1984

Represents Britain at the XLI Venice Biennale with 24 paintings. He has the pavilion’s neo-classical interior painted eau de Nil green. Forty Paintings then travels to the Philips Collection, Washington, D.C., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover and reopens the Whitechapel Gallery, London. The catalogue includes an essay by John McEwen and an interview with David Sylvester: “To be an honest artist now, you have to make your own language, and for me that has taken a very long time. Gradually, as you make your own language, the more you learn to do the more you can do, and the more you include….I think for obvious reasons I will never succeed, but I would like to be…a classical artist…where all emotion, all feeling turns into a beautifully articulated anonymous architectural monument at the other end”.

Meets Antony Peattie with whom he still lives. Takes a studio in Cardiff for five years. Paintings from this period include Down in the Valleys. Shows 12 paintings at Knoedler’s, New York, including Clean Sheets, Waking up in Naples, Passion, None But the Brave Deserves the Fair and Egypt.

Nigel Finch directs a film on Hodgkin for BBC TV’s Arena.

The Arts Council organises a touring exhibition, ‘Four Rooms’, in which four artists are commissioned to make a room. Hodgkin designs fabric (printed by Warner’s) for sofas, chairs and walls, as well as stained plywood tables and bronze lamps, manufactured by Ron Aram. He has the lamps programmed to dim and brighten at intervals.

A conversation with Patrick Caulfield is printed in Art Monthly.

Nominated for first Turner Prize, H hangs Son et Lumiere in the Tate display. The prize was awarded to Malcolm Morley.