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Lot Essay
‘I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional states’
-Howard Hodgkin
A vision in bold, graphic colour, Guest is a vibrant evocation of memory and place by Howard Hodgkin. It has been held in the Jeremy Lancaster Collection for more than three decades, during which time it was on long-term loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. Prior to that, it was included in the travelling 1976 Arts Council exhibition Howard Hodgkin: Forty Five Paintings 1949-1975. 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 twentieth-century British art.
Standing among the more figurative works that characterise Hodgkin’s late-sixties and early-seventies period, Guest has an almost Pop-art clarity. At its centre sit swelling, anthropomorphic shapes in peach and lime green, embraced by a crisp blue. This atrium is surrounded by an architectural cornice of deep burgundy paint. Quarter-circles of off-white and green scallop its upper corners, as if mimicking the soft lighting in a domestic room. Outside this zone, the painted wooden frame – part of the work, as is typical of Hodgkin’s practice – flanks the room with bright blotches of orange on green, and a strip of dark blue which forms a 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. Guest – its title underscoring the sense that we are invited visitors to a private space – is at once vivid and enigmatic. Its framing creates a metaphysical sense of image within image, like Magritte’s surrealist masterpiece The Human Condition, 1933 (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.). While Hodgkin always forged a singular path, the painting’s sinuous linear shapes seem to recall the British Pop work of his close friend Patrick Caulfield: it has a distinct touch of sixties chic, in tune with the intense, poetic attention Caulfield paid to contemporary furnishings.
-Howard Hodgkin
A vision in bold, graphic colour, Guest is a vibrant evocation of memory and place by Howard Hodgkin. It has been held in the Jeremy Lancaster Collection for more than three decades, during which time it was on long-term loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. Prior to that, it was included in the travelling 1976 Arts Council exhibition Howard Hodgkin: Forty Five Paintings 1949-1975. 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 twentieth-century British art.
Standing among the more figurative works that characterise Hodgkin’s late-sixties and early-seventies period, Guest has an almost Pop-art clarity. At its centre sit swelling, anthropomorphic shapes in peach and lime green, embraced by a crisp blue. This atrium is surrounded by an architectural cornice of deep burgundy paint. Quarter-circles of off-white and green scallop its upper corners, as if mimicking the soft lighting in a domestic room. Outside this zone, the painted wooden frame – part of the work, as is typical of Hodgkin’s practice – flanks the room with bright blotches of orange on green, and a strip of dark blue which forms a 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. Guest – its title underscoring the sense that we are invited visitors to a private space – is at once vivid and enigmatic. Its framing creates a metaphysical sense of image within image, like Magritte’s surrealist masterpiece The Human Condition, 1933 (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.). While Hodgkin always forged a singular path, the painting’s sinuous linear shapes seem to recall the British Pop work of his close friend Patrick Caulfield: it has a distinct touch of sixties chic, in tune with the intense, poetic attention Caulfield paid to contemporary furnishings.