1977 · New York
by HODGKIN, Howard (1932-2017)
New York: Petersburg Press, 1977. Lithograph from one aluminium plate printed in black, with hand colouring in gouache (grey wash border and yellow) on Lexington hand-made paper. Signed and dated '77' in pencil, lower right. Numbered in pencil ('8/100') lower left. Proofed by Bruce Porter. Printed and hand coloured by Bruce Porter and Jim Welty at the Petersburg Studios, New York. A superb example of Hodgkin’s painterly printmaking, by a master colourist and one of Britain’s foremost modern artists.
Born in London and educated at Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy, Hodgkin emerged as one of Britain's foremost artists. He represented the United Kingdom at the 1984 Venice Biennale, won the Turner Prize in 1985, and was knighted in 1992. Though often grouped with post-war abstraction, he described his works as representational paintings of emotional situations, compressing memories of people and places into luminous, frame-like fields of colour. In 1977, Hodgkin turned to printmaking with a new urgency that paralleled upheavals in his private life. As Hodgkin later reflected, a life-threatening bout of amoebiasis in 1975, followed by the artist's coming-out and separation from his wife had a liberating effect on his work, not only on content, but also on style. Within a decade the painter had forged an entirely personal print language, one that treated every sheet as a unique, painted object. Hodgkin approached printmaking with the same painterly urgency that drives his oils on wood. Working with master printers, he layered lithography, etching, aquatint and carborundum to build rich textures, then returned to each sheet with brushes of gouache or tempera. Hand-colouring, sometimes executed by trusted assistants under his close direction, turns every impression into a unique object, blurring the boundary between print and painting. Across all media Hodgkin's saturated palettes owe debts to Matisse, Vuillard and the miniature paintings of India, a country he visited almost annually from the 1960s onward. His rhythmic borders and tactile surfaces have influenced generations of contemporary printmakers, offering a model for how reproducible media can still carry the immediacy of a painting. The present image shows a jagged yellow chevron cuts upward through a velvety black surround, like a shard of sunlight breaching shade. Jarid's Porch refers to a porch in Morocco belonging to a mutual friend; Hodgkin compresses the sensation of crossing from shadow to searing daylight into a single colour gesture. Hodgkin layered, hybrid method blurs editioned print and one-off painting: each sheet carries its own weather of crinkles, pools and brush rhythms. The starkly simple, freely washed technique seen here signal the same breakthrough visible in his paintings of 1975-85, but the prints from this period reveal the transition more gradually. By 1986 Hodgkin had demonstrated how reproducible media could convey the spontaneity of a painted mark. His practice (half studio craft, half performance with ink and brush) became a touchstone for contemporary printmakers seeking tactility in an age of photographic precision.
Heenk, Howard Hodgkin Prints: a catalogue raisonné, No. 34. Pat Gilmour, 'Howard Hodgkin,' The Print Collector's Newsletter, vol. 12, no. 1, March-April 1981, p.3. Judith Dunham, 'Howard Hodgkin's Accumulated Memories,' PrintNews, vol. 8, no. 1, winter 1986, p.6. (Inventory #: 42280)
Born in London and educated at Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy, Hodgkin emerged as one of Britain's foremost artists. He represented the United Kingdom at the 1984 Venice Biennale, won the Turner Prize in 1985, and was knighted in 1992. Though often grouped with post-war abstraction, he described his works as representational paintings of emotional situations, compressing memories of people and places into luminous, frame-like fields of colour. In 1977, Hodgkin turned to printmaking with a new urgency that paralleled upheavals in his private life. As Hodgkin later reflected, a life-threatening bout of amoebiasis in 1975, followed by the artist's coming-out and separation from his wife had a liberating effect on his work, not only on content, but also on style. Within a decade the painter had forged an entirely personal print language, one that treated every sheet as a unique, painted object. Hodgkin approached printmaking with the same painterly urgency that drives his oils on wood. Working with master printers, he layered lithography, etching, aquatint and carborundum to build rich textures, then returned to each sheet with brushes of gouache or tempera. Hand-colouring, sometimes executed by trusted assistants under his close direction, turns every impression into a unique object, blurring the boundary between print and painting. Across all media Hodgkin's saturated palettes owe debts to Matisse, Vuillard and the miniature paintings of India, a country he visited almost annually from the 1960s onward. His rhythmic borders and tactile surfaces have influenced generations of contemporary printmakers, offering a model for how reproducible media can still carry the immediacy of a painting. The present image shows a jagged yellow chevron cuts upward through a velvety black surround, like a shard of sunlight breaching shade. Jarid's Porch refers to a porch in Morocco belonging to a mutual friend; Hodgkin compresses the sensation of crossing from shadow to searing daylight into a single colour gesture. Hodgkin layered, hybrid method blurs editioned print and one-off painting: each sheet carries its own weather of crinkles, pools and brush rhythms. The starkly simple, freely washed technique seen here signal the same breakthrough visible in his paintings of 1975-85, but the prints from this period reveal the transition more gradually. By 1986 Hodgkin had demonstrated how reproducible media could convey the spontaneity of a painted mark. His practice (half studio craft, half performance with ink and brush) became a touchstone for contemporary printmakers seeking tactility in an age of photographic precision.
Heenk, Howard Hodgkin Prints: a catalogue raisonné, No. 34. Pat Gilmour, 'Howard Hodgkin,' The Print Collector's Newsletter, vol. 12, no. 1, March-April 1981, p.3. Judith Dunham, 'Howard Hodgkin's Accumulated Memories,' PrintNews, vol. 8, no. 1, winter 1986, p.6. (Inventory #: 42280)
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