Howard Hodgkin b. 1932

London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Howard Hodgkin: Recent Paintings, 1964, no.2, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue;
Minneapolis, Walker Art Centre, London: The New Scene, 1965, no.36, no.2, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue;
Oxford, MOMA, and travelled to London, Serpentine Gallery, Leigh, Turnpike Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Laing Art Gallery, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Sheffield Graves Art Gallery, Howard Hodgkin: Forty-five Paintings 1949-1975, 1976, no.11, illustrated in colour in the exhibition catalogue.

Jane Stockwood, 'Sometimes it Makes a Good Portrait', Harper's Bazaar, November 1963, pp.107-8, 110, illustrated;
Norbert Lynton, 'London Letter', Art International 8, 25th Arpil 1964, pp.73-78, illustrated p.73;
Martin Friedman, London: The New Scene, Minneapolis: Walker Art Centre, 1965, p.22;
Bryan Robertson, John Russell, Lord Snowdon, Private View, Thos. Nelson & Sons Ltd., London, 1965, p.278, illustrated;
Timothy Hyman, 'Howard Hodgkin', Studio International 189, May-June 1975, pp.178, 180-1, 183.

Painted in 1962-3.

Hodgkin’s paintings of the early 1960s mix abstraction and figuration in a way which, even within the eclectic spirit of British painting of the time, show a manner of individual expression that is at once entirely his own. Greatly concerned with a form of painting that combines the snapshot image of recalled memory with a suggestion of form, much of his work of this period remains suggestively readable, frequently aided by the apparently matter of fact and descriptive titles. However it is often the use of simple shape, painterly surface and bold colour juxtaposition that leads the viewer into the image. This is particularly true of his ‘portrait’ paintings, works in which the references to the subjects are frequently hidden under layers of visual metaphor. The suggested intimacy and familiarity of these paintings, again partly created through the artist’s titling, is a vehicle for a painting of sensation, a hint of the spirit and feeling of an event or an individual.

The present painting is based on a memory of over ten years earlier, as is Julia and Margaret of 1962 (Private Collection), a remembrance of two girls sitting in a hotel room, with a third figure behind them looking back as he leaves the room. However, by the alterations and dense black over-painting, Hodgkin rapidly takes away the remaining figural references, concentrating the viewer’s gaze on a few highly-charged elements, rather like a snapshot of an event taken through a keyhole.