Howard Hodgkin, at Tate Britain

Date: 18-06-2006
Owning Institution: Tate Britain, courtesy of Howard Hodgkin and Gagosian Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012        
Subject: 20th Century    Now      

Pablo Picasso defined the difficulty of being a modern artist better than anyone. “Beginning with Van Gogh,” he said, “however great we may be, we are all, in a measure, autodidacts – you might almost say primitive painters. Painters no longer live within a tradition and so each one of us must recreate an entire language. Every painter of our times is fully authorized to re-create that language from A to Z … In a certain sense, that’s a liberation but at the same time it’s an enormous limitation, because when the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in liberty he loses in the way of order, and when you’re no longer able to attach yourself to an order, basically that’s very bad.”

The retrospective exhibition of Howard Hodgkin’s pictures at Tate Britain reveals how seriously and for how long, with what difficulty and ultimately with what success, this particular English painter has wrestled with the problems outlined by Picasso. About seventy of Hodgkin’s paintings have been hung in a suite of twelve interconnecting galleries. Between them, they do not so much chart a career as unfold a life. They do so sometimes obliquely, in occluded representations of people met and moments experienced, translated by the painter into his own inimitable forms – bars and blots, stripes and swipes of unashamedly vibrant and zingy colour. They do so sometimes with startling, erotic clarity; and sometimes with anger, regret, or patent melancholy. Their subjects include friends and enemies, sexual and other types of encounters, reflections on art, landscapes, abstract ideas such as patriotism, as well as harsh present realities, such as war.

Tate Britain’s retrospective is, surprisingly, the first exhibition ever to explore the entirety of Hodgkin’s oeuvre, from the late 1950s to the present. It has been judiciously selected by Nicholas Serota, who has also, together with the painter himself, been responsible for the hang. Strong and unusual colours have been chosen for the walls – mottled battleship grey, eau-de-nil, mud-brown and, for the last rooms, gold – which make the whole display feel as though it is not set in an art gallery at all, but in some imaginary Renaissance or Baroque palace. The effect is brilliant, giving the satisfying arc of a trajectory to the whole of the artist’s life in paint – making it into a single book, so to speak, albeit one with different chapters, and bringing out the inner coherence of Hodgkin’s pictures, which in the context come to seem almost like a single, unified decorative scheme.

The opening galleries introduce the painter by way of his work of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The subjects of these pictures are for the most part simply snatches of life, fragments of experience such as once were painted by Degas and his English follower Sickert, the French intimists Bonnard and Vuillard. But Hodgkin occludes each remembered moment, rendering it as a fragmentary collage of shapes almost like those into which the image in a kaleidoscope is splintered. Dancing , of 1959, presents an image of blurred flesh, a swatch of fabric and, perhaps, a fleetingly glimpsed piece of headgear, but all seen as if through the slats of a green Venetian blind. Nearby, Mr and Mrs Robyn Denny (1960) appear as goggle-eyed mannequins on a pulsing fabric of tip-tilted blue and white curves, in a portrait that looks like an affectionate pastiche – a painter’s way of poking fun at friends who also happen to be dedicated followers of fashion. Meanwhile, Brigid Segrave (1961-2) is disembodied to a bit of skirt and a flash of thigh. The rarely exhibited Afternoon (1959-61), an impetuously painted nude reclining in a pose of evident abandon on a field of red rainbows, suggests that the artist’s eye was briefly caught by the fleshy nudes of Willem de Kooning – the Abstract Expressionist whose first exhibition in London, at the Whitechapel Gallery, took place at around the time Hodgkin painted his picture.

It is better to speak of the artist’s early work in terms of affinity rather than influence. What seems very clear from this display is his determination, from the outset, to paint pictures that should look like no one else’s. Certain rules are established, the most unbreakable being that every picture should have its own, distinct subject, that it should be about something distinct and particular. Proscriptions are put in place too, so that anything too closely resembling the old, academic traditions of representation are avoided. So the painter works instead with the wreckage of those traditions, borrowing and enhancing, for example, Degas’ effects of blur, or Bonnard’s sideways-looking habits of composition – and also, crucially, putting the disorientating Cubist principle of collage at the centre of all that he did. Gradually, from that mosaic of affinities, and his own experiments, he forges his own language – one that works by shaping paint into signs and symbols and metaphors, rather than explicitly legible images, and which stands in relation to conventionally representational art as poetry stands in relation to prose.

