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howard hodgkin b.1932
In a French Restaurant
Oil on board
35 7/8 by 48 in. 91.1 by 121.9 cm.
Painted in 1977-78.
Provenance: M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York; Waddington Galleries Ltd., London; Acquired from the above on February 3, 1990
Exhibited: New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., Howard Hodgkin, 1981, no. 5; London, Royal Academy of Art, A New Spirit in Painting, 1981, no. 60; Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Museum; Tochigi, Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts; Osaka, National Museum of Art; Fukuoka, Art Museum; Sapporo, Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Aspects of British Art Today, 1982, no. 133; Venice, XLI Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, British Pavilion; Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection; New Haven, Yale Center for British Art; Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings, 1973-84, 1984-85; Cologne, Museum Ludwig, Bilderstreit: Widerspruch Einheit und Fragment in der Kunst seit 1960, 1989, no. 264; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum; Dusseldorf, Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande & Westfalen; London, Hayward Gallery, Howard Hodgkin Paintings, 1995-97
Literature: Jesse Murry, "Reflections on Howard Hodgkin's Theater of Memory," Arts Magazine, New York, June 1981, illustrated p. 154; Milton Gendel, "Report from Venice: Cultured Pearls at the Biennale," Art in America, New York, September 1984, illustrated p. 50; Annelie Pohlen, "A Few Highlights but no Festival,"Artforum, New York, September 1984, illustrated p. 105; Judith Higgins, "In a Hot Country," ARTnews84, New York, Summer 1985, pp. 56-65; Frances Spalding, British Art Since 1900, London, 1986, fig. 199, illustrated p. 227; Andrew Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London, 1994, illustrated p. 56; Michael Auping, John Elderfield, Susan Sontag and Marla Price, Howard Hodgkin Paintings, London, 1995, no. 146, illustrated pp. 54 and 170
Howard Hodgkin has been acknowledged as one of the great painters of modern times and one of the most inventive and original colorists of the 20th Century. His paintings exist at the margin between representation and abstraction, bright mosaics shot through with hints and glimmerings of recognizable form. They are intelligent objects, constantly in dialogue with the art of the past, but shining with a brilliant modernity.
Andrew Graham-Dixon has analyzed in detail this seminal composition, focusing on the emotional and intellectual essence of Hodgkin's painting: "In a French Restaurant (1977-79) plays ironically on the contrast between the hesitant evocativeness of Hodgkin's own language and the unequivocal semaphoric clarity of conventional visual signs - in this case the French flag, painted into the top edge of the picture with deliberate, banal straightforwardness. It looks like a postage stamp stuck, imperfectly, on to a palimpsest, a curious intrusion into a painting whose puzzling depths, spatial ambiguities and vaguely figurative gloamings suggests a world of private emotional complexity charged with private feeling. But the flag may be there to make a point. It turns the picture into a painting that is, on one level, about the inadequacy of simple visual conventions as representations of the real. It stands in for the kinds of oversimplification which the painting itself refuses to countenance. Flags pretend to represent whole nations, but the picture serves as a reminder that all of France cannot be reduced to a tricoloured piece of cloth, that something as vast and amorphous as an entire country cannot be so easily summarized. It is hard enough, the painting insists, to paint a single moment in a single life. In a French Restaurant is about the failure of code but it is also a declaration of intent, a painting which says that new means, new forms of expression must constantly be found, however gropingly and uncertainly, if experience is to be done justice." (Andrew Graham- Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London, 1994, pp. 58-59).
John McEwen related the present composition to one of David Hockney's works: "In a French Restaurant... was designed as a retort to David Hockney's picture of an interior at the Louvre, Contre-jour in the French Style. It struck Hodgkin that the dry and parsimonious nature of Hockney's picture was the very reverse of French in style. Accordingly, by way of correction, he painted a lush, though no less classically symmetrical, picture." (Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings, 1973-84, (exhibition catalogue), Venice, XLI Biennale Internazionale d'Arte; Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection; New Haven, Yale Center for British Art; Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, 1984-85, p. 10).