1977 · New York
by HODGKIN, Howard (1932-2017)
New York: Petersburg Press, 1977. Lithograph from three aluminium plates (yellow, orange, brown) with hand-colouring in violet gouache on Lexington handmade paper. Signed and dated '77' lower right. Inscribed lower left 'PP,' one of 2 printer's proofs. 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. A visit to Oklahoma in 1977 was followed by a burst in printing activity, which produced seven works including the present. Nick's Room shows a blazing orange border, which encloses a lilac-violet rectangle whose mottled surface evokes the pattern of a quilt or tiled wall. Hodgkin painted the gouache border after printing, so each impression carries subtly different brush rhythms along the serrated outer edge. The title recalls the artist's friend Nick and suggests an intimate interior seen in memory rather than in perspective. The saturated complementary colours, laid down in discrete steps (lithography, then direct hand work), dramatize Hodgkin's abiding theme: the emotional charge of places remembered. Hodgkin's layered, hybrid method blurs editioned print and one-off painting: each sheet carries its own weather of crinkles, pools and brush rhythms. The richer palette and looser handling 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. 35. Pat Gilmour, 'Howard Hodgkin,' The Print Collector's Newsletter, vol. 12, no. 1, March-April 1981, p.3. (Inventory #: 42279)
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. A visit to Oklahoma in 1977 was followed by a burst in printing activity, which produced seven works including the present. Nick's Room shows a blazing orange border, which encloses a lilac-violet rectangle whose mottled surface evokes the pattern of a quilt or tiled wall. Hodgkin painted the gouache border after printing, so each impression carries subtly different brush rhythms along the serrated outer edge. The title recalls the artist's friend Nick and suggests an intimate interior seen in memory rather than in perspective. The saturated complementary colours, laid down in discrete steps (lithography, then direct hand work), dramatize Hodgkin's abiding theme: the emotional charge of places remembered. Hodgkin's layered, hybrid method blurs editioned print and one-off painting: each sheet carries its own weather of crinkles, pools and brush rhythms. The richer palette and looser handling 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. 35. Pat Gilmour, 'Howard Hodgkin,' The Print Collector's Newsletter, vol. 12, no. 1, March-April 1981, p.3. (Inventory #: 42279)
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