The struggle to accomplish this act of invention is palpable in a number of Hodgkin’s early paintings. His habits of veiling and otherwise occluding his subjects can give rise to a kind of eloquence – particularly so in his acerbic portrait of R.B.K. , of 1969-70, a painting which, by hiding its ostensible subject away behind bars of striated pigment, appears to imply a life itself lived in a prison of self-containment. But other early paintings seem almost hamstrung by their reticence and hesitancy. The breakthrough, which is as sudden and invigorating as the sun coming out from behing clouds, takes place in the early 1970s. First with a stunningly summary and vivid landscape, simply entitled Bombay Sunset (1972-3), then with a whole outpouring of other works, Hodgkin suddenly finds his own style and his own voice. He paints landscapes and interiors that buzz and hum with their own, intricately patterned forms of life. A conversation blooms, in Dinner at Smith Square (1975-9), in the form of a mist of red marks floating on lozenges and bars of green, violet and orange. Decorations dance and shimmer all around the painter, and a flag affixes itself to his memory like a postage stamp, as he takes his seat (circa 1977-9) In a French Restaurant .

The Moon (1978-80) is formed – rather as Picasso had made his famous sculpture of a goat from bicycle seat and handlebars – from the circle of an old bar stool glued to the support and framed by bars of emerald green. After Corot (1979-82) miraculously evokes the small land- and seascapes painted by the French artist during his early career, with no more than a deceptively delicate swipes and washes of blue and brown paint across a tablet of wood. There is a wonderful picture of sex, too, from this middle period, in the shape of In a Hot Country (1979-82), with its bold diagrammatic pink arrow. Intimacy is the theme of Waking Up in Naples (1980-84), in which the eye sees a reclining figure, modelled by the simple expedient of leaving a curvilinear patch of wood bare, from which sea or sky or both seem to emanate like sweat or veils of coloured smoke. Its pair or pendant – to judge by its dates and by the juxtaposition made in the hang – is the melancholy picture Clean Sheets (1979-84), which strands a swipe of flesh-coloured paint in darkening expanses of green and black. In this way the painter makes visible both the idea, and the feeling, of physical aloneness.

Seen cumulatively his works demonstrate the degree to which Hodgkin has indeed, with self-conscious determination, lived out his own version of the life of the modern artist, cut adrift by historical necessity from the reassuring continuities of convention and tradition. First, as a “primitive painter” or autodidact, he set himself the task of inventing his own language. Then, with increasing confidence and exhilaration, he expanded the range of things that he could do and say with that language.

Finally – perhaps the hardest step of all – he has struggled to reattach himself to “an order”, to borrow Picasso’s phrase. In Hodgkin’s case, that has meant striving to create pictures of human life and feeling that would not only reflect his own individuality and idiosyncrasies, but might also take their place in the traditions of painting that matter to him. “I would like to be classical artist where all emotion, feeling, turns into a beautifully articulated memorial at the other end,” he has said. In the later phases of the exhibition, the painter notably expands the scale of his operations while remaining true to his fundamental original ambition – that of conveying, in the memorial forms of art, something like the totality of the fabric of a life.

There are more paintings of sex ( Lovers , of 1984-92, the most conspicuously sensual) but there are also explicit memorials to deceased friends and an increasing concentration on landscape. Rain , of 1984-9, is perhaps Hodgkin’s masterpiece in the genre, a picture as exuberant in its own way, as full of a sense of nature’s energies, of the juice and sap of the world, as the landscapes that Rubens painted in his old age (although Rain is run close by Italy and by the stunningly brash and bad-mannered explosion that is Rhode Island , both of 1998-2002). The gold colour of the walls on which many of the later pictures hang enhances their Baroque qualities – and sharpens the suspicion that it is indeed towards the masters of the Baroque, such as Rubens, whose profound sense of humanity was inextricable from his love of bright colour, and his freedom of handling, that Hodgkin’s thoughts have most recently been turning. The most remarkable painting in the later rooms of the show is the sombre, beaten-up-looking Undertones of War , a panel of battered wood on which the artist has rained a scribbled welter of marks, as if to conjure up both the stupidity of war and his own helplessness in the face of it. It is like a Rubens oil sketch of a battle scene, achieved by other means.

Perhaps Hodgkin’s largest achievement is that having invented his own, quite new language of painting, he should have reclaimed the prerogative of the traditional artist and insisted on his right to paint all of the things that matter to him. That is what lies behind his gradual colonisation (on his own terms) of pretty well all the old genres, landscape, still life, portrait, even history painting and mythology. The most invigorating aspect of this enthralling, absorbing exhibition is its range of mind and feeling. Hodgkin’s work asserts – an proves – that painting can be as profound a way of talking about experience as any that we have.