Howard Hodgkin

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

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

The mix of passion and deliberation that is the essence of Howard Hodgkin’s art first blossomed in Garden. This brilliantly coloured, seemingly spontaneous composition was in fact the product of two years anxious effort, and is one of Hodgkin’s first mature abstract compositions. The ghostly traces and glints buried beneath the uppermost layer of vibrant green and yellow paint reveal Hodgkin’s 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.

Hodgkin’s paintings work in memory and metaphor as opposed to from illusion with the subject serving as a catalyst for imagery. As in some of his most intimate and private compositions of the early 1960s, Hodgkin here paints an environment constructed from emotions and sensations. “Ideally they should be memorials,” Hodgkin has commented. (cited in: John Russell, ‘Hodgkin Colour Locals’, ART news 66, May 1967, p. 62) Reconstructing the visual texture of the moment, the overlaid density and intense colouring of the composition make Garden endlessly alive and elusive. Its directness, abstraction and immediacy sees a mixture of fantasy and materiality that connect with the ‘somewhere else’ of recollection in manner that is simultaneously relevant on both a personal and a shared, communal level. 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.

Garden stands as one of Hodgkin’s brashest paintings and shows him intuitively sensing the aesthetic shifts that would define the 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.