Howard Hodgkin

Audio Arts at the Venice Biennale 1984

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 7 Number 1, 1984

Transcript

Audio Arts has attended the Venice Biennale since 1984 and made ‘on the spot’ recordings with artists, curators, critics and visiting commentators. The aim being to ‘catch the mood’ of this unique international event and participate in the dialogues and discourses that characterize and define the views, ideas and critical responses to this major bi-annual are world event. Over time the magnetism of the Venice Biennale has increased and the event itself has expanded beyond the main exhibition site of the Giardini, to buildings and spaces all over Venice. The concentration of artists and others central to contemporary art during the opening days of the Biennale made the occasion particularly productive for audio arts, in that many people could be stopped and interviewed. As well as verbal accounts, the Audio arts recordings, always made close to the exhibitions and installations contained the atmosphere and ambience of Venice. In 1984 Audio arts interviewed Howard Hodgkin in his exhibition at the British Pavilion as well as others who were present that year.

William Furlong: Howard, if we could start by talking about the exhibition in the Pavilion I wondered, why you decided to put the paintings on green walls rather than white?

Howard Hodgkin: Well, for various reasons. The most important one is that I think white for the colour of my pictures is entirely wrong. It reflects far too much light and in the distant past people always used to hang picture on colours like dark red or brown which doesn’t reflect much light. Therefore, the light is entirely reflected by the pictures and so you can see them much better. But also, it’s the form of the actual Pavilion itself which has a very sympathetic series of differently proportioned rooms which when they were painted all one colour lost a great deal of their shape and form. And it was very nice to bring that back by painting the walls a different colour from the ceiling, particularly the room we are standing in which, with its enormous vaulted ceiling and sky-light, reflects the light beautifully and the walls have an identity of their own.

WF: Although the walls are still luminous they seem to establish the plane of the wall as well.

HH: Absolutely right. And in this Venetian light, if they were white one would also be entirely dazzled. What surprised me was the great difficulty I had with the British Council about the colour of the walls. They thought, that if they were not white people would remember the colour of the walls rather than my pictures.

WF: They’re not hung in any particular chronological order because you’ve decided to only show paintings produced over a ten-year period. Is that right?

HH: Yes, and they’ve been hung where I felt they look best. One finds that some things hang themselves; there is the only place for this or that picture. The real trouble comes when you have to fit in the others. But the biggest picture here which is the biggest picture I’ve ever painted needed as much space proportionately as a very small picture and I had to use up nearly half a room for one painting.

WF: Your paintings are normally quite small aren’t they?

HH: And this is quite small compared to international sizes or proportions.

WF: Can you talk a little but about the history this painting, Souvenirs, and how you arrived at it?

HH: Yes indeed. The title is quite precise. It is memories of one single apartment in New York, which belongs to a great friend of mine. It started, as it were as a spread-out view of the apartment, it’s as if one can see into four rooms at once and see simultaneous things going on within them.

WF: How did you actually begin the painting?

HH: It was painted from memory like all my pictures are. I never paint from the motif. And, of course, in this case it would have been impossible because it contains sort of multiple views. I found it very difficult to paint for various reasons, not least because it’s scale was so new to me that I was constantly frightened that I would make an enlargement of a small picture. I’ve only just finished it with great difficulty and anxiety and I don’t really know what I feel about it. But, the one thing I am sure about is that it is not a small picture made large. I think the scale of it is completely convincing. And when I saw photographs of it one couldn’t tell what sized picture it was, which I think is the acid test.

WF: Some of them you work on for some time, don’t you?

HH: For many years, and I began this one at least three years ago and finishing it was a very anxious business. Not least because I wanted to keep the paint surface as open and informal as possible. I wanted the picture from the very beginning to look as if it had been painted in a few minutes.

WF: Is what we’re seeing now the sort of final revision that might have only taken one day?

HH: Yes, what you see now is indeed the final revision. But it didn’t take only one day; It’s very hard work. Spontaneity is a result of very hard moral work. It’s not allowing oneself to get bogged down. And I’ve tried increasingly with my most recent pictures to sit for hours in front of the picture and make the mistakes in my head rather than on the picture surface.

WF: Are you continually altering the formal terms of the painting in an exploratory sense?

HH: Yes, always. And I think that’s one of the reasons why they’re all completely different from each other.

WF: In this next room Howard is a painting called ‘In a French Restaurant’ which is a very different piece of work. HH: I think the reason partly is because it had to contain the French flag, which is a very powerful image. It was painted as a reply to a painting of David Hockney’s called A Painting in the French Style, which is very symmetrical. He painted with very dry paint and I wanted to paint something more full-blooded. I felt that his picture was remarkably English for a painting in the French style.

WF: So was it a response to that painting?

