Fresh Fruit Crumble, Ice Cream and A Glass of Red are three of the prints by Howard Hodgkin on show at the new premises of the Alan Cristea Gallery in London. Luscious, edible colours make the subject matter of the otherwise abstract images absolutely clear. Food has been one of Hodgkin’s subjects over the years. Other prints take places and the weather for their subjects: Blue Evening, Dark Rainbow, and Foreign Garden. Others still unspecified experiences: Surprise Surprise, Absolutely and Outspoken.
All have the sensuous immediacy familiar from Hodgkin’s work over the decades. He once described his paintings (ostensibly abstract) as representational images of emotional situations. His prints, which he has been making for more than six decades, aim for a different directness: getting right up close to the experience of things, whetting the appetite, lulling you with beauty, bringing back the smell of rain or old leaves. Each image is a moment of visual intoxication.
It was Alan Cristea who convinced Hodgkin that his 1995 series of Venice prints should not be his last, and has cajoled him to return to the difficult and demanding medium. For a painter used to working alone in the studio, producing unique pieces, often over a number of years, the collaborative effort of making prints requires some mental adjustment. Cristea has gently fuelled Hodgkin’s ambition over the past 30 years, and in 2012 the artist made two prints, titled As Time Goes By which, at more than six metres long, are the largest etchings ever made. When asked by an interviewer why he had made such large prints, Hodgkin replied: “To show that I could”.
Hodgkin came into his stride as a printmaker in the late 1970s. It was at this moment that, through the use of new techniques, the prints began to become equivalents, or “surrogates”, as Hodgkin once put it, for his paintings; things in their own right. One of the earliest prints in the current exhibition, from 1977, shows a dark mass against a sodden light blue background and is titled A Storm. It was made in New York after hearing of terrible storms in Oklahoma, where Hodgkin had recently travelled, which reminded him of the stormy skies in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton.
A few years later Hodgkin began using carborundum, a sticky, lava-like substance, which is applied direct to the printing plate using brush or fingers. (The process had been invented 20 years earlier by Henri Goetz, a printmaker who worked with Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró.) The rich, textured mark it produces was a perfect answer to Hodgkin’s desire to get away from the fussiness of traditional printmaking, and the reliance on the drawn, rather than painted mark. The four Venetian Views from 1995, combinations of etching, aquatint and carborundum (one is on view in the new show), which came out of an aborted project to illustrate Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, were intended to defy the physical limits of printmaking and immerse the viewer in colours and forms.
Above all it is through hand-colouring that Hodgkin achieves his immersive effect. He didn’t invent the technique, which has been used for centuries as a way of adding colour by hand to brighten up a monochrome prints, but he has made it his own.
No artist has used it with such consistency, and to such great effect. Each of the 30 prints in the edition of Ice Cream, for example, were made in this way; Hodgkin paints an artist’s proof, noting the type of brush used, and the exact mix of paint. A master printmaker, in this case Andrew Smith, who has been hand-colouring Hodgkin’s prints for a number of years, then reproduces Hodgkin’s brushstrokes with fiendish accuracy, using exactly the same brushes and colours, mimicking also the direction and angle of application, the pressure and small movements of the hand that make the marks distinctive.
At first Hodgkin provided the person doing the hand-colouring with evocative instructions on how to apply the colour: “like a silk stocking”, for example, or “too much is just enough” or, more controversially, “just like hitting a baby” (an old English expression, Hodgkin explains). They sound a bit like Eric Satie’s directions on his musical scores, all the more direct for being so strangely allusive: “light as an egg”, “from the top of your back teeth” and, most memorably, “like a nightingale with a toothache”. Smith has become so adept at reproducing Hodgkin’s marks that he no longer needs instructions, or even to watch the original mark being made, but can tell exactly how any brushstroke was made simply by looking at it, and feeling the weight of personality behind it.
Are the prints any less original for having not been touched by the artist’s hand? Nowadays you can go into most successful artists’ studios and find a small team of assistants completing the paintings to order. But replicating, by hand, a highly complex and expressive mark is something else, a matter both of technical skill and empathy – or a combination of “sensitivity and politesse”, as Hodgkin says of Smith. It’s a uniquely personal approach to an impersonal technique. Andy Warhol (who once invited Hodgkin to make a print celebrating the 1984 Winter Olympics) would surely have been jealous.
Hodgkin’s ability to come up with such concise visual symbols for experience is also remarkable. Dark Rainbow shows two arcs of inky blue on a red swoosh, on a yellow ochre background. Whatever a dark rainbow is, this sums it up very well. Autumn Sky is made up from a yellow and blue strokes that mingle with black and white – not particularly autumnal colours, but the season is unmistakeable, just as it is with Springtime, even though enclosed by a thick black frame. A Glass of Red brings to mind the late Patrick Caulfield, Hodgkin’s great friend, whose bare images of ordinary moments had a poetic intensity of their own. But Caulfield would never have produced an image so free and symbolic, like a hieroglyph, so visually unlike but then so utterly “of” a glass of red wine.
It is often said that Hodgkin creates images based on memories, an act of Proustian recollection – an easy thought, but a lazy one. One also flatly contradicted by his prints, where he does not draw on experience, but creates it anew. Rather than being a sentimental painter, he is a realist, with all the pathos and comedy of that genre. Forget Proust’s dainty madeleine; think rather of Flaubert’s carp, in Madame Bovary, gasping for air on the kitchen table, a symbol of unquenchable desire – that’s at least what the large print Big Sister brings to mind, a flurry of dark brushstrokes against a yellow ochre frame. And everything else on the kitchen table is right there in front of you: good enough to eat.
Howard Hodgkin: After All is at Alan Cristea Gallery, London SW1 until 18 November. alancristea.com
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