RAINBOW WARRIOR
Two exhibitions this year celebrate the fiercely inspiring intensity of the late Howard Hodgkin’s colour-filled works. By Hermione Eyre
Ar t i st s never d ie. Although Howard Hodgkin passed away in March this year at the age of 84, he was vividly present at the National Portrait Galler y’s poignant exhibition of his portraiture, “Absent Friends”, in June. A major new painting in the show, unveiled just days after his death, is Portrait of the Artist Listening to
Music, a quintessentially Hodgkin piece that skips over pedantries of likeness or verisimilitude, cutting straight to how it feels to listen, and to remember, in grey plumes and aching emerald shafts. Playing on repeat in the studio while he was painting were Jerome Kern’s “The Last Time I Saw Paris”, and the zither music from The Third Man.
His laughter was almost indistinguishable from tears. Like others who interviewed him, I watched him racked by strange sobs when recounting droll stories of absent friends—the poet John Betjeman, the painter Patrick Caulf ield, or the writer Susan Sontag (“I miss her terribly”). The writer Julian Barnes was fondly referred to as “Mr Flaubert”. Former Tate director Nicholas Serota noted Hodgkin’s emotions were “ver y close to the surface”; Bruce Chatwin, another friend and novelist, said his smile could “captivate or freeze”. I was mortif ied when I asked if at 80 he felt doing anything other than painting was “wasting his true calling” and he replied: “Yes, but I wouldn’t put it as pompously as that.” But when I was allowed back to his studio near the British Museum to interview him a second time, I realised it was not a wounding but a playful wit, founded on huge generosity of heart. It’s f itting that his f inal shows are about two of his great passions: Friendship, and India, in the new exhibition “Howard Hodgkin: Painting India” at The Hepworth Wakef ield (1 July to 8 October). In later life, he visited annually and from his teens acquired Mughal art, always defending his col lection not on academic grounds but because each work delivered “an authentic shock to the hear t”. His own master works, often overf lowing their canvases as if their frames cannot contain them, never fail to do the same.
The artist is gone but the vision remains.