I first encountered Howard Hodgkin on the cover of World of Interiors. It was shortly after his death. The contents of his apartment were being auctioned off by Sothebys. His home was drenched in mint green, with a floating marble slab as console, Baroque occasional tables and deep seated sofas.
Hodgkin’s paintings look how so many things only feel, like a heart exploding out of your chest, unbearable, inexplicable, and ecstatic all at once. There are these stories of Hodgkin—surly and taciturn by several descriptions—with the painter breaking down in tears unexpectedly. Little things moved him.
There is innocence in his paintings. Purity. Honesty. Love. Rain, painted between 1984 and 1989, rushes at you like a deluge at first glance. A second look will show you the dark, foreboding calm before the storm. A third look smells fresh like the grass post drizzle. I feel these things, but I can’t dissect or explain them.
What looks to me like raw expression somehow came out of slow, gradual development. Hodgkin would work for several years on a single square foot. He started off in the 1950s with busier canvases: people, places, and props appeared, loosely disguised. A portrait from the 1960s shows a clear head and eyes with the rest of the face taken up in a Goya-esque mess of blood and guts. Small Durand Gardens of 1974 looks as if his later paintings were collaged into one. He is piecey here; playing with settings.
It is his canvases of the 1980s and 1990s that hold my heart in a vicelike grip. His oval Love Letter (1984-1988) feels like all the things left unsaid, all the things said that reverberate years on, and all the things waiting to be said, layered over one another and shifting like tectonic plates. Keith and Kathy Sachs (1988-1991) shows the pair as textured swipes standing firm and flexible on a cacophonous background. All the messiness of relating is relegated to the painted frame. Confusion is in the outskirts. And Evening (1994-1995) shows the restraint and refinement of Hodgkin’s later years.
At this point he has figured out what to say and how to say it with as few words as possible. His gestures are clear and impactful. A tabula rasa of youth peeks out at the top of the composition, a dark stripe of experience splitting it from the grass green freedom and fulfillment of mature life.
Hodgkin is a diarist, whose heart-wrenching, ecstatic work is a pleasure to read.
-Camille Okhio