1979

Selects work from the National Gallery’s collection for an exhibition in their series ‘The Artist’s Eye’. Renoir’s Dancing Girl with Castanets and Dancing Girl with Tambourine flank the entrance against yellow backgrounds. “English people don’t seem to like these paintings much”, he comments in the catalogue so he installs banks of red geraniums underneath them to help people see them better. He brings up the fragments of Manet’s Execution of Maximilian I from the reserve collection in order to assemble them on one canvas (as a previous owner, Degas, had done) and installs Tiepolo’s ceiling panel as a ceiling panel. Both innovations persist. His plan to cover the room’s walls with bright, floral patterned, Indian cotton is not realized for ‘technical reasons’. Instead works by Velazquez (without its “hideous frame”), Mantegna, Fabritius and others hang on walls covered in navy blue bunting. The series always includes works by the artist; Hodgkin hangs Dinner at Smith Square and Mr and Mrs E.J.P as well as a Moghul miniature, a page from the Hamzanama, Mihrdukt shoots at the ring. The catalogue includes Hodgkin’s introduction and comments and an appreciation by Alistair Smith. 165,000 people came to the show, an attendance figure “equalled only by Titian’s Portraits”, the director Michael Levey tells Hodgkin in a letter of 28 August 1979.

Visits David Hockney in Los Angeles with Peter Blake and keeps a Journal. After omelettes at the Sidewalk, (“P.B’s a Jack Kerouac, mine…a Gertrude Stein. Both revolting”), they visited Disneyland: “DH admired Pirates of the Caribbean. A plunge by boat into a dark river with treasure and cities being pillaged, a skeleton sitting in bed reading a map through a magnifying glass, a harbour full of slaves and whores all life-size, life-like and in motion…The Life of Snow White which was poor, described by PB as an early work.” Extracts were printed in Ambit 83, 1980. Hodgkin’s paintings of DH in Hollywood and prints of David’s Pool and David’s Pool at Night refer to this visit. Peter Blake evokes the trip in A Remembered Moment in Venice, California 1981–91 and the encounter with David Hockney in The Meeting or Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney 1981-3. That also refers ironically to La rencontre, ou Bonjour M. Courbet of 1854, in which Courbet’s wealthy art patron and servant behind him salute the Assyrian-bearded artist.