Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends
National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 (020-7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk). Until 18 June
The title of this exhibition of Howard Hodgkin’s portraits, Absent Friends, comes “freighted with a sorrowful irony”, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. Hodgkin, who to his chagrin was always considered an abstract painter, was overjoyed when the National Portrait Gallery approached him about an exhibition devoted to his portraiture. Alas, he never saw the result: just two weeks before the opening he died, at the age of 84. Yet absent though he is, the show is a triumph. It brings together more than 50 portraits, charting the evolution of Hodgkin’s style over a career that spanned more than six decades. Few works here could be considered portraits in the traditional sense. “So don’t come expecting literal descriptions (though there are a handful from his early days): expect to discover a vibrant riot of colour, splashed, dappled and stippled; striped, smeared and swashed.” This is a “haunting swansong” that “brings tears to the eyes”.
Hodgkin regarded himself as something of an art world “outsider”, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. Nevertheless, he befriended many artists – “and well-known ones at that”. Here, we see portraits of the painters Joe Tilson and Robyn Denny with their wives, as well as DH in Hollywood (1980-84), a painting of David Hockney that reduces him to a “single phallic pink stripe”. “These are domestic, autobiographical, highly intimate paintings,” said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. Are they really portraits, though? The exhibition has to perform some “high-level semantic gymnastics” in order to justify them as such – and for all the power of the works here, this seems downright “silly”. Hodgkin’s art is not abstract – “even if that is how it looks”, said Martin Gayford in The Spectator. He painted his memories. Kathy at La Heuze (Flame against Flint) (1997-98), for example, is based on his recollection of a moment when a friend stood against a wall in a yellow dress. He dispenses with her face and body, leaving us with just the “essence of the moment: gold and russet swirling against bobbily grey stone”. Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music (2011-16), meanwhile, bears the distinction of being the last painting he finished. That Hodgkin was “so frail he had to be held up physically” while painting this “powerful” work makes it a little more “urgent, dramatic and poignant”. Despite its “sad circumstances”, this “brilliantly conceived show offers insight into the evolution and essence of Hodgkin’s art”.
Shah of Shahs and The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski, 1982 and 1978 (Penguin £8.99 each). Two accounts of revolutions, in Iran and Ethiopia, from one of the world’s finest journalists. He conveys both the personal fragility of the dictator and the political fragility of the societies they misgoverned – and the human cost of their brutality. For a budding foreign correspondent, his books were a real inspiration.
What is History? by E.H. Carr, 1961 (Penguin £9.99). This series of essays by the veteran historian gives a sharp framework for understanding how past events are distorted, and how they can be better understood. Through this, I came to realise the bankruptcy of objectivity as a concept for historians as well as journalists – everybody comes to their subject with a point of view.
Brown Girl, Brownstones
by Paule Marshall, 1959 (The Feminist Press at CUNY £14.99). A coming-of-age story about a Brooklyn girl of Barbadian parentage during the Depression and WWII. It is rich in the complexities of what is frustrating, powerful and aspirational about both the adolescent and the migrant experience.
A Seventh Man by John Berger, 1975 (Verso £9.99). In a series of vignettes that track
the migration of workers from Turkey to Europe, Berger manages to humanise the migrants even as the migratory process dehumanises them. First published in the 1970s, it becomes more urgent with age.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, 1958 (Penguin £8.99). Chronicling the devastating impact of European settlers in what is now Nigeria, Achebe manages to evoke both the power and perils of tradition in precolonial Africa, and the humiliation of the colonial occupation and subjugation that crushed it. Sparse in the telling, it shows how fiction, when liberated from facts, can be so much more evocative than non-fiction.