What Am I Doing Here? (9 page)

He comes from an upper-middle-class family of wellordered minds and well-furnished houses. The Hodgkins are one of those puritanical, public-spirited dynasties that constitute, for Noel Annan, ‘the intellectual aristocracy of England'. Among his eighteenth-century ancestors is the ‘Father of Meteorology', who coined new names for clouds. A nineteenth-century Hodgkin discovered Hodgkin's disease (of the spleen and lymphatic glands); a twentieth-century cousin shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine. One Hodgkin was a famous grammarian; another wrote the standard history of the Anglo-Saxons. Among their relatives were the critic Roger Fry and the poet Robert Bridges. Howard's grandfather, Stanley Hodgkin, owned an engineering works that manufactured a pump called ‘The Pulsometer'. His father was an obsessive collector of alpine plants who found, in his rock garden, a relief from the tedium of his job in Imperial Chemicals.

Such are the sources of his ambition and a certain taste for public honours. The rest is not quite so straightforward.

The experiences of his childhood seem to have given that ambition a rather unusual twist. He can remember, for example, floating in an enormous blue bath in a hotel in Cologne, and a picture of the Führer in the dining-room. He can remember a summer holiday in Carinthia around the time of the Anschluss, his German nanny flaunting a Nazi flag on her table, and the village boys who dumped her in the swimming-pool. He can remember, too, the day that Florence Hodgkin, his eccentric Irish grandmother, appeared in a black suit with a green hat, green artificial flowers, green blouse, green shoes, green umbrella, green bottles of champagne and a lot of green-wrapped presents in a green carrier bag. Black and green is still one of his favourite colour combinations and could – at a pinch – be his ‘madeleine'. Only the other day he told me that the glossy green paint of his London flat made him feel ‘secure' – and that the furniture was to be black.

Florence Hodgkin encouraged his childhood mania for collecting antiques; in 1938 she had already written a horoscope for the little boy born under the ‘Royal Sign of Leo'. ‘For Leos', she prophesied, ‘colour is life.' She also predicted that her grandson would have a ‘marvellous faculty for presenting facts in a new light', and would be ‘immovable in his opinions'. The horoscope ended with a list of other Leos that included Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Mussolini, Alexander the Great, Rembrandt, Henry Ford and Mae West.

In 1940 Howard was evacuated to the United States. He stayed at Long Island, in a Georgian house where the walls were covered with painted mock coromandel canvas, all very different to the formalised gloom of the Hodgkin houses in England. The sights of New York dazzled him and were registered, unforgettably, on his retina. His colour sense was Americanised. He went to Coney Island, and to the Museum of Modern Art where he trembled before the Matisses. At school he sang the ‘Star-Spangled Banner‘ and ‘America the Beautiful'. The other school kids were so beautiful they made him feel gauche and uncomfortable. When the war was over, and the time came to leave, America was still a Paradise, and England, quite definitely, the Fall.

He went to Eton, which he detested. Yet the result could have been much worse were it not for the art master, Wilfred Blunt, who encouraged him to paint ‘imitation Fauves' and opened his eyes to the exotic, exquisite world of Rajput and Mughal miniatures. He seems to have understood, even then, that the Indian artists' sense of colour and composition offered a way out of the muddy impasse of most English painting. He dreamed of making a collection of Indian paintings for himself – and picked up one or two.

At fifteen, floundering in emotional turmoil, he prevailed on a psychiatrist to let him go back to Long Island. All that summer, under the influence of Vuillard, of Matisse, of Stuart Davis, of Egon Schiele and of erotic Indian miniatures – yet in a manner entirely his own - he painted the picture called
Memoirs
:

A woman – or rather a woman from the neck down – is seen reclining on a white sofa, dressed of course in black and green, with red-lacquered talons and a big diamond ring. The walls and carpet are red; the artist himself, wearing yellow trousers, and looking a bit like an adolescent Eric von Stroheim, has fixed his hallucinated stare (for this is an ‘Artist and Model' composition in which the artist simply stares and memorises) on a point midway between the sitter's diamond and her décolletage.

