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Lot Essay
A vision in bold primary hues, Room with Chair (1969-70) is a vibrant evocation of memory and place by Howard Hodgkin. It has been held in the Jeremy Lancaster Collection for almost three decades, during which time it was on long-term loan to the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. Born in Solihull in 1936, Jeremy Lancaster had a close attachment to the West Midlands; he also lent works to Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, where he served as a trustee. Alongside his trade as an industrialist, Lancaster developed a keen eye as a collector. The works of Hodgkin, whose joyous colours and deep feeling sound a keynote for the collection at large, were at the heart of Lancaster’s lifelong intellectual and emotional engagement with 20th century British art.
Standing among the more figurative works that characterise Hodgkin’s late-sixties and early-seventies period, Room with Chair has an almost Pop-art clarity. The red, reclined form of a chair is outlined in crisp ultramarine against a coral-tinted floor and bright yellow wall. The painted wooden frame – part of the work, as is typical of Hodgkin’s practice – flanks the room with primary stripes and forms a jutting red ceiling. It creates the perspectival sense that we are looking into an actual space, as well as a psychological interior framed by the act of remembering. ‘The more evanescent the emotion I want to convey,’ Hodgkin once said, ‘the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing, the more elaborate the border, so that this delicate thing will remain protected and intact’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in P. Kinmonth, ‘Howard Hodgkin’, Vogue, June 1984).
Hodgkin distilled memories of places, people and moments into his own abstracted language of colour and form. His later works would venture still further from figurative territory, but share in the present work’s conception of emotionally-charged rooms and objects, as well as its electric use of colour. Room with Chair is at once vivid and enigmatic. While Hodgkin always forged a singular path, the painting’s graphic linear forms seem to recall the British Pop work of his close friend Patrick Caulfield: the sinuous shape of the chair has a distinct touch of sixties chic, in tune with the intense, poetic attention Caulfield paid to contemporary furnishings.
Standing among the more figurative works that characterise Hodgkin’s late-sixties and early-seventies period, Room with Chair has an almost Pop-art clarity. The red, reclined form of a chair is outlined in crisp ultramarine against a coral-tinted floor and bright yellow wall. The painted wooden frame – part of the work, as is typical of Hodgkin’s practice – flanks the room with primary stripes and forms a jutting red ceiling. It creates the perspectival sense that we are looking into an actual space, as well as a psychological interior framed by the act of remembering. ‘The more evanescent the emotion I want to convey,’ Hodgkin once said, ‘the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing, the more elaborate the border, so that this delicate thing will remain protected and intact’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in P. Kinmonth, ‘Howard Hodgkin’, Vogue, June 1984).
Hodgkin distilled memories of places, people and moments into his own abstracted language of colour and form. His later works would venture still further from figurative territory, but share in the present work’s conception of emotionally-charged rooms and objects, as well as its electric use of colour. Room with Chair is at once vivid and enigmatic. While Hodgkin always forged a singular path, the painting’s graphic linear forms seem to recall the British Pop work of his close friend Patrick Caulfield: the sinuous shape of the chair has a distinct touch of sixties chic, in tune with the intense, poetic attention Caulfield paid to contemporary furnishings.