“It would be wrong to present the later pictures as something entirely new. They are not. The questions that have driven the work all along have never changed. But those questions seem to have come back with renewed force, and greater clarity. What is a self? What am I? What is the nature of human experience? How can I paint it- and how can I make, from a painting of it, a monument in defiance of time?” 1

In his accompanying essay to the exhibition ‘Howard Hodgkin, Paintings 1992- 2007’ 2 Richard Morphet writes,

“Howard Hodgkin’s paintings of the past fifteen years are among the most direct and forthright painted anywhere. In their surprising invention, their sensuous abundance, and their richness of suggestion, the fullness of the experience they offer invite comparison with the work of some of the key painters of the recent and more distant past.” 3

Mirza's Room, 1995- 1996 and it’s ‘sister’ painting, In Mirza’s Room, 1995 – 98, whilst not included in this exhibition, fall neatly into this grouping of Hodgkin’s mature work and encompass many of these qualities. Morphet’s words assert that there is a new freedom of expression and a break from convention in these paintings and that, because of this, they are some of the most authentic and personal expressions of Hodgkin’s artistic career.

Collectively, these paintings remain engaged with the fundamental themes explored by the artist since his painting career began in the late 1940s. The central concern for Hodgkin has been to cultivate a language of ‘anonymous’ marks which are capable of evoking and distilling the memory of past experiences, and of creating in the artist’s own words, “representational pictures of emotional situations”’. 4

Hodgkin’s career spanned eight decades, during which time these themes have undergone a complex evolution. In his early work, Hodgkin was concerned with recalling friends or colleagues in domestic situations, inviting comparison of his pictures with the quiet, French painting of the late 19th and early 20th century termed as Intimism. By the 1980s this had evolved into painting which was capable of articulating the emotions involved in shared experiences and certain exchanges, whether it be anger and pain or sensual pleasure.

From the early 1990s onwards, other currents come to fore. Hodgkin’s observation in 1967 that his paintings are about, “…one moment in time involving particular people in relationship to each other and also to me,” 5 still rings true. However, the artist’s experience of particular landscapes and interior spaces come to the fore as subjects. In doing so, they replace human subjects and relationships as the central signifier or experience or memory and adopt “the character of inward or psychological topographies that are fused with the perennial astonishment at the effects of nature.” 6 Paired with this development is, as Sir Nicholas Serota noted in the introduction to the Tate Gallery’s 2006 retrospective, “…a growing awareness of mood and pre-eminently the changing conditions of light.” 7 Mirza's Room, 1995- 1996 explores these shifts in concern to dazzling effect. The room itself becomes the physical embodiment of its owner and the picture is thus, the painterly and symbolic expression of Hodgkin’s interactions with both the room and the person that inhabits it. During the 1960s Hodgkin developed a new pictorial language of sensuously applied paint, bold colour and autonomous shapes and signs that enable him to articulate the emotional message of his subject matter and assert each work’s tangible, physical presence. Indeed, as Hodgkin remarked, ‘The only way an artist can communicate at large is on the level of feeling. I think the function of an artist is to practice his art such a level that like the soul leaving the body, it comes out into the world and affects other people.’ 8

In Mirza’s Room, these elements have taken on a new scale and energy and the conditions of the mood and light that Serota remarked upon are felt acutely. The painting literally shimmers and appears to vibrate with heat, as splashes of orange dance across the canvas’s surface. In the centre of the painting they appear as short, straight lines against a bright yellow background recalling sparks of fire. Yet, in other areas they appear as uneven, rounder dots, enlarged and more organic versions of Georges Seurat’s pointillist marks.

Colour in Mirza’s Room is incandescent and used to wonderful effect. The bright rectangle of yellow draws our eye towards the center of canvas as if we are looking at a window through another window created by the inner recesses of the painted wooden frame. Red, yellows and oranges describe heat and fire, yet they are tempered by varying shades of green which frame the external and internal picture planes. To the bottom middle of the canvas are marks of deep blue which described the presence of an unknown form, perhaps a body.

Hodgkin’s approach to mark-making owes much to Georges Seurat whose dots he saw as a ‘liberation’ and whom he credited as, “…one of the first people who tried to use anonymous marks in a way that quite a few twentieth- century artists have tried to do since. (He) managed to do this of course despite the fact that his work is instantly recognisable from across the room.’’ 9 Today, much the same could be said of Hodgkin’s mark making, which is at once both universal and deeply personal. He has stated, “My pictures are finished when the subject comes back. I start out with the subject and naturally I have to remember first what it looked like, but it would also perhaps contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All of that has got to be somehow transmuted, transformed or made into a physical object, and when that happens, when that’s finally done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back- which, after all, is usually the moment when the painting is at long last a coherent physical object- well, the paintings finished…my pictures really finish themselves.” 10

Hodgkin’s varied application of paint; sweeping long brushstrokes repeated in layers, intense dots of pigment and short, frenetic marks, all combine to create a unique and intense painterly experience. Paint is used create various planes of depth as is the clever pictorial trick of the painted frame which Hodgkin had introduced into his work in the 1970s. In Mirza’s Room this gains new breadth and paint covers the entirety of the frame to its very outer edge, the painted image transcending to a painted object and fulfilling the notion of Hodgkin’s works as physical ‘memorials’ to the fleeting nature of memory and experience.

1. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Howard Hodgkin, Thames and Hudson, London 1994, p178
2. At the Yale Center for British Art, Yale, 1 February- 1 April 2007 and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 24 May- 23 September 2007
3. Morphet, p19
4. The artist, reproduced in Ibid, p11
5. The artist quoted in Paul Moorhouse, Howard Hodgkin, Absent Friends, National Portrait Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 2017, p14
6. Ibid, p19
7. Sir Nicholas Serota, ‘Introduction,’ Howard Hodgkin, Tate Gallery, London exhibition catalogue, 14 June- 10 September 2006, p16
8. Richard Morphet, ‘Paradox and Plentitude,’ Howard Hodgkin, Paintings 1992- 2007, 2007, Yale Center for British art exhibition catalogue, p33
9. The artist in conversation with John-Paul Stonard, ‘Howard Hodgkin on Seurat,’ 2006, www.artandarchitecture.org.uk
10. Yale, p33