.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
With its vivid panorama of colour and texture spanning more than four square metres, Rhode Island is a spectacular large-scale work by Howard Hodgkin. Painted over a two-year period between 2000 and 2002, the work was unveiled at the artist’s 70th birthday exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art shortly after its completion, and subsequently featured in his major touring retrospective in 2006. Affirming Hodgkin’s status as one of the great colourists of his generation, it contrasts bold, saturated hues with deep strains of black, articulated through a series of sweeping gestures that allow glimmers of light to peer through. ‘With its hellfire reds, its stanchion of hard black, and its leafy strewings at the base’, writes the critic Anthony Lane, ‘[Rhode Island] could well be the most opulent tribute ever paid to that state’ (A. Lane, ‘True Colours: Howard Hodgkin Returns to New York’, The New Yorker, 24 November 2003). The work belongs to a group of paintings whose titles evoke Hodgkin’s love affair with America. Having spent time with his aunt in Long Island as boy during the 1940s, he returned to the U. S. throughout his career, admiring its art, absorbing its landscapes and enjoying critical acclaim in its galleries and museums. Hodgkin was particularly buoyed by passionate reaction of American audiences to his works, whose carefully-wrought surfaces sought to distil personal feelings and experiences into paint. In the fiery depths of Rhode Island – alive with the glow of an untold memory – this ambition is made plain.
‘I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances’, asserted Hodgkin. ‘I paint representational pictures of emotional states’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in E. Juncosa (ed.), Writers on Howard Hodgkin, London 2006, p. 104). Working slowly and thoughtfully over long periods of time, the artist sought visual expression for sensations buried deep in his psyche. America – the subject of the artist’s very first documented painting in 1948 – played a central role in the development of this approach. As a child, evacuated from England during the war, he saw works by Picasso and Matisse hanging in the halls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During the 1950s, he was entranced by major exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting that toured to London, enthusing that ‘the New York school … taught us that more is more’. Absorbing these influences into his own idiom, Hodgkin made his solo debut in America in 1973 to rapturous acclaim. ‘They realised at once what sort of artist I was’, he explained; ‘the reaction was such that I felt I was communicating with an audience’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted at https://howard-hodgkin.com/resources/chronology/ [accessed 16 January 2020]). By the time of the artist’s major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art towards the end of the millennium, his practice had evolved, growing looser in gesture and grander in scale. Gone were the thick, heavy borders of his earlier works, replaced by fluid, expansive surfaces that seemed to relinquish some of their closed interiority. In Rhode Island, certainly, ‘more is more’; Hodgkin’s admiration for his transatlantic peers had come full circle.
‘I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances’, asserted Hodgkin. ‘I paint representational pictures of emotional states’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in E. Juncosa (ed.), Writers on Howard Hodgkin, London 2006, p. 104). Working slowly and thoughtfully over long periods of time, the artist sought visual expression for sensations buried deep in his psyche. America – the subject of the artist’s very first documented painting in 1948 – played a central role in the development of this approach. As a child, evacuated from England during the war, he saw works by Picasso and Matisse hanging in the halls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During the 1950s, he was entranced by major exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting that toured to London, enthusing that ‘the New York school … taught us that more is more’. Absorbing these influences into his own idiom, Hodgkin made his solo debut in America in 1973 to rapturous acclaim. ‘They realised at once what sort of artist I was’, he explained; ‘the reaction was such that I felt I was communicating with an audience’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted at https://howard-hodgkin.com/resources/chronology/ [accessed 16 January 2020]). By the time of the artist’s major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art towards the end of the millennium, his practice had evolved, growing looser in gesture and grander in scale. Gone were the thick, heavy borders of his earlier works, replaced by fluid, expansive surfaces that seemed to relinquish some of their closed interiority. In Rhode Island, certainly, ‘more is more’; Hodgkin’s admiration for his transatlantic peers had come full circle.