“That’s not art!  He’s only painting like that because he can’t draw!”  Howard Hodgkin’s paintings have long been a part of the age-old debate around the worth of modern art.  Having long eschewed drawing, his pieces are a full-blooded harmony/cacophony of colour, shape and unabashed abstraction.  Between now and September 10th, the Tate Britain is host to a retrospective of the Turner prize winning artist’s work.  The exhibition has galvanised a wave of interest in Hodgkin so I went along to see what the fuss is all about.

Things weren’t too busy at the Tate during my mid-week visit.  The exhibition rooms were filled with a handful of the usual arty types, which made my experience all the more pleasant.  There was none of the hustle and bustle of large groups of tourists and the only negative aspect I had to endure was the occassional gentleman in thick-rimmed glasses musing for all to hear, "maybe I know the artist". 

Improving with Time

My first impression of the exhibition was that Hodgkin’s work has improved vastly over time, and the early efforts that fill the first room at the Tate are not the work for which he is famous.  A few paces onwards and twenty years down the line however, and the striking colours and mesmeric contrasts are starting to get into their stride.  While his name has never been as widely recognised as some of his British contemporaries – artists such as Lucian Freud and David Hockney – Howard Hodgkin’s influence on the current generation of artists is undeniable.

Tate Britain's exhibition consists of 64 of Hodgkin's pieces all subject to the familiar measured and spacious arrangement in a way that seems to isolate each piece from the others, thereby subduing the temptation to greedily take in an entire room-full simultaneously like a fistful of Smarties.  There is a feeling that these paintings belong together, as a collective; that they work better amongst each other than alone. 

A Hodgkin exhibition requires a certain amount of work from the onlooker.  Surrounded by paintings so devoid of recognisable forms, titles take on a completely new dimension.  As I took each painting in I found myself referring back to the title continually as the only element of objectivity in a subjective artwork.  The paintings’ names consistently link them to a single experience.  Titles like Talking About Art, Ellen Smart’s Indian Slide Show and Come into the Garden Maud label the paintings as sort-of visual anecdotes, who’s lashings of paint express the way the artist felt about, for example, a certain slide show.  In fact, the artist rejects the label 'abstract' for his work, claiming that his paintings are simply representations of real life. 

The way that Howard Hodgkin paints has been an issue of some intrigue for the art world for a number of decades, encouraged perhaps by the media-unfriendly artist’s disinclination to discuss the matter and his absolute refusal to allow the process to be witnessed by anyone.  The BBC2 documentary broadcast recently managed, for the first time ever, to capture Howard Hodgkin painting on film in his studio: “... And then”, whispers Alan Yentob to a captive television audience, “He did something he’d said he would never do…”  Hodgkin ambles over to a canvass (or more likely wood board) not much larger than his palm, picks the thing up, gives it a cursory wipe of blue paint with a brush twice its size and hides it back behind a screen.  Not too many secrets given away there then. 

Undertones of War

While the cynics may suggest that some of Hodgkin’s work could have been created with about this much graft, the artist himself claims to spend years on many pieces, reworking a work-in-progress continually until it pleases him.  There are more clues to Hodgkin’s approach and philosophy of art in his choice of board over canvas, as well as the way his paint refuses to be hemmed in, invading the frame as it does to claim the painting as an object rather than an image.  Many will find that Hodgkin’s more recent work is the most satisfying.  As the artist himself has attested, he has only recently come to terms with the challenge of painting on a large scale.  Paintings such as Night and Day, Undertones of War and Wallpaper demonstrate that, now into his seventies, Howard Hodgkin is still developing new ideas.

The Tate Britain gallery is located close to Pimlico underground station on the Victoria Line and Westminster on the Jubilee, district and circle lines.  A riverboat service will also carry you west along the Thames from the Tate Modern.  Admission to the Howard Hodgkin exhibition costs £7.50 and doors close at 5 pm.