HH: It was but it eventually acquired an identity of its own. But it is in fact a view from a real French restaurant in the Invalides and in the centre is a fragment of the Eiffel Tower.

WF: So in fact, it’s a combination of two ideas.

HH: Yes

WF: I mean, another thing that strikes me looking at the paintings is the concern with surface and picture plane, and although there is illusion going on within the painting, you know, one is always constantly reminded of this sort of frontal way.

HH: Yes, and it is in fact a painting because this sort of illusionism which I use, and I’m very interested in illusionism and the history of art generally, it never works paradoxically unless you make it quite plain to the spectator that it is a lie. Then they believe you. Perhaps rather like in real life, the only lies that really succeed are the ones that people know they are. And old fashioned trompe-l’oeil painting, the most obvious example is paintings of dead game on a background of grained wood, an example I’m always using, that most people are familiar with. The grained wood makes a picture surface and shows that it is a lie, that the modelling on the pile of dead birds is fake. And then you can believe it.

WF: Is the point at which a painting is complete, always clear to you?

HH: Absolutely and the pictures ultimately finish themselves. I once said in answer to that question finishing a painting is bowing to the inevitable: with Souvenirs which I agonized over for so long, the day I put the last mark on it I knew there was nothing else I could do to it, even though I didn’t know what I thought of it.

WF: Once again the scale is reduced, It may be appropriate to mention your particular interest in Indian painting at this point and the scale of Indian painting is always small.

HH: Quite small, yes it is. But I’m very interested in scale anyway, I think in proportion, as many people like to think of it. I think that for some subjects like this one and this picture ‘Passion’ it would have been very difficult to paint a large picture of it, because it is fairly generalized.

WF: The paintings always seem to have a very personal starting point and presumably you wouldn’t make a painting about an inanimate situation?

HH: No, I couldn’t. I can’t paint a picture of something I’ve just seen. It has to have some kind of emotional connotation as well.

WF: So the painting then becomes a sort of equivalent, in your terms, to that experience; it certainly isn’t an illustration of it.

HH: No, absolutely, it’s not an illustration. It is an equivalent it’s in a way a transference, the subject matter or the feeling becomes the painting and it goes out of me into the picture.

WF: Can you retain what that original emotion was over the extended period of the work?

HH: Oh yes, I think, in fact I think the effort to turn it into a painting helps preserve it.

WF: Well shall we move now to the next room, where the intensity of the light has dropped?

HH: This room is never very light and that to some extent has dictated what is hung in here.

WF: In this painting over here, Dinner at Smith Square, there seems to be an interest in the use of pattern.

HH: I think that the pattern in that painting is simply a way of keeping the surface going in different planes.

WF: Right. This one over here is I must say a magnificent painting. It’s a very small one, After Corot.

HH: Well, it was painted originally as a present for a friend, which unfortunately I never delivered. He was very keen on the work of Corot of his Italian period, which is very different to the later sort of smudgy pictures of trees. I wanted to paint a picture which evoked his Italian period, and it’s a view of the Bay of Naples in the style of Corot of about 1830. It was very difficult to do because the way I paint and the way Corot painted are not similar or related to each other.

WF: The colour in it seems quite subdued and if anything untypical in relation the rest.

HH: Well it may be untypical of me to paint Corot’s Italian period believe me. I think it was probably very good for me artistically to have to make this really Herculean effort. And the picture looked much more like one of my other paintings before it acquired these delicate greys and pinks.

WF: I imagine that colour is something that you feel very strongly about.

HH: I do feel very strongly about it but I don’t ever use it for it’s own sake. It has a very severe function, it’s a language. I don’t find it beautiful on its own as it were. My use of colour is not in that sense anything to do with Colour Field painting, for example, though I probably shouldn’t say that because I don’t know very much about it, as it’s such a totally different attitude to colour.

WF: But the colour obviously is one element that you’re actually coping with when you make the painting.

HH: Yes, it is indeed but I can’t use colour like Rothko obviously. I don’t know how true it is that it is the relationship between my paintings and Indian painting is often talked about, but I would suspect if there is a relationship it would be in the way colour is used: not the sort of colour I use but the way it’s used, and the reason for using it would be related.

WF: So now we’ll anyway move to a narrow longish room at the back of the pavilion, which has windows overlooking the Grand Canal. Now these are two paintings, portraits of Terrence McKinnerney. Are they portraits in the normal sense?

HH: They really are portraits in the normal sense. They also include the artist. I am the rather amorphous shape in the left-hand corner of each is me; views of back of my head, something I’ve never seen. And it’s a picture of me looking at this friend Terry McKinnerney and talking to him.

WF: So, why did you make two portraits?

