Text by Karen Sweeney, © Irish Musuem of Modern Art and the author
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
Howard Hodgkin at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
22 February – 7 May 2006

Howard Hodgkin
Irish Museum of Modern Art
22 February – 7 May 2006

Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin (born 1932, London) has developed an unmistakable body of works, establishing him as one of the foremost international artists of his generation. Although primarily a painter, he has also made prints, designed furniture, costumes and sets, and is an avid collector of Indian paintings, including Mughal and Rajput miniatures, which he began collecting while a pupil at Eton during the mid 1940s. This exhibition at IMMA brings together more than fifty significant paintings from the late 1950s to the present, and is the third retrospective exhibition of his work to date. This is not the first occasion he has exhibited a body of work in Dublin: the exhibition Howard Hodgkin: Small Paintings,[1] toured to the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1991.

Considering these works collectively, one begins to understand the coherence of his practice over almost five decades. This exhibition offers new insights into the development of Hodgkin’s work and traces the expansion of his distinctive visual vocabulary, from early portraits and interiors, to the gradual loosening of the paint surface in recent years. These paintings resist classification, with each existing as a self-contained world and as Hodgkin asserts ‘I paint representational pictures of emotional situations’.[2] Ultimately, the images encapsulate defining moments in his existence, a fusion of events he recalls, encounters between people and places he has known, experienced in a tangible emotional relationship with his subject, while avoiding the literal.

In order to appreciate the full extent of Hodgkin’s oeuvre, it is important to examine the development of his work from early to recent paintings, and the works in this exhibition are hung in a more or less chronological way. The earliest painting in the exhibition, 114 Sinclair Road, 1957-8, refers to his former west London address, and depicts, amongst other figures, a female reclining on a sofa in odalisque fashion. While more inhibited than paintings of the later period, this work heralds many of his later concerns, such as the psychology of space and an intimacy that verges on voyeurism evocative of the enduring legacy of Sickert, Vuillard and Bonnard, artists whose work he admires.

Hodgkin began exhibiting in the early 1960s and during this period his primary focus was on husband and wife portraits of his friends, gardens and domestic interiors focusing on specific events. He affirms, ‘My pictures are narrative paintings which describe specific moments and very definite people, in relationship to each other and also to me’, and follows by saying, ‘After that moment has occurred all the problems are pictorial’[3]. In many portraits of this time, the subject’s name becomes the title of the work, as in the portrait Brigid Segrave, 1961-2. As with all his works, Hodgkin was guided by the original experience and his memories of it when creating this painting. Possibly this painting depicts a figure holding a mirror in which the figure’s partially reflected image appears, adding a dimension of warmth that infuses the entire painting, while calling to mind Vermeer’s or Matisse’s fondness for including reflections and mirrors within their imagery. This work succeeds both as a representational image and as an abstract motif, evident in the objects silhouetted against the vibrant red backdrop, which highlight the geometric harmonies within the work.

Hodgkin frequently blurs the boundaries between figuration and imagery verging on the point of abstraction in his paintings. This is already apparent in his humorous portrait of the British artist Robyn Denny and his wife Anna, Mr. and Mrs. Robyn Denny, 1960. The composition is complex, with geometric simplifications evident in the reduction of background and foreground to a flat pattern, using both as elements in a rigorous pattern. The inherent tension stems from the need to reconcile what we perceive with the need for design and structure within the work. Similarly, in the portrait of his art collector friends Mr. and Mrs. E.J.P., 1969-73, the green egg-shape in the foreground forms a hybrid between light-hearted parody of a sculpture by Brancusi in the couple’s art collection, and a formal compositional device within the painting.

During the 1970s, the various elements with which he had been experimenting were resolved in a more absolute sense. Hodgkin introduced the painted border for the first time in R.B.K., 1969-70, a portrait of the artist R.B. Kitaj. The border draws attention to the flatness and refinement of texture inherent in the work, while at the same time shifting the focus to the frame. This work also signals his first move from canvas surface to wooden panels, which he favours because, as he says, it ‘doesn’t answer back in the way canvas does. Canvas loses its life very easily’. Framing devices form part of his visual signature and he carefully selects suitable old frames to fit his purpose. Often it is the first element painted, thereby lending definition to the picture plane and establishing the surface. Hodgkin has suggested that the more fleeting the emotion contained within his works, the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing used.

After Corot, 1979-82, sparely painted in Corot’s style, is one of his most elaborate uses of framing. The expressive handling of sharply receding perspective epitomizes the manipulation of spatial effects in this work. By constructing a short distance point, the image and frame become mutable to such an extent that the viewer experiences both background and foreground simultaneously. This intensifies drama and acts as a focus for the mutinous way paint spills over on to the frame, defying the boundaries of the surface. Hodgkin further compresses the space through his handling of the foreground, where the paint flows orthogonally to the central upright pillars, producing a sense of theatrical depth, while also appearing as if the viewer is watching the scene through a window, reminiscent of the French tradition of Intimism[4]. His interest in the architectonics of space is apparent in his onetime ambition to become ‘a classical artist…where all emotion, all feeling, turns into a beautifully articulated anonymous architectural memorial at the other end’.[5]

NOTES

• 1.       Howard Hodgkin: Small Paintings, 1990, was organised by the British Council and toured to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes; Caixa de Pensions, Barcelona; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin.
  2.       Hodgkin quoted in Andrew Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd; New York: Harry N. Abrams Incl, 1994)
  3.       ‘Howard Hodgkin interviewed by David Sylvester’ in Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings: 1973-84, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London/ The British Council, 1984.
  4.       A painting practice which takes domestic life as a subject by depicting intimate domestic interiors, through the studied arrangement of the figure.
  5.       Ibid 2