Howard Hodgkin is showing twenty new paintings in the generous, light-filled spaces of Gagosian Gallery. The artist is in his seventy-sixth year but his energy and invention are undimmed. The pictures are vigorous, joyful, saturated in colour. They are painted with great freedom and collectively indicate that the painter has so thoroughly mastered his own, self-invented language of expression – a deceptively forthright vocabulary of bars and swipes and spots and veils of colour – that he can do just about whatever he wants with it. The sense of awkwardness overcome, of a beguiling but necessary opacity, once so integral to the experience of his work, has largely evaporated.
In the past, many of Hodgkin’s formal devices conveyed his struggle to pin down and preserve individual moments of experience – to create, as he once put it, “representational pictures of emotional situations”. He would work on tablets of framed wood, not only painting over the frame itself but painting further uprights and horizontals within the borders of the image. In the process he would create frames within frames, like the stage flats of a proscenium arch theatre, as if to dramatize his sense that the feelings he wished to preserve were so fragile that they needed this weighty pictorial buffering to shield them from the world. Each painting was like a different room in the artist’s palace of memory. The pictures were objects to be looked into, to be interrogated and deciphered. Many of them, most of them even, were small in scale. They had the feeling of veiled, private images, rather like Degas’ brothel-scene monotypes (and in fact their subjects were often erotic).
Over the years, and particularly in recent years, Hodgkin’s art has become more extrovert. He still works in oil on wood. But whereas he...
