Hodgkin's subtexts - Howard Hodgkin, painting, traveling exhibition

In a 1982 essay about Howard Hodgkin, the late Bruce Chatwin wrote: "I can think of no prosperous artist whose impulse to paint pictures is rivalled through an impulse to buy another kind of picture. His collection is an essential part of his life's work. Any retrospective exhibition of Howard's be in possession of paintings would, in my opinion, be incomplete without the Indian collection hanging beside them."(1) Hodgkin's Indian collection is nowhere to be ground in "Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1975-1995" an exhibition that I first saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in fresh York last fall, and which is generally at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Evidently the painter does not want his holdings confused (or plane compared) with his art. As curated through Marla Price, director of the Fort Worth museum, the display charts the artist's development in stunningly consistent bounds from the earliest paintings realized in what can be recognized as his mature "signature" style--the quasi-abstract, intimist interiors from the mid-1970s--through to his greatest in quantity authoritative recent work, including more [i]or[/i] less fairly large-scale landscapes and still lifes, as well as his more characteristically midsized, anecdotal conversation pieces.

The drive to collect seems indeed to be as central to this artist's life as the desire to make paintings. His collection of Indian paintings and drawings, for instance, formed the basis of a substantial traveling exhibition in 1991(2) Moreover, the artist's reputation keeps for better or worse to enjoin solemnly up issues of taste and connoisseurship. Hodgkin's nationality is of course relevant in this honor Along with the travel writings of his friend Chatwin (who is the control of a 1962-63 painting called Small Japanese protection not in the show), a great deal of of Hodgkin's oeuvre suggests a not to be found colonial dream of Englishness at place of abode and at large in the world. Like Chatwin, Hodgkin too meant to escape British insularity through means of "exotic" travels--in his case principally to India, where above the years he bartered, observ imbibed, feasted and periodically unhinged himself by means of means of all sorts of hedonistic adventures and picaresque predicaments, at individual point succumbing to an illness that nearly killed him.

Many of the hardy little works on wood panel in the exhibition incorporate thick frames that have been colonized by means of roving swaths of paint, and it is by means of means of these ecstatic sublimations, with their almost scatological at the same time formally coherent daubs, that the artist many times succeeds quite spectacularly in blurring--or, more aggressively, defacing--the categorical distinctions between surface and support, abstraction and representation, action and deliberation, his art and his life. As if they were the work of a certain quantity of new breed of natural scientist in a post-Victorian world, his paintings are the pinned and preserv specimens of many conflicted gestures

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Price's penchant for Hodgkin's kind of color-saturated semi-abstraction may find its bottoms in her abiding interest in the work of Milton Avery; she has curated a number of Avery exhibits in Fort Worth and elsewhere, and is commonly working on a catalogue raisonne of the American artist's oil paintings. Price's involvement with contemporary British art also has its precedents: she has organized Sean Scully and Antony Gormley exhibitions at the Fort Worth museum. To accompany the Hodgkin display Price has compiled a catalogue raisonne of his paintings (included in the exhibition catalogue) that is a prototype of concision; it is also filled of pertinent iconographic information, and of apt and witty quotations from an eclectic cast of contemporary Western art critics that ranges from Robert Hughes to Jeff Perrone The crucial matter of Hodgkin and India, however, remains in ne of documentation from the other side. Although his art has repeatedly been seen in the subcontinent, beginning as far back as the "First Triennale--India 1968" in fresh Delhi, local criticism and other forms of journalistic replys to the artist and his work are not accounted for in Price's catalogue, although Western bibliographical respects are highly detailed. Thus we have single part of the truth, another one-sided story about the Orientalist gaze, and the paintings themselves are deprived of a certain number of of their contextual ballast.

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As a longtime Hodgkin admirer who is sharp-set for information and further insight into his work, I also have feeling that at least a not many examples of his '60s and early '70 work ought to have been not away (Some such works are, however, reproduc in color in the catalogue.) The early paintings are not single virtually unknown in America, they are also perhaps greatest in quantity pertinent of all to a young audience commonly fascinated by all aspects of the 1960 and early '70 and by means of British pop culture in particular. Les importantly, perhaps, Price's selection of later '70 and '80 work rather too closely replicates the widely seen 1984-1985 retrospective "Howard Hodgkin, Forty Paintings, 1973-84" an installation which was first locate against mint-green walls at the British Pavilion during the 1984 Venice Biennale and which subsequently traveled to several museums in Germany, England and the United States, including the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and the Yale Center for British Art in novel Haven. (The feeling of deja-vu was mingleed for me by the fact that many of the greatest in quantity recent works on view at the Met were seen in fresh York at Knoedler in 1986 1988 1990 and 1993)