Howard Hodgkin at Modern Art Oxford.
At the end of the 1980s the painter Howard Hodgkin was interviewed for Vogue by the late David Sylvester. The principal subjects of their conversation were colour, sex and English taste, about which Hodgkin had some provocative things to say:
“I have a feeling that it is only in the Anglo-Saxon world that sunsets are to be described as ‘vulgar’. And I think the reason why is because of the connotations of the colour of sunset. Sunsets, after all, are very red, very orange, which at the red end of the spectrum are the colours of tumescence. And pink, which is another way of scumbling the human body, has been used a great deal for underwear in this country – not only by women. According to Alastair Forbes, Churchill wore silk pants which were a colour with the wonderful name of cuisse de nymphe emue… There is an in-built Puritanism about the English attitude to colour which is really quite bizarre ... I think people are deeply worried about it. Rubens is bad enough, particularly a Rubens that has been cleaned, which is often filled with little engorged moments of very red flesh: it gets much darker than pink. But Renoir [seems to trigger such unease even more strongly] … I think people feel profoundly uncomfortable in front of Renoir’s late pictures; they’re probably among the most visibly and palpably carnal pictures ever painted…”
“Time and Place” is the title Hodgkin has chosen to give to his new exhibition of paintings, at Modern Art Oxford. All were created during the last ten years, which coincides, more or less, with the eighth decade of the painter’s life. Collectively they embody his absolute determination not to go quietly, and this is especially true insofar as the...
