1981

First South Bank Show for London Weekend Television, directed by Verity Bargate.

Designs sets and costumes for ‘Night Music’, choreographed by Richard Alston for Ballet Rambert.

First show with Lawrence Rubin at Knoedler’s Gallery, New York. 12 works include The Moon (bought by R.B.Kitaj). Catalogue includes an essay by Lawrence Gowing: “Absorbed in the simultaneous flat-and-deep of Hodgkin’s colour one no longer seeks to decode it. One dwells in it for itself; in its presence, one is in its company.”

“I think there are some artists who certainly should get out of the studio a little bit more often”, Hodgkin tells Edward Lucie-Smith in an interview for BBC Radio 3 (printed in Quarto, 1981). “I mean I know in my case that my work is entirely sustained by experiences of one sort or another. Somebody once said, ‘well, you must have to live like a novelist to paint pictures like this.’ Which is true.”

Hodgkin is included in ‘A New Spirit in Painting’ at the Royal Academy. Talking to Alan Woods in 1998 the artist commented, “Painting still remains alive, as an activity, in a way that, when I was young, would have seemed ridiculous. Pompier painting, as it was called, has come back with a bang – huge subject pictures. Think of Kiefer’s work alone, but anyone who saw the exhibition would have seen how much it was the old spirit of painting – pictures that would have made Cezanne and the Post-Impressionists turn in their graves. Enormous subject pictures which, as physical objects, were often produced in the most perfunctory manner possible, that were big and were in your face, comparable to these huge machines in the Paris Salons which I was brought up, I think quite rightly, to despise.”

Gives the William Townsend Memorial Lecture at the Slade School of Fine Art (reprinted in The Burlington Magazine, 1982). A distinguished sculptor walks out, when Hodgkin talks about money. See ‘How to be an Artist’ in Interviews & Resources.