Bhupen Khakhar

Acquired from Hester van Royen Gallery Ltd, London, 1979 

Penelope Marcus was Assistant Curator in the Modern Department and then ran the 20^th Century Archives Department at the Tate Gallery, London, from 1970 to 1973. Subsequently, she was Senior Editor at Phaidon Press where she commissioned monographs on modern and contemporary art and painters, including Paula Rego and Bruce McLean. She served on the Board of Modern Art Oxford for over 30 years, and has always been involved in the work of international artists practicing the many exciting forms of contemporary art.

Dr. Paul Levy is a food critic, writer, columnist and successful author, heralded for coining the universally known phrase ‘foodie’. Throughout his celebrated career, Levy has won many British and American food writing and journalism prizes, including two commendations in the British Press Awards. His interests are not limited to food and literature but encapsulate all of the arts. For a decade Levy wrote a weekly column on the arts for The Wall Street Journal and was a regular contributor to the ‘Personal Journal’ pages where he discussed his love of arts and culture.

They were close friends of the artist Howard Hodgkin, who famously painted both a portrait of them and also of Paul Levy during the 1970s. It was in the same decade that Bhupen Khakhar first came to Britain – he met Howard Hodgkin in India in 1972 and later stayed with him in Wiltshire, England in 1976 and 1979. Penelope Marcus and Paul Levy came to know of Khakhar and his artwork through Hodgkin, visited him in India and always keenly followed the painter’s career.