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Chronology
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1950-4
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Studies at the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, under principal Clifford Ellis and staff members William Scott, Kenneth Armitage, Peter Lanyon, William Brooker and Jack Smith.
As an art student Hodgkin also studies the Old Masters.
While at Corsham, Hodgkin and Colin Thompson (later Director of the National Galleries of Scotland) arrange the first show of Andre Derain in England.
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1954
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Becomes assistant art master at the Charterhouse School near Godalming in Surrey.
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1955-66
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Teaches at the Bath Academy. Lives in a flat in Shepherd’s Bush and commutes to Corsham.
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1957-60
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Studio at 114 Sinclair Road, London, W14.
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1958
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Hodgkin’s first son, Louis, is born.
Completes 114 Sinclair Road, 1957-58, and continues Interior of a Museum, 1956-9, the first pictures Hodgkin worked on over an extended period of time.
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1959
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Visits the exhibition The New American Painting at the Tate Gallery, London. The show is designed to introduce European audiences to Abstract- Expressionism.
Completes Dancing, a work in which Richard Morphet later claimed Hodgkin “established the type of painting which he has developed, with enrichments, ever since.” Howard Hodgkin: Forty-five paintings: 1949-1975, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976
114 Sinclair Road displayed in the 1959 London Group show at the Royal Society of British Artists Galleries, London—the first exhibition of a work by the artist. Also exhibits work with the London Group in 1960 and 1961.
Meets Cary Welch, an American connoisseur of Indian and Persian miniatures who encourages Hodgkin’s collecting of Indian art.
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1962
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Joint exhibition, Two Young Figurative Painters, with Allen Jones at the ICA in London.
First solo exhibition, Howard Hodgkin: an exhibition of recent paintings at Arthur Tooth & Sons, London.
The Tooth Gallery offers Hodgkin a contract that would double every year. "But I insisted it stayed the same," says Hodgkin. "I always worried where the next picture was coming from and it would have been too much pressure." quoted in Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian, 24 March 2001
Moves his studio to 12 Addison Gardens, London, W14, where he remains until around 1975.
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1963
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Edward Lucie-Smith chooses Hodgkin as one of four upcoming artists to watch in his article ‘The Impact-Makers’. (Vogue (UK), August 1963)
Completes Small Japanese Screen, 1962-63.
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1964
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First visits India on a trip financed by London dealer John Kasmin—the first of many journeys to the country. Hodgkin’s memories of his visits to India become the subject of numerous paintings.
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“I think there is something…about those empty interiors on extremely hot afternoons and people lounging about on the vestigial furniture which probably has influenced me, but in a very tangential sort of way. It’s more the moods, the way people live in India,that has probably influenced my painting very much."
David Sylvester, Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings: 1973-1984, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1984)
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Exhibition of ten recent paintings at Arthur Tooth & Sons, London.
Included in London: the New Scene, an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Herbert Read lists Hodgkin, along with Hockney, Blake, Jones and others as a member of the ‘pop-art’ school in his book Contemporary British Art. Hodgkin himself recalled, “I have always been an outsider. I appeared once in a book on Pop Art. In the index it just said, ‘He was not one.’” Interview with John Tusa on BBC radio 3, 2000.
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1965
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Buys a mill house in a green Wiltshire valley. For several years, Hodgkin keeps a studio on the Wiltshire property in addition to London.
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1965
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Begins teaching at the Chelsea School of Art, London, where he remains on the staff until 1972. He is also an occasional visiting instructor at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, from 1964 to 1972.
Asked to contribute an artist’s statement to Studio International, Hodgkin writes:
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“Figurative painting is about a specific experience involving the figure. The most complete expression of such a subject would not necessarily involve description. Nor would it require the use of one kind of language rather than another….”
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Mr. and Mrs. Roger Coleman, 1962, and Girl on a Sofa, 1965, included in the group exhibition London Under Forty , Galleria Milano, Milan, with Peter Blake, Bernard Cohen, Allen Jones, Bridget Riley and others.
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1967
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Exhibition at Tooth & Sons, London.
Hodgkin speaks to Alan Bowness about the relationship between subject matter and painted image in his work and likens his paintings to “memorials”—a comparison he will continue to evoke throughout his career:
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“for me the paramount difficulty is to make the picture into as finite and solid an object as possible in physical terms and to include nothing irrelevant or confusing. Ideally they should be like memorials.” Recent Paintings: Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Collection, Tate Gallery, London, 1967
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1968
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Participates in a discussion entitled “The relevance of Matisse” with Andrew Forge and Phillip King, published in Studio International.
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1969
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Completes Mrs Nicholas Munro. According to Hodgkin, the painting “commemorates a moment in March, 1966, when Cherry [Nicholas’s wife] stripped after lunch in the living room of their cottage in order to put on a 1938 crêpe de chine dress.” quoted in Tate Gallery Report—Acquisitions, 1968-70, London
Indian Subject (Blue), 1965-9, is the first work Hodgkin completes on a wood surface. His definitive shift to wood supports occurs a few years later.
In contrast to canvas, according to the artist, wood retains its stability and “doesn’t fight back.” “…I want to be able to attack again and again and again, and the trouble with canvas is that if you attack it more than once or twice, there’s nothing left.” Art Monthly, July-August 1984
The panels he chooses range from table-tops and breadboards to antique frame backs.
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