Chronology

Made a Companion of Honour.

Publication of ‘Howard Hodgkin Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné’, with an introduction by Nan Rosenthal and a conversation between the editor Liesbeth Heenk and Hodgkin.

Shows 38 new paintings at Gagosian Gallery, Chelsea, New York, including Echo, Spring, The Body in the Library, Undertones of War, Italy, Come into the Garden, Maud and Eclipse. The catalogue includes essays by Julian Barnes and David Anfam. Most works go on to Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles.

Shows new work at the Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin.

Attends the burial of Susan Sontag in Montparnasse cemetery, Paris.

Finishes Flowerpiece, Listening, In the Bedroom, Eclipse, In Venice, Supper, Art, An Italian Landscape, One Damn Thing After Another, First Light, Poison Ivy, Ultramarine, Visitors, After Samuel Palmer and 48 Clarendon Road.

Shows small paintings at the Galerie Lutz & Thalmann, Zurich.

Retrospective exhibition of paintings curated by Enrique Juncosa and Nicholas Serota starts at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, where it is opened by Seamus Heaney. It then tours to Tate Britain, London and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. The catalogue, edited by Nicholas Serota, includes an essay by James Meyer, notes on painting processes and materials, a chronology and bibliography. At Tate Hodgkin has the walls painted with thin layers of blue, yellow and brown and in the final rooms the walls are covered with sheets of gold paper.

‘Writers on Howard Hodgkin’ published by Irish Museum of Modern Art and Tate Publishing features new essays by Colm Tóibín and Enrique Juncosa and reprints essays by Bruce Chatwin, Julian Barnes, Susan Sontag, William Boyd and James Fenton.

Barbican Art Gallery starts a tour of selected prints at Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, which goes to Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; Winchester Discovery Centre; Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, Manchester and PM Gallery, Ealing, London. David Acton, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at Worcester Art Museum, Mass. writes in the catalogue. Barbican International Enterprises plan further tours for the exhibition, which has been seen by over 54,000 people.

Designs backcloths for Mark Morris Dance Group’s ‘Mozart Dances’, which opens at Lincoln Center, New York and then tours to Vienna, London, Chicago, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Toronto, Aukland, Washingon, Seattle, Montpellier, Tel Aviv and Boston.

‘Paintings 1992-2007’, 1 February – 1 April at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (designed by Louis I. Kahn) tavels to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 24 May – 23 September. It includes Afternoon Flowers, Bamboo, Old Sky, After Vuillard, Silence, Moonlight, Autumn, The Body in the Library and Mud. Paintings hang against Kahn’s raw silk in New Haven and partly on gold paper in Cambridge. The catalogue includes an essay by Richard Morphet.

Twenty new paintings shown at Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London WC1, include House and Garden, Blushing and Degas’ Russian Dancers, In Egypt, Artist and Model and four large paintings, Home, Home on the Range; Where the Deer and the Antelope Roam; Where Seldom is Heard a Discouraging Word and And the Skies are Not Cloudy All Day. The catalogue prints Seamus Heaney’s speech opening the Dublin show and a new essay by Alan Hollinghurst.

‘Howard Hodgkin & Edgar Degas’ at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, in which An Early Landscape is paired with La femme de Candaules.

Whitechapel Gallery commissions a new print, Sunset (copperplate sugarlift in 5 colours, handpainted in acrylic in 4 colours) as the Whitechapel Gift: all proceeds go to the gallery’s education programmes.

Makes his largest prints yet, As Time Goes By, referring to the song in Casablanca, 1942 (written by Hermann Hupfeld for a revue in 1931): “You must remember this /A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh. / The fundamental things apply / As time goes by.” They are made of five separate sheets and add up to 20′ in length and are in two colour ways, red and blue. Alan Cristea, who publishes them, shows them along with some of Hodgkin’s previous large prints, the ‘Venice’ series, Into the Woods and Frost.