To this theme – of figures in a room where something momentous or erotic may, or may not, happen – Howard has returned again and again. It's nice to think that, in a recent series of pictures, the artist no longer gawks at the model; instead something both momentous
and
erotic is actually going on – a happier change from the very ‘black' lithographs of the seventies where the model appears to be confined to the room, ensnared within the hermetic interior.

After returning from America, he did not go back to Eton, but to Bryanston School, which has a better record for coping with ‘artistic' cases. He lived with his house master, who was a friend of Auden: the art master was a pacifist and world authority on Victorian furniture. Howard spent his spare time rummaging in the antique shops and, one day, bought for five pounds a black bronze vase that came from the Golden Drawing Room at Carlton House. For a time he kept this treasure in his room with a length of purple velvet tucked up behind it. Then he decided to sell it and run away to Paris and be a painter.

He did not go to Paris. Instead, in a pair of white sandals and with a veneer of studied Bohemianism, he enrolled as a student at the Camberwell School of Art. One day, he summoned up the courage to show
Memoirs
to the Principal, who pronounced it ‘a load of rubbish' – a painting so perverse he couldn't understand how it had come to be painted.

There followed a sullen, solitary battle. To the boy who had breathed the air of excellence in the Museum of Modern Art, the insularity and ‘know-all' attitudes of the English were insufferable. His comforts, in London, were few. There was a Braque exhibition; he combed through Alfred Barr's book on Matisse; and there were rumours of a new school of painting in New York. The one memorable break was a visit to a house in the Highlands where Royal French furniture glittered in the northern sunlight.

On quitting Camberwell, he taught painting, first at Charterhouse School, and then at Lord Methuen's Academy at Corsham, where at least the surroundings were distinguished. He married, bought a house in London, and had two sons. He continued to paint, secretly and in anguish. His artist friends felt the force of his personality, but few had the faintest idea of what he was up to. Then, in 1959, he met a hypnotic personality named Cary Welch – a meeting which, he says, ‘changed the course of my life'.

Cary Welch came from a well-to-do family from Buffalo, New York. Whilst at Harvard he conceived a passion for Indian and Persian miniatures. Against all advice he set about sinking a fair proportion of his inheritance buying them. The fact that this collection would drastically appreciate in value was incidental, and, at the time, far from certain: it was a copy-book case of not burying one's talents.

Welch and his wife came to live in London because, as a legacy of the Raj, the best public collections of Indian paintings were in England, and because you could still find paintings, cheaply, in private hands. Howard was overwhelmed by the onrush of Yankee enthusiasm and, perhaps, by a touch of envy for his new friend's entrepreneurial skills. First, he accepted all Cary's judgments; only later, as his confidence grew, did he discover that he liked a different kind of painting.

The upshot of the meeting was that Howard's hunting instincts were thoroughly aroused. He bought, sold and traded; he perfected the tactics of the bazaar; and for over ten years he channelled about half his creative energies into his collection.

Most painters collect works of art and some of them, like Degas, collect great works of art. Usually the collection serves the artist as an
aide-mémoire
and a confirmation of his own identity. Sometimes the artist's collection seems to appear of its own accord, simply because he has an eye, a bank account, a certain standing with the dealers, or something to swap with another artist friend. But in the case of Howard Hodgkin, none of this is true. I can think of no successful artist whose impulse to paint pictures is rivalled by an impulse to buy another kind of picture. His collection is an essential part of his life's work. Any retrospective exhibition of Howard's own paintings would, in my opinion, be incomplete without the Indian collection hanging beside them – though having once made a purchase, he has an equally strong impulse to hide it, to lend it, or at least to get it out of his sight.

After his first exhibitions at the Tooth Gallery, critics were quick to point out the formal similarities between the art of Mughal and Rajput India and his own. And they were right. But I have sometimes thought that Howard's pictures . are a declaration of war against his Indian ones. He is obscure where they are explicit. He is mute where they tell a story. He fudges where they are finicky. His colours are deliberately jarring where theirs seek to soothe. Perhaps it's a case of renouncing the thing you love? Perhaps his ‘walloped-down' pictures can be seen as an act of total renunciation.

I first made friends with Howard in the early Sixties; and happened to come in useful.

