Zen-like depictions of the subcontinent
Howard Hodgkin: Painting India Hepworth Wakefield
Howard Hodgkin’s lifelong infatuation with India began when he was a schoolboy. Hodgkin, who died in March and is now near-universally regarded as one of the greatest British artists of the past few decades, was introduced to the intense colours and dynamic compositions of Indian miniature painting by one of his teachers.
His fascination with these images, of which he became an important collector, led to a first trip to India in 1964, with almost annual visits during succeeding decades, culminating in a final sojourn just weeks before his death, aged 85. The paintings he produced in India and in recollection at home are far from straightforward travelogue. They explore his subjective impressions in compositions that may appear abstract, but are always inspired by some significant encounter or moment of intensity. As you enter this exhibition, the characteristic Hodgkin elements are all vibrantly on display: the radiant colour, exuberant brushstrokes, trademark stripes, dots and curves.
So much so that you may find yourself wondering if a Hodgkin painting inspired by India is so very different from one inspired by, say, London, or Wiltshire, where he lived for many years. Hodgkin’s colours are already “hot” to the point of incandescent before he’s even got on the plane. These are paintings, however, that take time and some concentration to work their full emotional and pictorial magic. For all their immediate physical effect, Hodgkin’s paintings are very far from simple.
The figurative elements are most easily discernible in the earlier works. In Mrs Acton in Delhi, 1967-71, the most Sixties in feel, the wife of a British Council dignitary, who Hodgkin recalled as a rather put-upon figure, lolls to the left of the painting, looking disconcertingly like some pop art sex-doll: a stylised pattern of primary colours with splayed red legs. Mrs Sheth on the Terrace invokes a formidable Indian lady who made a great impression on Hodgkin on another visit, travelling with him with an array of extravagantly coloured saris in her luggage. Palm trees appear as overt symbols of India, their leaves arranged in melon-like segments in In a Hotel Garden. Palms are delineated in whirling loops of yellow in the large In the Garden of the Bombay Museum, the surrounding flower beds indicated in layers of splodgy dots, which evoke the formal pattern-making of Hodgkin’s beloved Mughal miniatures.
From the mid-eighties, Hodgkin’s brushmarks became looser and splashier, while he grew increasingly preoccupied with the frame as part of the painting. In the 7ft 6in wide Afternoon (1998-9), much of the surface is taken up with a painted rectangle, splurged over the edges of the canvas with a kind of exuberant fury. Anyone who thinks of Hodgkin as a genteel, “establishment” painter – and there are quite a few who do – should take a look at this exultant shout of a painting.
In his final years, as he began painting India in situ rather than through distant recollection, while becoming – paradoxically – less mobile, his responses became more direct and much simpler. Often consisting of only two or three apparently impulsive squiggling paint marks on unprimed plywood, these paintings have, none the less, a Zen-like concentration and focus. Over to You is just a curving smear of pinkish red on green, though as it is dated 2015-17 it clearly took some thinking about, while Bombay Blues is a kind of voluptuous jazz improvisation in varied blues.
If Hodgkin saw India as a place where emotion brimmed close to life’s surface, in these final few art works his own feelings are right there on the surface of his paintings, captured in a few final brushstrokes of rapturous intensity.