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford exhibits 20 of Hodgkin’s Indian paintings and drawings of elephants, that are on loan. Meanwhile Modern Art Oxford shows 25 of his paintings 2001-2010 in an exhibition called ‘Time and Place’, curated by the director, Michael Stanley. The last painting, Blood, arrives too late to be included in the catalogue.

The same building, then called Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, housed Hodgkin’s first retrospective of 45 paintings in 1976, curated by Nicholas Serota. The exhibition tours to the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands, which is directed by Hendrik Driessen. He is also responsible for the installation.

Stefan Kuiper writes in Vrij Nederland, 28 August 2010: ‘In the past, until about ten years ago, [Hodgkin] worked on the basis of personal memories, and his paintings bore titles such as In Paris With You (1995-1996) and In Raimund Stecker’s Garden (1998-2001). His art was private, confessional; as though all sorts of intimate acknowledgements could be found among the enigmatic forms. Those paintings were highly personal theaters (the broad, paint-spattered frame resembling the entrance to a stage) in which the painter brought his memories to life. Paint had become Proust’s madeleine. Hodgkin’s new work is different, less private. That can be discerned in the titles—Lawn, Big Lawn, Sky—but also in the form. The small and intimate panel Leaf (2007-2009), for instance, involves no more than a single sharply curled sweep of thinned green against a background of plain wood. And Mud (2002) is a unprepared plank covered with wide strokes of green and grey. Though it consists of practically nothing, somehow this little picture effortlessly gives rise to associations with landscapes and shoals, or an approaching storm. These paintings are more suggestive than Hodgkin’s earlier work, less insistent, and consequently better. The difference resembles that between people who give energy—Hodgkin fondly refers to his paintings as a cast of characters—and those who take it. Between inhaling and exhaling. The question is whether the painter himself sees it that way. Hodgkin nods eagerly when I present him with my interpretation. That new approach to the work, he says, has to do with added confidence (“I used to be afraid of boring the viewer”) but also with a new method. “Painting, to me, meant plodding away endlessly. I spent entire days turning things around and around in a painting. Plenty of pentimenti were carried out before I felt satisfied with the work. At a certain point I had had enough of that. It became too strenuous, especially with my difficult knees. Nowadays I work differently, with circumspection, more like a chess player. I’d say that about ninety percent of the time in my studio is spent on a contemplation and analysis of the work, and only ten percent on actually painting it. So when I sit there staring at the wall, I’m in fact hard at work.” His eyes twinkle mischievously: “Explaining that to my assistants took quite some time.”‘

The exhibitions ‘Seven New Paintings’ goes up at Gagosian Gallery, Davies Street, London. The windows are covered in gauze and on the walls painted in soft grey hang Sky, Leaf, In the Train, Embrace, Rain on the Pane, Folk Art and Green Thoughts. Lawn hangs in the inner room.

Hodgkin’s exhibition ‘Time and Place: Paintings 2001 – 2010’ reaches its final touring destination at the San Diego Museum of Art, California.

Exhibits new paintings with the Gagosian Gallery; ‘Howard Hodgkin: New Paintings 2007-2011’ on Madison Avenue, New York.

The Designers Guild re-release Hodgkin’s textile designs including a brand new design titled Brush.

‘Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin’ is a major exhibition in 2012 at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford of about 115 Indian paintings and drawings – almost the entirety of Hodgkin’s private collection. The collection comprises most of the main types of Indian court painting that flourished during the Mughal period (c.1550–1850), including the refined naturalistic works of the imperial Mughal court, the poetic and subtly coloured paintings of the Deccani Sultanates, the boldly drawn coloured styles of the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan and the Punjab Hills.

Hodgkin turns 80 and his birthday is celebrated by the Alan Cristea Gallery with a retrospective exhibition of prints. The same year he is commissioned to make a poster, Swimming, to promote Britain’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games.

He exhibits new prints with Alan Cristea Gallery, London, in the exhibition ‘Acquainted with the Night’.