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Artist or Maker: Sir Howard Hodgkin, C.H. (b. 1932)
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Provenance: with Kasmin, London.
Professor Colin St. John Wilson, from whom acquired by the present owner.
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Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Stadler, Patrick Caulfield, Howard Hodgkin, Michael Moon, March - April 1972, not numbered.
Oxford, Arts Council, Museum of Modern Art, Howard Hodgkin: Forty-five paintings 1949-1975, March - April 1976, no. 32: this exhibition travelled to London, Serpentine Gallery, May 1976; Leigh, Turnpike Gallery, June 1976; Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing Art Gallery, July - August 1976; Aberdeen, Art Gallery, August - September 1976; and Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, September - October 1976.
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, on loan.
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Notes:
Artist's Resale Right ("droit de Suite"). If the Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer also agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
In conversation with David Sylvester, Howard Hodgkin commented, 'I want to get the sort of evasiveness of reality into my pictures. I mean, looking at you now, I don't see Ingres' portrait of Monsieur Bertin, for example. Because I'm always seeing something else and something more. I might be looking past you or looking at the light falling on part of you or thinking of you. So it's my idea of you as well as what I see that's in my mind. But this kind of realism which depends also a lot on illusionism, is, of course, evanescent, frail and difficult to establish' (see exhibition catalogue, Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings: 1973-84, London, British Council, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1984, p. 97).
Hodgkin studied at Camberwell School of Art (1949-50) and then at Bath Academy of Art (1950-4), where he subsequently taught for 10 years (1956-66). In the late 1950s, during Hodgkin's time at Bath, he began working on a series of portraits which were to form a significant part of his output for the next twenty years. Teresa Gleadowe comments, 'These paintings may, with hindsight, be seen as studies in language, something akin to Queneau's celebrated Exercises in Style. But, at the time they were made, the pictures had for Hodgkin another function, helping him to define his own 'space' as an artist in the context of the prevailing styles of the period. The occasional passages in which ironic observation shades into sharper satire may be seen as a direct engagement with those of his contemporaries who considered his practice too idiosyncratic, too wayward or whimsical, for serious consideration' (see exhibition catalogue, Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1977, XLI Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, 1984).