HH: I made two because I thought I’d give him one and keep one that was probably the initial reason, but when I started they gradually acquired a life of their own. I realized the more similar in pose and setting they were, the more they showed different aspects of him and they acquired an emotional and a pictorial life which is independent. And so I decided they should be kept together. I regret now that they’ve been sold to people who live in different parts of America because they should in fact have been kept together because they are complementary and though they have an independent identity they really work best together.

WF: Your paintings don’t appear to be thematic. Each one seems to be a separate entity.

HH: Oh yes it is. I have never painted a series of pictures. I have occasionally painted pairs of pictures, sometimes trying to paint identical pictures which I have done more than once. But, no, there’s nothing thematic.

WF: I say that because this is the only pair or only two that are clearly connected and were you working on them at the same time?

HH: When I made a mark on one I made a mark on the other. I worked on them as consistently together as that. And I finished them at the same moment, within twenty minutes of each other.

WF: Before we move to the last room, just talk a little about Venice itself.

HH: Wonderful, absolutely wonderful and it was always a dream. And I thought long ago that of all the things that happen to one in one’s professional career as an artist, to be shown in the Biennale would be a thing that would make me happiest. I’d long thought I was too old and so forth so I was wild with excitement at the thought.

WF: Had you seen this pavilion prior to your exhibition here?

HH: Oh yes, I have attended several Biennales and I know the pavilion well so I had quite a good idea of what I wanted to do.

WF: So, the decision then to paint the pavilion green actually was made prior to the paintings being here?

HH: Oh yes, it was.

WF: The paintings look particularly good here given that the light in Venice is such a beautiful element.

HH: It’s a wonderful light. Everybody knows it’s different from anywhere else, but nobody knows quite how or why.

WF: That’s right. Were all the paintings here painted in England?

HH: Yes, every one. I have never painted anywhere except in England.

WF: Howard, earlier you mentioned Julian Schnabel to do with scale and no doubt you’ve been aware of recent developments within painting and the so-called New Spirit, but do you feel that you’ve been part of something that’s come into focus or do you feel that you are outside of any particular movement?

HH: I’ve always been a complete outsider as a painter but I’m very interested in the works of other painters. I’m an admirer of Julian’s and I know him, but I don’t feel any common cause with him as I do with Patrick Caulfield, whose my greatest painter friend and who’s work I deeply admire. All painters are interested in the same things; I think they must be.

WF: Well, shall we just go to the last two galleries now? There are two paintings here in front of us called Counting the Days, and Waking up in Naples where you’ve actually incorporated the frames themselves and painted over them.

HH: Yes, I do that increasingly and the pictures I’m working on at the moment often have quite elaborate frames which are curved and, even gilded in one case. And they’re a challenge and a help, both at once, because a frame with a very strong identity already distances itself from the painting inside it more than when I seem to paint a frame in the trompe-l’oeil fashion. But of course, it competes as well with what I do to it.

WF: Yes, is that to do with this interest between illusion and the surface of the painting?

HH: Oh, very much so and the stronger the identity of the frame the greater the illusion of depth one gets.

WF: This one called Valentine, again it’s painted in a circular format on a panel of wood.

HH: This is a tabletop that had been around for a very long time.

WF: Is it always wood and never canvas for the support?

HH: Yes, it’s always wood because wood has a very strong character of it’s own and you can do what you like to it and it doesn’t get tired or take it’s revenge on you by turning into linoleum or sagging or various things that canvas will do.

WF: Let’s move into the last room. This is Mr and Mrs James Kirkman.

HH: James Kirkman is a well-known London art dealer of very eclectic taste. He tends to pick up on everybody else’s. I wanted originally to make a picture of him and his wife, which would reflect this, but I failed to do that. It turned into a portrait of them without having this stylistic eclecticism, which I’d been hoping for.

WF: So once again it was the elements of an idea about a subject that really motivated the painting.

HH: Oh, absolutely and also my feelings about Mr and Mrs Kirkman themselves, which is a mixture of affection and a certain amount of disapproval.

WF: Finally, since, you know we are in the Biennale, have you actually had an opportunity to look at any other work?

HH: Well I have looked round a bit, and in the German pavilion I think the Baumgarten floor is absolutely magnificent. To me it looks, I don’t know what a great work of art is, but it looks to me very much like one.

WF: I suppose it could almost be counterproductive as there’s so much work to see one looses a focus after a while.

HH: Absolutely, and I think in that sense it’s a tremendous challenge to any artist who has a one-man show in it. I have no idea personally as to how this exhibition of mine stands up to that challenge. I hope, before I leave Venice, that I will be able to get that sort of perspective on it and look at it as if it was just anybody’s exhibition.

WF: Well I shall certainly be asking other people that question!

HH: Thanks very much.