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Lot Essay
Exhibited in Howard Hodgkin’s major touring retrospective between 1995 and 1996, and not shown in public since, Scotland is a remarkable example of the artist’s intimate chromatic visions. Composed of jewel-like greens and bright crimson with a shot of orange, the paint surges onto the frame, which seems to contain a transient moment from the outside world. Painted between 1994 and 1995, the work captures Hodgkin’s growing confidence in his artistic output at this time: the previous decade had seen his inclusion in the Venice Biennale and his receipt of the Turner Prize, followed by a knighthood in 1992. From 1990 onwards, he painted more freely and fluently and with increasing boldness, while revisiting paintings of seemingly fleeting moments—such as a night on the Nile or a rain shower in Venice—over periods of months or years. With the picture’s frame as its stage, Scotland presents a small, self-contained world, which Hodgkin beckons the viewer to observe.
Scotland played a recurring role across Hodgkin’s career: the artist spent time travelling in the country, and in 1990 the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art had hosted the major touring exhibition Howard Hodgkin: Small Paintings. Moreover, whilst Hodgkin looked at the works of great modern masters such as Matisse, Vuillard, Rothko and Pollock, the intensity of feeling and the beauty of colour in his paintings seem to conjure the Scottish colourists, particularly the vibrant landscapes of Peploe and the saturated tones of Cadell. In spite of this, Hodgkin took a strongly independent path, developing a unique and distinct style in his paintings.
The title of the present work also aligns itself with Hodgkin’s preoccupation with places. In 1940, an eight-year-old Hodgkin fled from London to Long Island, New York, with his family in the midst of the Second World War. This experience of migration bled into Hodgkin’s oeuvre. His work is grounded in a fascination with location—most notably expressed in his enduring love of India and Venice. In Scotland, Hodgkin captures the essence of a place without utilising figuration. The artist aptly described himself as a ‘representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in A. Graham Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London 1994, p. 7).
Robert Rosenblum remarked that Hodgkin’s art ‘offers an unfamiliar, but unforgettable marriage of the abstract and the earthbound, of rhapsodic visual pleasures and quiet memories of a life outside the studio walls’ (R. Rosenblum, Howard Hodgkin, Large Paintings, 1984-2002, exh. cat. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2002). The ambiguity of Scotland’s composition—a flash of paint here and an impastoed brushstroke there—invites us to delve into our own experiences and memories. As Richard Calvocoressi has written of Hodgkin’s small paintings, the artist ultimately strives ‘to make a window … into which the viewer can look’ (R. Calvocoressi, ibid.).
Scotland played a recurring role across Hodgkin’s career: the artist spent time travelling in the country, and in 1990 the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art had hosted the major touring exhibition Howard Hodgkin: Small Paintings. Moreover, whilst Hodgkin looked at the works of great modern masters such as Matisse, Vuillard, Rothko and Pollock, the intensity of feeling and the beauty of colour in his paintings seem to conjure the Scottish colourists, particularly the vibrant landscapes of Peploe and the saturated tones of Cadell. In spite of this, Hodgkin took a strongly independent path, developing a unique and distinct style in his paintings.
The title of the present work also aligns itself with Hodgkin’s preoccupation with places. In 1940, an eight-year-old Hodgkin fled from London to Long Island, New York, with his family in the midst of the Second World War. This experience of migration bled into Hodgkin’s oeuvre. His work is grounded in a fascination with location—most notably expressed in his enduring love of India and Venice. In Scotland, Hodgkin captures the essence of a place without utilising figuration. The artist aptly described himself as a ‘representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in A. Graham Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, London 1994, p. 7).
Robert Rosenblum remarked that Hodgkin’s art ‘offers an unfamiliar, but unforgettable marriage of the abstract and the earthbound, of rhapsodic visual pleasures and quiet memories of a life outside the studio walls’ (R. Rosenblum, Howard Hodgkin, Large Paintings, 1984-2002, exh. cat. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2002). The ambiguity of Scotland’s composition—a flash of paint here and an impastoed brushstroke there—invites us to delve into our own experiences and memories. As Richard Calvocoressi has written of Hodgkin’s small paintings, the artist ultimately strives ‘to make a window … into which the viewer can look’ (R. Calvocoressi, ibid.).