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PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF PETER COCHRANE

B. 1932
GARDEN

oil on canvas

Executed in 1960-62.

PROVENANCE

Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., London
Acquired directly from the above by the late owner
Thence by descent to the present owners

EXHIBITED

London, Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., Howard Hodgkin, 1962, no. 13
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, British Painting in the Sixties: An Exhibition Organized by the Contemporary Art Society, Section Two, 1963, no. 149
Bochum, Städtische Kunstgalerie, Profile III: Englische Kunst der Gegenwart, 1964, no. 79
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, The New Scene, 1965-66, p. 23, no. 34, illustrated in colour
Oxford, Museum of Modern Art; London, Serpentine Gallery; Leigh, Turnpike Gallery; Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing Art Gallery; Aberdeen, Aberdeen Art Gallery; Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Howard Hodgkin: Forty-five paintings 1949-1975, 1976, p. 29, no. 7, illustrated in colour

LITERATURE

Patricia Boyd Wilson, 'The Home Forum', in: The Christian Science Monitor, 17 July, 1965
Norbert Lynton, 'London Letter', in: Art International, December 1992
Michael Auping, John Elderfield and Susan Sontag, Howard Hodgkin Paintings, Catalogue Raisonné, London 1995, p. 142, no. 24, illustrated

NOTE

The mix of passion and deliberation that is the essence of Howard Hodgkin's art first blossomed in Garden. Documenting the emergence of his mature style, this work comes from the personal estate of the late Peter Cochrane: the foremost champion of Post War abstraction in London and the first gallerist to give Hodgkin -- as well as numerous other modern masters -- his first solo show. The link between the artist and Cochrane was longstanding and built on a mutual passion for the aesthetically adventurous. Their relationship was commemorated in a portrait of Peter Cochrane by Hodgkin that is to be offered by Sotheby's in October 2006.

Brilliantly coloured, the seemingly spontaneous composition of Garden was infact the product of two years anxious effort, and is one of Hodgkin's first abstract compositions. The ghostly traces and glints buried beneath the uppermost layer of vibrant green and yellow paint reveal his painterly process to be an assiduously pieced together patchwork of feeling and memory, endlessly modified towards its final form. This tendency for layering was to become the signature style of this most revered modern master, and here lends itself intensely to the subject which Hodgkin condenses into a matrix of painterly symbols.

The title of Hodgkin's paintings serves as a catalyst for the imagery which he constructs through emotions and sensations as opposed to from illusion. "Ideally they should be memorials," Hodgkin explained. (cited in: John Russell, 'Hodgkin Colour Locals', ART news 66, May 1967, p. 62) Bordering on both the figurative and the abstract, there is an underlying, disarming mystery within the geometry of this vibrant canvas suggestive of a human presence. One of Hodgkin's brashest paintings and shows him intuitively sensing the aesthetic shifts that would define 1960s. His daring use of colour and the freedom of the intuitive composition owe much to early Pop painting which had recently broken the stranglehold of pure, formalist abstraction. However, in a wilful act of painterly caricature, Hodgkin here also flirts with the decorative banality of Pop art images whose cool cynicism was a direct contrast to his romantic, intensely personal subject matter and painting style.