HOWARD HODGKIN | In Central Park

M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York (acquired directly from the artist) Muriel and Howard Weingrow, New York

Waddington Galleries, Ltd., London

Private Collection, USA

Sotheby's, New York, 18 November 1998, Lot 289 (consigned by the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., Howard Hodgkin: Recent Work, May 1986, p. 27, illustrated in colour Nantes, Musée des Beaux Arts; Barcelona, Centre Cultural de la Fundació Caixa de Pensions; Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and Dublin, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Howard Hodgkin: Small Paintings 1975-1989, June 1990 - May 1991, p. 51, no. 16 (Nantes), and p. 51, no. 17 (Barcelona), illustrated in colour

New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1992–2007, February - April 2007

Gregory Galligan, ‘A Small Thing But Painting: The New Work of Howard Hodgkin’, Arts Magazine, September 1986, No. 61, p. 65 (text) Andrew Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London 1994, p. 108, illustrated in colour

Marla Price, Ed., Howard Hodgkin: Paintings, London 1995, p. 186, no. 210, illustrated

Marla Price, Ed., Howard Hodgkin: The Complete Paintings, London 2006, p. 225, no. 210, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is less green in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Executed between 1983 and 1986, In Central Park is a seminal example from the height of Howard Hodgkin's acclaimed oeuvre. In 1984, Howard Hodgkin represented Great Britain at the XLI Venice Biennale and in 1985 he was awarded the Turner Prize. Created at a time when he was firmly established as one of the greatest British painters of the Twentieth Century, this painting conjures a romantic look into the past. In Central Park evokes a very specific set of memories drawn from Hodgkin’s early years spent as an evacuee in New York during the Second World War. Herein, the present work is a potent paradigm of Hodgkin's unique exploration into the emotive potential of art and its ability to capture transient moments of memory. Hodgkin’s pictures are poignant autobiographical works that have suggestive titles and were created with people, places, and situations in mind. Hovering on the cusp between representation and abstraction, the dabbed daubs that pepper the oval surface of the present picture transport the viewer into the luscious scenery of New York’s Central Park. As art historian Gregory Galligan has pointed out, “In Central Park, 1983-86, is a seductive arcadian vision that immediately inspires within us memories of autumn foliage. At the same time, we can visually scour the surface as if it were the artist’s palette, where his pre-mixing of colour has led to a provocative composition of its own” (Gregory Galligan, ‘A Small Thing But Painting: The New Work of Howard Hodgkin’, Arts Magazine, September 1986, No. 61, p. 65). For Hodgkin, colour provided a portal through which to explore his memories of specific places, such as America, with a latent potential that the figurative tradition could never encapsulate. Painted over a period of several years, the conflation of hot oranges, vibrant yellows and earthy greens present a scene from shifting viewpoints through hues associated with the changing seasons. Hodgkin once told David Sylvester: "I start out with the subject and naturally I have to remember first of all what it looked like, but it would also perhaps contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All of that has got to be somehow transmuted, transformed or made into a physical object, and when that happens, when that’s finally been done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back-which, after all, is usually the moment when the painting is at long last a physical coherent object – well, then the picture’s finished and the is no question of doing anything more to it. My pictures really finish themselves" (Howard Hodgkin cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings 1984, p. 97).

The time spent in New York had a profound creative effect on Hodgkin's development as an artist, best summed up by the following simple words on his time there: “I could go to look at pictures” (Anthony Lane, ‘True Colours’, The New Yorker, 24 November 2003, online). Spending his days between the Met and MoMA, Hodgkin soaked up American culture, captivated by the masterpieces of the great artistic mythmakers of the American landscape tradition, from Ansel Adams to Georgia O’Keeffe. Part Turner, part Constable, In Central Park is a memory-scape of New York as a leafy metropolis as seen through a decidedly British lens – that of the Romanticist and foreigner. If India held sway over his adult life, America can lay claim to his youth. This is not to say that Hodgkin was immune to European precedent. With its unbridled spontaneity and carefree dots that recede back into an almost enveloping sense of depth, Hodgkin has freed the technique of pointillism from its dogmatic restraint as previously championed by George Seurat and Paul Signac. A drastic departure from those early Impressionist experiments where the dot was in controlled servitude to a greater figurative aim, Hodgkin elevates the dot by granting it a form of artistic soliloquy, yielding it space to stand alone as the sole pictorial protagonist. In its non-figurative, representational force, In Central Park is a private elegy to a place and emotion – decidedly romantic in nature – poured from the depths of the artist’s memory.