Chronology

With Terence McInerney selects 16th to 19th century Indian Drawings for an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London and writes notes in the catalogue. Travels to Egypt with McInerney and attends a son et lumiere performance at the pyramids.

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.

Awarded the second Turner Prize. Exhibits A Small Thing But My Own, 1983-85, in the Tate show.

The Tate Gallery shows 25 of his Prints 1977-1983. Richard Morphet writes in the catalogue.

Cinda Sparling in New York hand colours a pair of prints, David’s Pool and David’s Pool at Night (both printed by Aldo Crommelynck in Paris), which begins a fruitful collaboration: she goes on to hand colour DH in Hollywood, Moonlight and Black Moonlight, Red Eye, One Down, Two to Go, Bleeding, Mourning, Blood and Sand, among other prints.

Becomes a Trustee of the National Gallery, London. He strongly supports the acquisition of Degas’ Helene Rouart in her Father’s Study.

Exhibits 17 new paintings at Knoedler Gallery, New York, including Blue Palm, Venice Evening, View from Venice, In a Crowded Room and Sad Flowers.

Works for the first time with Jack Shirreff at 107 Workshop, Wiltshire on a print, Green Room. The partnership continues for the next 24 years.

Commissioned by Tricia Guild of Designers Guild to design textiles: Leaf and Large Flower are printed on glazed chintz; Moss and Earth on cotton satin.

Designs sets and costumes for ‘Pulcinella’, choreographed by Richard Alston for Ballet Rambert. Filmed by Bob Lockyer for the BBC it is now on DVD.

Makes Moon, a print in colour and in black and white for the Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Appointed Honorary Fellow, Brasenose College, Oxford.

Designs a mural for the swimming pool in the Broadgate Centre (architect Peter Foggo; commissioned by Rosehaugh Stanhope), executed in Venetian glass mosaic.

Shows 13 New Paintings at Waddington Galleries in his first show in a London commercial gallery since 1971, including Dinner at Palazzo Albrizzi, In Bed in Venice, Venetian Glass and Love Letter. It was also seen at Knoedler’s, New York.

Designs set and costumes for ‘Piano’, choreographed by Ashley Page for the Royal Ballet.

British Council tours 27 ‘Small Paintings’ to the Musée des Beaux Arts, Nantes; Caixa de Pensions, Barcelona; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin. Henry-Claude Cousseau writes in the catalogue.

Shows 14 new paintings at Michael Werner’s gallery, Cologne, Germany and at Knoedler’s, New York, including Rain and Venice in the Autumn. Wilfried Dickhoff and Timothy Hyman write in the catalogues.

Makes a poster for the London Underground of Highgate Ponds.

Makes Ivy, a large, oval intaglio print at 107 Workshop, Wiltshire. It was commissioned by Chris Corbyn and Jeremy King for their new restaurant, The Ivy, where it hangs.

Creates hand-coloured engravings for Susan Sontag’s story ‘The Way We Live Now’ (first printed in the New Yorker, 1986), that are published by Karsten Schubert and in facsimile by Jonathan Cape. Proceeds go to Aids charities in Britain and America.

Designs a silk scarf for Marion Boulton Stroud’s Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, shown there in ‘New Dimensions: Artists Design Scarves’, 26 November 26, 1991 – January 4, 1992, curated by Dilys Blum, Philadelphia Museum of Art Curator of Costume and Textiles.

Indian Paintings and Drawings from Hodgkin’s collection opens at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. and tours to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Rietberg Museum, Zurich; the British Museum, London and the Museo del Castelvecchio, Verona. The catalogue includes essays by Andrew Topsfield and Milo Beach and Hodgkin’s ‘Notes on the collection’.

“For an artist there are certain elements of scale, form, and colour that are beyond verbal description. In Indian painting I have found much that for me could not be found anywhere else, but I cannot tell you what – I can only metaphorically wave my arms at the pictures – and say look!’ (From an article in Asian Art, IV, 4, 1991).

Knighted.

‘Seven Small Pictures’ opens at the British School in Rome.

‘Outing Art: the BBC Billboard Art Project’ (directed by Sheree Folkson, and shown on television during the week of 17 May) invites Hodgkin, along with Richard Hamilton, Damien Hirst, Michael Landy and others, to make billboard-sized art. He paints A Small Thing Enlarged.

Designs a mural for the front of the new British Council headquarters in New Delhi, architect Charles Correa. It evokes the shadows cast by a tree and is executed in black stone and white marble.

Makes Put Out More Flags, a print to benefit the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s Artists’ Fund.