Chronology

To celebrate a friend’s 60th birthday Hodgkin flies to Cairo in order to travel down the Nile. He agrees to see in dawn at the pyramids but refuses to climb one. See Mud on the Nile, 1993.

First show at the Anthony D’Offay galleries, London, also seen at Knoedler’s, New York. 24 paintings include After Degas, Keith and Kathy Sachs, Lovers, Venice Sunset, Snapshot and Fisherman’s Cove. Catalogue includes a conversation with the artist: “I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.”

The catalogue also includes his choice of extracts from Julian Barnes, Susan Sontag, Stendhal, Anita Brookner, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, G.K.Chesterton, Bruce Chatwin, Evelyn Waugh and Horace Walpole: “’tis pity we ever imported from the continent ideas of summer: nature gave us coal mines in lieu of it, and beautiful verdure, which is inconsistent with it, so that an observation I made 40 years ago, is most true, that this country exhibits the most beautiful landscapes in the world when they are framed and glazed, that is, when you look at them through the window.”

The first monograph on Hodgkin’s work appears, written by Andrew Graham-Dixon. It includes 13 ‘Artist’s Statements’ and texts.

Anthony D’Offay hangs a new painting, After Morandi, for one evening in his house at 242 East 52nd Street, New York, designed by Philip Johnson.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.

38 works are featured in ‘Paintings 1975 – 1995’ at the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; the Kunstverein fur die Rheinlände und Westfalen, Düsseldorf and the Hayward Gallery, London. The catalogue features essays by Michael Auping and Susan Sontag, an exchange of letters with John Elderfield and a catalogue raisonnée by Marla Price.

At the Hayward Gallery Hodgkin has all the later, internal walls removed (for the first time since the building was opened) and the walls painted mailbag grey. David Sylvester installs the show and a credit appears on a wall panel, perhaps for the first time. The hand-list includes an essay by Bruce Bernard.

‘Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield and Howard Hodgkin: Paintings from the 60s and 70s’ opens at Waddington Galleries, London. Alison Jacques writes in the catalogue. Hodgkin’s Venice prints are hung in the Kunsthalle, Winterthur in a space shared with Anya Gallaccio, who garlands it with scarlet gerbera (365 Gerbera (chateau)). The curator Roman Kurzmeyer writes in the catalogue for ‘Where You Were Even Now’, “For me, the veiled or hidden depths in Hodgkin’s work present a promise, and their painted frames offer an embrace.”

Pictured: HH and Bhupen Khakar. Hodgkin and his friend, the Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003), in Bhupens house in Baroda, India, 1995.

Illustrates Julian Barnes’s short story ‘Evermore’, first printed in Cross Channel, with a series of hand coloured etchings, published by Palavan Press and in paperback by Penguin.

A.M.Homes interviews Hodgkin for Artforum.

Second South Bank Show directed by Melissa Raimes.

Awarded Shakespeare Prize by Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg. Predecessors include Graham Greene, Julian Barnes, Dame Janet Baker, David Hockney and Philip Larkin. Dr Raimund Stecker gives the Laudatio.

Shows 12 paintings at Galerie Lawrence Rubin, Zurich, Switzerland, including Haven’t We Met? Of Course We Have, In Coconut Grove, Stormy Weather and Alpine Snow. Catalogue includes an essay by Georg Imdahl.

Interviewed by William Feaver for ‘Mind’s Eye’, Hodgkin talks about Mondrian, Sickert, Liotard, Matisse and Degas.

Designs backcloths for Mark Morris Dance Group’s ‘Rhymes with Silver’.

First exhibition with Gagosian Gallery: shows 13 works at Madison Avenue gallery including Old Sky, Chez Max and Rain. Catalogue includes James Fenton’s poem ‘In Paris with You’, an extract from Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Alien Corn’ and Doris Lockhart Saatchi’s essay on Max Gordon.

New paintings at Haas & Fuchs Gallery, Berlin. Alan Woods writes in the catalogue.

Shows 22 paintings at Anthony D’Offay Gallery, London, including Night and Day and After Matisse. James Fenton writes in the catalogue.

Paints an image of an eye, which is enlarged photographically to cover the entire outside wall of the new circular Imax Cinema on Waterloo Roundabout, London. “There used to be a very large Howard Hodgkin mural wrapped around the Imax cinema in Waterloo, which gave a certain lift to the landscape.” (Thomas Sutcliffe, Independent, 30 March 2007). It was in place 1999-2006.

Paints an image for the Royal Mail, used on the 64p millennium stamp.

Awarded Honorary Doctorate by the University of Oxford.

Designs backcloth for Holst’s opera ‘Savitri’, staged in the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.

For the National Gallery’s ‘Encounters’ show, exhibits Seurat’s Bathers, his version of Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, next to the original.

“Although their general disposition has been retained, the figures seem emotional recollections of Seurat’s men and boys beside the Seine but without Wordsworthian ‘tranquillity.’ Instead, a swoosh of erotic energy runs through Hodgkin’s version, epitomized by the splashes of blue between the boys in the river. There is no doubt about the source in Seurat, but the result is unmistakably Hodgkin, fusing memory and sensuousness, abandon and control, all bathed in the anxieties of influence.” (Richard Shone, ArtForum International, 1 May 2000).

10 paintings are hung among the works in the Dulwich Picture Gallery Collection. The catalogue includes an essay by Judy Collins. “There are only 10 pictures in this show, but each one carries its own weight, and each is saying and doing something different. It’s an amazing achievement”, wrote Richard Dorment (The Daily Telegraph, 11 July 2001).

11 new small prints go on display at the Alan Cristea Gallery, Cork Street, London, among them, Eye; You Again; Rain; Dawn; Tears, Idle Tears; Away and Cigarette.

‘Philadelphia Collects Howard Hodgkin’ opens at Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In celebration of H’s 70th birthday the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art shows 20 Large Paintings 1984—2002. They include Lovers, Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, Sad Flowers, Rain and Snapshot. To unify the spaces in the Dean Gallery, two rectangular rooms linked by a bridge, Hodgkin has the walls painted ultramarine. Catalogue includes essays by Robert Rosenblum and Richard Kendall.

For the ‘Galleries Show’ at the Royal Academy, London Gagosian takes the large rotunda, where Hodgkin shows eight small paintings, among them, Mud, Dirty Weather and Low Tide against walls of ultramarine.

Designs backcloth for Mark Morris Dance Group’s ‘Kolam’.

The Aldeburgh Festival stages a new production of Savitri, reuses Hodgkin’s backcloth and exhibits his stage designs at the Peter Pears Gallery in a setting devised by Patrick Kinmonth. The catalogue includes an essay by John-Paul Stonard.