I knew a man in France, who knew a woman in Switzerland, who was the widow of a famous German scholar of Islamic art, who owned a great masterpiece of Indian painting. It was a page – perhaps the most beautiful page – of the Hamza-Nama, a colossal manuscript done for the Emperor Akbar around 1580. Howard lusted after it – the word is not too strong – and with a bit of juggling, he got it, though not before he had hocked off several lesser masterpieces.

At the time, I lived in a flat behind Hyde Park Comer which, he recalls, was the ‘most dandyish interior I had ever seen'. I had recently come back from a desert journey in the Sudan and the sitting room had a monochromatic desert-like atmosphere and contained only two works of art – the arse of an archaic Greek marble
kouros,
and an early seventeenth-century Japanese screen. One evening, the Hodgkins and the Welches came to dinner, and I remember Howard shambling around the room, fixing it in his memory with the stare I came to know so well.

The result of that dinner was a painting called
The Japanese Screen
in which the screen itself appears as a rectangle of pointillist dots, the Welches as a pair of gunturrets, while I am the acid green smear on the left, turning away in disgust, away from my guests, away from my possessions, away from the ‘dandified' interior, and possibly back to the Sahara.

However, if my rooms astonished Howard, his house was a never-failing source of wonder to me. Already there were signs of that wilful vulgarity with which people of faultless taste protect themselves from faultless taste. But why, when he never tired of discussing the ultimate refinements of interior decoration, did he take such pains to make his own quarters look like a slum? Why the carefully cultivated dampstains? Why the crumbling plaster, the peeling shreds of wallpaper and the back-breaking chairs? This was not an artist's loft. It was not a garret. It was a comfortable, middle-class London terrace house. Whatever the reason, it was not simply a matter of money.

I used to think that Howard kept his house ‘untouched' for fear that any effort to improve it would detract from the energies he was pouring into his art and his collection. I have since come round to the idea that those austere rooms were more affected, more calculated and more dandified than anything I could dream of. It was his way of saying, ‘This is my answer to my family and their brown furniture.' ‘This is what England is really like.'

Around 1965, collectors began to buy Howard's pictures for real money and the Hodgkins bought a mill house in a very green Wiltshire valley. Again, you felt the builders would stay for ever, and when they finally did go, Howard spent hour after hour arranging and re-arranging the house to achieve the most tentative effect with the maximum amount of efforts. The same is true of his paintings, which are built-up layer on layer of ‘rubbings-out' – on Hemingway's principle that if you obliterate something it will always be there.

Around the same time, too, he found a new dealer in Kasmin, who insisted on, and paid for, his first trip to India. India became an emotional lifeline. Each winter he travelled all over the subcontinent, sopping up impressions - of empty hotel rooms, the beach at Mahabalipuram, the view from a railway carriage, the colour of cowdust in the evening, or the sight of an orange sari against a concrete balustrade - and storing them for the pictures he would paint, at home, in Wiltshire. The influence was now India herself, not the India of Indian painting. Then he almost died, of a tropical disease contracted there, and the enchantment palled a little. A picture entitled
Bombay Sunset,
painted in colours of mud, blood, and bile, perhaps shows that India was also his emotional cul-desac.

Meanwhile, the ‘Hodgkin' side of his character had reasserted itself. He immersed himself in the art politics of England. He was appointed a Trustee of the Tate Gallery, then of the National Gallery, and was awarded the CBE. And then the story might, artistically, have ended, were it not for a chance encounter. The details of the encounter I leave to the imagination: the results were that Howard's painting took a sharp and unexpected swerve.

Gone were the portraits of forlorn married couples in rooms, to be replaced by a new kind of subject, and a new mood. In his most recent pictures, the sitters – though they still exist under layers of paint – are overwhelmed by dots, splotches, flashes and slabs of colour, recording situations or impressions that Howard, in his new persona, has witnessed. Some are simple enough: it doesn't require much imagination to see that the one called
Red Bermudas
is of a sunbather in Central Park. But who would guess that
Tea,
a panel oversplattered in scarlet, represents a seedy flat in Paddington where a male hustler is telling the story of his life? Howard has also returned to the ‘Artist and Model' theme, in a series of hand-coloured lithographs, revealing a new-found engagement with the erotic.