Daily Art Appreciation
Brimming with an explosive palette of luscious red punctuated by fiery orange and contrasted with succulent patches of cool green and blue paint, Portrait of the Artist is a rare self-portrait within Howard Hodgkin’s oeuvre and a unique exposition of his personal brand of painterly force. Across the entirety of this work we understand Hodgkin as a contemporary artist of immense expressivity, who takes influence not only from the masters of French post-Impressionism, but also from the Indian art which has captivated him since childhood.
Portrait of the Artist is a typically suggestive title from Hodgkin. His best works are always created with people or places in mind. However, they are never illusory. These works, which are designed to be objects in their own right, allude to specific subject matter — in this case the creator himself — without ever trying to recreate it. His paintings demand consideration at surface level on the merits of their appearance. Hodgkin himself commented on this expressive juxtaposition: “I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations” (Howard Hodgkin cited in: Marla Price, Howard Hodgkin: The Complete Paintings Catalogue Raisonné, London 2006, p. 14).
Bold in his use of colour, Hodgkin’s lavish application of paint in this work evokes the Fauves’ wild and expressionistic colour palette. Similar to Matisse and Derain, who prioritised the painterly qualities of their work through the use of strong colours, Hodgkin employs a variety of different hues to invoke a sense of abstraction that focuses the eye solely on the perceptive power of colour. In the present work, the colour and surface are particularly redolent of the painters of Nabis school, in particular Édouard Vuillard of whom Hodgkin has long been “a fanatical admirer” (Howard Hodgkin in conversation with David Sylvester, in: Exh. Cat., Venice, British Pavilion, XLI Venice Biennale (and travelling), Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings 1973–84, 1984, p. 100). Artists of the Nabis school sought to blend their emotional intention with their aesthetic form, so that a painter’s feelings were manifest in each aesthetic decision. Portrait of the Artist forms a worthy comparison not only in this emotional sense, but also in its palette, where the conflation of red, orange, pink and green, seems directly redolent of Vuillard.
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