{"id":189629,"date":"2025-09-29T10:41:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T10:41:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/189629\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T10:41:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T10:41:18","slug":"howard-hodgkin-review-extraordinary-this-is-art-to-pierce-the-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/189629\/","title":{"rendered":"Howard Hodgkin review \u2014 extraordinary, this is art to pierce the heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s \u201cthe evasiveness of reality\u201d that Howard Hodgkin was always striving for in his pictures. The \u201cglancing quality\u201d of memory, that fleeting flash, packed with detail but somehow blurry at the same time. This exhibition at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery in London is a lovely opportunity to see a selection of the great British colourist\u2019s prints from throughout his career, and a few of his glorious paintings, in a splendid setting.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s appropriate that Pitzhanger was Sir John Soane\u2019s country home; Hodgkin was fascinated by people\u2019s interior spaces, as he says in Judy Marle\u2019s 1982 film (running in the manor\u2019s basement) of Hodgkin visiting his beloved second home of India, and in conversation with various friends (though it needs subtitles; it\u2019s quite hard to decipher his classic \u201cdiffident Seventies intellectual\u201d mumble).<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

Not that you\u2019d know when you\u2019re looking at an interior. Hodgkin was a committed abstractionist; his paintings, which took years to create, and his prints, made relatively quickly, use a pictorial language of splodges, sweeps and fat lines in brilliant colours that bear relation to reality only in as much as they capture the emotions associated with whatever memory the picture relates to.<\/p>\n

\u2022 A Picasso for less than ten grand?<\/a><\/p>\n

There are recognisable motifs \u2014 India\u2019s palm trees reappear often; a series of prints from the mid-Seventies are framed within their frames by rectangles of blue recalling the small windows in Indian railway carriages, through which Hodgkin watched the landscape flash by. Jarid\u2019s Porch, 1977, a sharp tick of intense yellow in a sea of black, evokes the interior glow when a door opens on a dark night.<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

Hodgkin\u2019s Night Palm (1990-91)<\/p>\n

But mostly, with Hodgkin, you must give yourself over to an emotional response \u2014 he once said that he\u2019d been told his paintings made people cry, and that he couldn\u2019t think of a better compliment. Rather like a Rorschach test, you see what is in you \u2014 part of his brilliance is that he captures the universal. And the beauty on display is breathtaking; the extraordinary colours pierce the heart (it\u2019s gorgeously hung). I particularly love the later work, as it became more gestural in the Nineties, his movements adding to its intensity.<\/p>\n

Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music was Hodgkin\u2019s final work, completed three months before his death in 2017. It\u2019s one of his largest, and feels elegiac, maybe even angry, with rapid black and grey marks encroaching aggressively on what might be a figure. You can imagine a man, listening to something furiously avant-garde and raging against the dying of the light. It\u2019s the feeling that matters, and these works are bursting with it.
\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606
Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London, Oct 1 to Mar 8, pitzhanger.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s \u201cthe evasiveness of reality\u201d that Howard Hodgkin was always striving for in his pictures. The \u201cglancing quality\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-189629","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}