霍華德·霍奇金 | 《在中央公園裡》

M.克内德勒公司，紐約（直接購自藝術家）
繆麗爾及霍華德·魏恩羅，紐約
沃丁頓畫廊有限公司，倫敦
私人收藏，美國
紐約蘇富比，1998年11月18日，拍品編號289（經由上述藏家委託）
現藏家購自上述拍賣

紐約，M.克内德勒公司，〈霍華德·霍奇金近作展〉，1986年5月，27頁，載彩圖

南特，美術館；巴塞隆納，凱沙基金會文化中心；愛丁堡，蘇格蘭現代藝術國家畫廊；都柏林，聖三一學院道格拉斯·海德畫廊，〈霍華德·霍奇金小型畫作展1975-1989年〉，1990年6月-1991年5月，51頁，品號16（南特），及51頁，品號17（巴塞隆納），載彩圖

紐海文，英國藝術耶魯中心，〈霍華德·霍奇金畫展1992-2007年〉，2007年2月-4月

格雷戈里·加利根，〈小事如繪畫而已：霍華德·霍奇金新作〉，《藝術雜誌》，1986年9月，品號61，65頁（內文）

安德魯·格萊姆·迪森，《霍華德·霍奇金》，倫敦，1994年，108頁，載彩圖

瑪拉·派萊斯（編），《霍華德·霍奇金：繪畫》，倫敦，1995年，186頁，品號210，載圖

瑪拉·派萊斯（編），《霍華德·霍奇金：繪畫作品全集》，倫敦，2006年，225頁，品號210，載彩圖

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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.