Internal affairs | 23 March 2017

Over 20 years ago I wrote about Giambattista Tiepolo in The Spectator. Shortly afterwards I went to visit Howard Hodgkin in his spacious, white, light-filled studio close to the British Museum. It turned out that he had read my column and was pleased that someone had been discussing this 18th-century Venetian, who was just his idea of what a painter should be: a subtle master of colour, poetic, sensual, a bit neglected — in other words, much as he saw himself.

The real subject matter of an artist such as Tiepolo, I suggested that day, is not really the Madonna or the apotheosis of some minor aristocrat. It is something more elusive and personal — such as the painter’s feelings about the charm of dogs, naked bodies or dreams of flying. ‘Yes,’ answered Hodgkin. ‘But who knows? You see, what one is left with is the thing.’ And that, roughly speaking, is how Hodgkin claimed his own pictures functioned.

When he died a couple of weeks ago, Hodgkin was widely described as an abstract artist, which would certainly have nettled him. He was emphatic on this point: ‘I couldn’t make a picture that was not “about” anything. I wouldn’t even know how to begin a picture without a subject.’ For the complete avoidance of doubt, Hodgkin flatly stated in a television interview from 2006, ‘I am not an abstract painter.’

What, then, was he — since it is often, at first glance, hard to make out anything in his works beyond brushstrokes, coloured patches and geometric forms? The exhibition Absent Friends at the National Portrait Gallery is helpful in that regard. It was not intended as a retrospective, still less as a posthumous one; but Hodgkin’s sudden death was announced on the day the installation was due to begin. In these sad circumstances this brilliantly conceived show offers insight into the evolution and essence of Hodgkin’s art.