Howard Hodgkin Portraits you can’t take your eyes off
This stunning exhibition makes a fitting farewell to the great Howard Hodgkin Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends National Portrait Gallery
The fact that Howard Hodgkin never seemed an obvious contender for the role of Britain’s “greatest” or “best-loved” artist may be down to the fact that his work appears completely abstract. Hodgkin, who died on March 9, aged 84, hardly went short of honours – from knighthood to Companion of Honour – but never quite enjoyed the popular acclaim accorded to figurative peers such as Freud and Hockney. Yet the extraordinary response to Hodgkin’s passing – one of celebration and gratitude for his life – is evidence that we have a greater appetite than anyone might have imagined for singing colour and exuberant brushwork that appear to exist for their own, joyous sake.
The revelation of this wonderful exhibition, however, is that Hodgkin’s paintings are very far from purely abstract. This isn’t entirely a surprise: Hodgkin always insisted that he was never an abstract artist, and his works have been understood to relate to memories of meaningful encounters and incidents. But after about 1970, these paintings – with their big, zinging dots, stripes and splashes – seemed to depart so far from their original stimulus that they were effectively abstract. The idea that any of his later paintings might be described as “portraits” seemed an eccentric caprice.
Here, however, we see the clear development of the “figurative” element in Hodgkin’s art, from his first extant painting, created when he was 17, to his final work, painted last year.
Evacuated to New York during the Second World War, Hodgkin, born 1932, had access to the Museum of Modern Art, with its superb modernist collections, at a time when such things had been little seen in Britain, and the first paintings here, Memoirs (1949) and Reclining Figure (1950), appear extraordinarily advanced for their period – never mind the artist’s age – with their thick black outlines and flat colours, like Pop Art pastiches of Picasso, 10 years before Pop Art began.
Memoirs, a rather comical image recalling an actual incident in which the young Hodgkin listened to a family friend detailing her emotional travails, highlights the element the show regards as the key to Hodgkin’s art: memory. Hodgkin, we are told, was interested not so much in how things looked at a particular moment, but how they felt in memory, refracted by time into a heightened emotional essence. This extends not only to places and landscapes, but to specific people.
The fact that memory is by its nature selective is made apparent in Interior of a Museum (1956-59), where much of the painting has been blocked out in thick cream paint, leaving decorative fragments representing Hodgkin’s wife Julia, an unknown man and one of the painter’s students peering at artefacts in the British Museum. Julia, whom Hodgkin married in 1955, and by whom he had two sons, reappears in Girl on a Bed (1965), a painting dominated by a kind of keyhole shape with a mass of abstract fragments representing, we understand, Hodgkin’s subjective perception of Julia. The rest of the painting is overlaid in red, swarming with green dots. You’re left with the sense that underneath the abstract surface there’s a more representational painting trying to get out.
While Hodgkin struggled for recognition in the early part of his career, and the exhibition portrays him as something of an outsider – “wary of art world talk” – judging from his subjects he appeared to know only other artists, and well-known ones at that, together with a few collectors and dealers. In double portraits of the painters Joe Tilson and Robyn Denny with their wives, he wittily incorporates their respective styles into large and very cursory goggleeyed likenesses: Tilson’s bold, Pop Art patterns and Denny’s chic, minimal abstraction reflected in a backdrop of scalloped blue-and-white checks.
Hodgkin, you would imagine, must have had synaesthesia, an ability to translate phenomena into involuntary mental images, which take the form, in his case, of ever bolder stripes, dots and framing rectangles. Yet the connections between these images and their subjects are often far clearer than you might suppose. The wonderful Mrs Nicholas Munro (1966-69) looks completely abstract, with its swaying flow of intersecting arabesques set against a white background. Yet once you’ve read Hodgkin’s description of Cherry Munro, wife of Pop Art sculptor Nicholas Munro, stripping “after a lunch in their cottage to put on a 1938 crêpe de chine dress”, you can grasp the whole scene: Mrs Munro’s upraised arm, blonde hair, and the rippling flow of her dress, as we glimpse her “performance” through the prism of Hodgkin’s emotional imagination.
While you might assume such a painting could be knocked off in a matter of hours, the works here are the result of painstaking revision over periods as long as seven years. Yet they never lose their sense of freshness.
After Hodgkin’s coming out as gay in 1978, his subjects are often drawn from an overtly homosexual milieu. In Lawson, Underwood and Sleep, showing the dancer Wayne Sleep, his partner George Lawson and their friend Nick Underwood, there’s the sense of a view through a doorway, but you may struggle to find the figures in the rows of orange-and-yellow stripes and splodges. In DH in Hollywood, Hodgkin’s response to David Hockney’s famous swimming-pool paintings, the Yorkshire painter is reduced to a single phallic pink stripe.
Some people may walk round this exhibition wondering what any of this has to do with portraiture. But our reactions to people are to do with a great deal more than the shape of their face or their expression at a given moment. Painters have been drawing out their feelings about their subjects through colour, tone and line for centuries. This exhibition is an exhilarating journey into the ways Hodgkin extended that process over his 70-year career. And if there are darker notes suggesting regret at loss and the passage of time, the overall mood is one of uplifting zest for life.
Indeed, while you might have expected Hodgkin’s work to get more staid in his final years, his last painting, Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music – completed last year – gives the impression of a newly liberated energy. The enormous gold frame is spattered with dots and drips flooding out of the central canvas, with which Hodgkin evokes the sensation of memory coursing through him in response to two of his favourite pieces of music – Jerome Kern’s The Last Time I Saw Paris and The Third Man theme – in impulsive flurries of Prussian blue and zinging yellow. You’d never have any idea that Hodgkin was by this time largely confined to a wheelchair.
It’s hard to imagine a more vibrant send-off than this show.