| Howard Hodgkin Prints - An essay by David Acton
Continued (3)
Hodgkin travelled to Los Angeles In the fall of 1979, along with Peter Blake, to attend the opening of an exhibition at the L.A. Louver Gallery that featured their work. They stayed with their old friend David Hockney at his home in the Hollywood Hills, and enjoyed happy hours together around the pool. All of the artists made drawings of their sunny idyll. Later, back in England, Blake painted the three friends in The Meeting, or Have a Nice Day, Mr. Hockney, which is now in the Tate Gallery.[4] Hodgkin painted David Hockney in Hollywood, and the print David’s Pool (Cat.no.8, Heenk 55). He knew how Hockney had come to think of the swimming pool as a symbolic axis of Californian life.
Sitting in the Hollywood garden, Hodgkin unintentionally described the print he would make months later. “An instant home,” he wrote in his diary, “the kidney-shaped pool seen through Kotah palms. . . . The sun shines, there is a smell of vegetation, and from behind the shrubs you can hear the discreet sound of some necessary equipment, perhaps a heater for the pool, which is kept at 90 degrees. . . The sun is so bright that the blue pool and transparent yellow umbrella are strictly art. . . . The house so simple and austere looks almost too perfectly like David’s paintings.”[5] Hodgkin made David’s Pool in collaboration with Aldo Crommelynck, the intaglio master who had worked extensively with Picasso. The artist went to Paris in 1979 to prepare the plate with softground etching and aquatint. It was not until 1985, however, that Crommelynck printed the edition, which was then sent to the hand colourist Cinda Sparling at Solo Press in New York. She used a wide brush and thin ink, formulated to flow readily through a fountain pen, to wash over the perimeter of the print in passages of translucent blue. In 1985 David’s Pool was awarded the Henry Moore Foundation Prize when it was shown at the Ninth British International Print Biennale in Bradford. In that year Hodgkin won the Turner Prize, and the first major retrospective of his prints was presented at the Tate Gallery.
The haunting Night Palm of 1990-91 (Cat.no.21, Heenk 86) is one of a four large, striking prints inspired by travel posters that Hodgkin had seen in the Paris Metro in the late 1950s. Mounted opposite the underground platforms, these enormous, lurid advertisements tempted viewers from their workaday commutes to carefree holidays in the Mediterranean sun. Their designers were heirs to the tradition of Belle Époque poster design, but they also understood the psychology of modern advertising that helped inspire Pop Art. Each of Hodgkin’s large, posterlike prints represents a palm tree, a motif that had long fascinated him. Printed in black and green from two plates, Night Palm was hand coloured with two applications of egg tempera. The curve of the fronds is accented by sweeping arcs of colour through the tree’s crown. However its light-coloured form surrounded by black is firmly locked in the composition, and the image conveys the sensation of light flashing across the tree, perhaps from the headlights of a car speeding along the Moyenne Corniche.
Night Palm was printed at the 107 Workshop in Wiltshire by Jack Shirreff, with whom Hodgkin had been working since 1986. He had introduced the artist to the technique of Carborundum intaglio, which, in combination with softground etching and liftground aquatint, effectively prompted him to abandon lithography. A patented abrasive compound of silicon carbide, Carborundum was developed for the precision grinding of machine parts. The material has been used in printmaking since the 1930s, but it was the French-American Henri Goetz who developed its most popular adaption during the 1950s.[6] Instead of cutting lines or texture into a printing surface to hold ink, Goetz used Carborundum to build up a coarse matrix. He suspended the hard, sandlike grains in various binding media, ranging from a smooth syrup to a lumpy paste. Then the printmaker applied the material to a metal or acrylic substrate with a brush, a palette knife, or by hand. The surface dried hard, and microscopic spaces between the granules could capture and hold ink for printing, and the durable plate could repeatedly withstand the enormous pressure of a modern hydraulic press. Carborundum brushstrokes or globules stand proud of the plate, embossing the paper during printing like a woodcut block, and lending tactile surface to the prints. At first, Hodgkin and Shirreff used this method for plates with grounds as even as conventional aquatint, like Night Palm. By degrees, they pushed the technique to its limits in prints that became more painterly and glyptic.
For example, Put out More Flags (Cat.no.24, Heenk 90) employs gestural swaths of tone printed from three Carborundum plates for its furling banner shapes, combined with impulsive hand colouring. Commissioned by the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, this is one of twenty prints by different artists in a portfolio published to celebrate the museum’s centenary in 1992. Put Out More Flags is printed on white handmade paper that peeks out between the bold brushstrokes of orange, yellow, and blue egg tempera. Its rich colours bleed over the sheet’s deckled edges, highlighting the effect of fluttering pennants. As he assumed the task of hand colouring Hodgkin’s prints, Shirreff worked very differently from his predecessor, in an approach more practical than prosaic. For each edition Hodgkin now painted an exemplary proof for the craftsman to use as a guide. Shirreff also took methodical notes, recording the mixture of pigment, the proper amount for each brush mark, and the attack, angle, and pauses of the stroke he should use. In Put Out More Flags, Hodgkin instructed that the three colours be applied with three, two, and one flowing brush movements. Despite this meticulous planning, the hand colouring looks natural and unpremeditated. The delicious irony of Put Out More Flags is that its virtuous festivity carries an unclean tinge; the title carries an inescapable reference to Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel of political and military improbity on the eve of World War II.
Notes
- 4 See Tate Gallery, Peter Blake, Exhibition catalogue, London, 1983; Michael Compton, Nicholas Usherwood and Carl Haenlein, Peter Blake: Retrospektive, Exhibition catalogue, Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, 1983.
- 5 “Peter Blake and Howard Hodgkin in California,” Ambit, no.83, London, 1980, pp.3-7; quoted by Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, London, Chatto & Windus, Ltd., 1988, p.182.
- 6 See Frédéric Nocera, Henri Goetz catalogue raisonné: peintures, œuvres sur papier, Paris, Editions Garnier Nocera, 2001.
|
|
