A year after his death, Howard Hodgkin’s reputation is soaring – and this display of his final works at London’s Gagosian gallery reveals why
After the death of a great artist, their professional life continues for some time. So, a year after the great English painter Sir Howard Hodgkin died in March 2017, new work continues to emerge.
He died before a substantial survey of his work in portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery. The launch of that exhibition had one of the most impressive atmospheres I can remember, as if Hodgkin had taken a graceful farewell before letting his work as a whole speak for itself.
Now, there is another exhibition at the Gagosian gallery, London, of his last paintings.
London’s Gagosian gallery is hosting an exhibition of the late Howard Hodgkin’s final work, and they are wonderful. Above: Portrait Of The Artist Listening To Music, 2011-16
They are wonderful: paintings of extraordinary freedom, intense in their engagement with colour, joyous in their relishing of the brushstroke and the material they are made of.
Many are painted on bare plywood, and balance sumptuous and raw textures. They evoke private experiences (Don’t Tell A Soul), quite ordinary sights, transfigured (Dirty Window). They summon the music Hodgkin loved (Portrait Of The Artist Listening To Music). And there is a painting called Cocktails For Two.
‘Howard wasn’t a great drinker,’ his partner, the writer Antony Peattie, tells me when I visit him in their beautiful house in Bloomsbury. ‘But he liked cocktails to be mixed and then looked at. A dry martini and a negroni – he liked the way they marked the difference between the day and the evening.’After Portrait Of The Artist, which occupied the whole autumn of 2016, Hodgkin and Peattie went to India.
In the exhibition, the six paintings that Hodgkin painted in his final five weeks in Mumbai stand out, including his very last painting, Indian Sea, 2016-17 (above)
Peattie never once saw Hodgkin painting – ‘he hated the idea that people were more interested in the process than the product’. But in this last period he was aware that Hodgkin, normally a slow worker, was suddenly painting in a great burst.
After Portrait Of The Artist, which occupied the whole autumn of 2016, Hodgkin and Peattie went to India. In Mumbai, a room of their flat was cleared for a studio, and Hodgkin immediately began to paint.
In the Gagosian exhibition, the six paintings that Hodgkin painted in these five weeks stand out, including his very last painting, Indian Sea.
It’s common for painters to see a plunge in their reputation before their death, and certainly afterwards.
But this certainly hasn’t happened to Hodgkin, whose reputation has never been higher. After the Gagosian exhibition, a last stage design comes to London in the shape of Mark Morris’s opera-ballet Layla And Majnun, arriving at Sadler’s Wells in November.
There is, too, the important question of the market’s valuation of Hodgkin’s work. Goodbye To The Sea Of Naples from 1980-82 sold at Christie’s in October 2017 for £1.7 million, four times its estimate. The demand for his prints in particular has taken everyone by surprise.
Many are painted on bare plywood, and balance sumptuous and raw textures. They evoke private experiences (Don’t Tell A Soul, 2016, above) and quite ordinary sights, transfigured
A catalogue raisonné of Hodgkin’s works should be getting under way, and will be a major task – some early paintings and prints have disappeared and may still surface.
There is, too, the question of what to do with the spectacular studio space, which, when I visited, was hung with a dozen unforgettable paintings. Could it become a museum to Hodgkin’s art?
The word seems inappropriate to a painter whose work, even now, seems almost shockingly alive. As if death were just an inconvenient interruption.
‘Howard Hodgkin: Last Paintings’ is at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, until Jul 28