I first saw paintings by Howard Hodgkin at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1976, when I was a graduate student. They were vivid, complex and highly individual, shimmering seductively between public and private – you glimpsed intimacies veiled in the very moment of being declared. Howard himself I first saw five or six years later, going just ahead of me into a London cinema for a screening of Frank Ripploh’s unprecedentedly candid gay movie Taxi zum Klo; I have an impression, like the vivid blur of one of his own paintings, of a small figure with greying hair settling in the reddish gloom of the auditorium, and when the lights came up at the end a glance of his grey eyes, which were uncanny in their effect of simultaneous absorption and penetration.
We got to know each other 10 years later, when he amazed me by asking if he could do the jacket for my second novel, The Folding Star. After a week’s silence he rang and invited me to his studio, to see if I thought what he’d done was suitable. I remember blinking, not only at the peculiar pure light of the studio, but at the fact it was there at all, a former dairy concealed in the heart of a block between the British Museum and New Oxford Street. In the square white room, under a pyramidal glass roof, tall canvas screens propped against the walls concealed every painting but one – in this case a small intense horizontal displayed on the far wall and magnetising the eye, the only bit of colour to be seen. He hadn’t read the book (it wasn’t yet finished), and it seemed to me sheer intuition that had led him to create this intensely apt image, a gorgeous sunset above hilltops, the crossing red clouds themselves forming a vast ragged star.
I knew Howard in two roles – as the living painter I felt the most inward connection to, and as a friend who was interesting in everything he did and said. It was certainly part of the interest that I was stepping, quite ignorantly, into a richly populated world – the titles of his paintings, with their allusions to friendships, affairs, dinner parties, travels, were further evidence of that. He had been married, had two children, separated; now he was living, as he would for the rest of his life, with the writer Antony Peattie, charming, funny, practical, and much younger than him. Their house, with rooms painted in intense, unEnglish colours, testified to Howard’s obsessions as a collector – he’d begun his major collection of Indian paintings at the age of 15. Now we sat among tapestries and baroque busts – his own pictures weren’t hung in the house.
Howard was a marvellous conversationalist – he listened as acutely as he spoke, with small pauses before each exact formulation. Everything he said was personal, and original. He had a witty, musical voice, which age and illness later narrowed to a wheezy bass, with gravelly chuckles of sometimes guarded assent. He cried frequently. Recalled generosity could make him well up – it would be wrong to say it reduced him to tears, since crying was just one of a range of expressions that he moved in and out of quite naturally, and after a while I was less alarmed by the sudden crumpling of the face. He had resolved to be an artist at the age of five, and a stubborn individuality characterised his talk, which turned easily to his own upbringing, his first electrifying exposure to Picasso and Matisse as an evacuee in New York in the war, the three schools he had run away from on his return to England, and his tearful gratitude to certain teachers who had understood him and encouraged him. He was sociable, and a friend of other painters, but he wasn’t, as an artist, a part of a group. His feeling of apartness, and his belief that he was unappreciated by a philistine society – despite numerous prizes, a knighthood and being made a Companion of Honour – clearly sustained him too.
I never saw Howard at work (I think very few people did) but it wasn’t hard to imagine him painting, since his marks, the great arcs of the right arm, the broad sumptuous horizontals that trundled the whole width of a picture and often out on to the frame, the soft storms of blobs and dashes, like multicoloured snow, which half-screened and half-revealed his subjects, all bore such clear evidence of their making. What was harder to imagine was the process of gestation, the sometimes hugely slow and halting advance towards the moment when he knew that a painting, begun perhaps years before, was done. There was a ravishing small picture called Leaf, 2007-2009 which was just one brushstroke – we’ll probably never know why it took so long. He claimed repeatedly that he hated the act of painting – it was never pleasurable, it was agony. But he was thrillingly productive up to the last weeks of his life, when he was planning the exhibition Absent Friends at the National Portrait Gallery – a great gathering of his portraits and evocations of friends over nearly 70 years. It was a glorious show, exploring those themes of memory and intimacy that were central to his art – and it became, a few days before it opened, his own, magnificently apt, memorial.
