a faithful reproductive print.
Intrigued by graphic art’s capability to present
works in series, Hodgkin accepted a commission from
Editions Alecto in 1966 to create a suite of four lithographs.
He was slightly daunted by the challenge of preparing
the plates directly in the printshop, and by the troublesome
image reversal inherent in the printing process.
However the artist was still intrigued by lithography,
and its ability to preserve every nuance of the artist’s
hand, as the great prints of Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet,
and Willem de Kooning attest. The process can
be so complicated, and the required equipment so expensive,
that all these artists worked with master lithographic
printers. Modern printshops are usually places
of rules, schedules, and deadlines, that many artists
find stifling. Hodgkin, whose creative process
is protracted and solitary, was uncomfortable in his
first experience working in the lithographic studio,
and he reverted to the vocabulary of his first screenprints,
failing to engage the possibilities of lithography.
Perhaps it is not surprising that for his next print
project the artist returned to Prater. Each of
the twelve prints of Hodgkin’s Indian Views
series of 1971 incorporates the wide border that had
become a leitmotif of his work. A symbolic break
between experience and illusion, the fictive frame is
a metaphor for an artist’s activity and place
in the world. However, in Indian Views,
the borders derived from a particular reminiscence.
The artist had often looked out on the Indian provinces
from the rectangular windows of antiquated railway carriages,
small openings that helped minimize the heat of the
blazing sun inside the train. Their restricted
shape served to concentrate and distil the traveller’s
view into flashing geometric abstractions.
Notes
- The analogy of Pat Gilmour, in “Howard Hodgkin,”
Print Collectors Newsletter, vol.12, March–April
1981, p.2.
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