Small Japanese Screen or The Japanese Screen

Notes: A portrait of Bruce Chatwin and Mr and Mrs Cary Welch; there is a larger version in the collection of the British Council (Japanese Screen or Large Japanese Screen, (PA63). In ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ in 1982 (opt. cit.), Bruce Chatwin described the origins of the painting: ‘I had recently come back from a desert journey in the Sudan and the sitting room had a monochromatic desert-like atmosphere and contained only two works of art – the arse of an archaic Greek marble kouros, and an early 17th-century Japanese screen. One evening, the Hodgkins and the Welches came to dinner, and I remember Howard shambling round the room, fixing it in his memory with the stare I came to know so well. The result of that dinner was a painting called The Japanese Screen in which the screen itself appears as a rectangle of pointillist dots; the Welches as a pair of gun-turrets, while I am the acid green smear on the left, turning away in disgust, away from my guests, away from my possessions… and possibly back to the Sahara.’ In a 1 February 1981 BBC radio interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, Hodgkin recalled a conversation with Chatwin about the painting: ‘I was talking to Bruce about it very recently and he was complaining that the portrait of himself was too literal, and he was quite right.’