The Expressive Brushstrokes of Memory: Howard Hodgkin’s Paintings... A Well Rounded Critique of His Oeuvre
- Ahmed Kheder
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017) remains one of the most original voices in postwar British painting. While often loosely associated with abstraction, Hodgkin’s work defies neat categorization. His paintings—simultaneously personal and enigmatic—are emotional landscapes marked by bold color, gestural brushwork, and a deep engagement with memory. To view a Hodgkin painting is to witness the elusive act of remembering turned into color and form.
An Exploration of Howard Hodgkin’s Paintings
From Representation to Evocation
Though his early work was more representational, Hodgkin quickly moved toward a unique form of abstraction in the 1960s and 70s. This shift was not a departure from subject matter but a redefinition of how it was expressed. Hodgkin famously described himself as a "representational painter, but not a painter of appearances." Rather than depict scenes directly, he sought to capture the emotional reality of an experience, often a memory or a fleeting moment with a person or place.
In paintings like Dinner at Smith Square (1975–79) or Memories of Max (1984), the titles hint at specific narratives. But the paintings themselves offer little in terms of literal depiction. Instead, they pulse with gestures—arcs of red, patches of green, and layered brushstrokes—each a mark of emotion rather than form. Hodgkin aimed not to show what happened, but how it felt.
The Frame as Canvas
One of the most striking formal qualities of Hodgkin’s paintings is his use of the frame as part of the composition. Rather than treating the frame as a boundary, he often painted over it, integrating it into the visual field. This practice blurred the line between artwork and object, painting and sculpture. It also emphasized the painting as an artifact—not just a window into another world, but a presence in the viewer's space.
The thick, sometimes sculptural frames Hodgkin used became surfaces for paint, as in works like In the Bay of Naples (1980–82), where the frame carries as much color and energy as the interior panel. These integrations challenge our expectations of where a painting begins and ends, deepening its physicality.
Color as Language
Perhaps Hodgkin’s most defining element is his use of color. His palette is at once intuitive and sophisticated, often applied in broad, gestural sweeps or dense, layered strokes. Reds, oranges, deep blues, and vibrant greens collide and harmonize in compositions that feel simultaneously wild and controlled.
Color in Hodgkin’s work is never merely decorative—it is emotional, atmospheric, and symbolic. It often conveys the emotional temperature of a memory: the heat of a summer, the bitterness of an argument, the warmth of affection. His brushstrokes are deliberate yet free, shaped by rhythm and instinct. This gives his paintings a lyrical quality, as though they are improvisations composed in the language of feeling.
Painting Time and Memory
At the heart of Hodgkin’s practice lies the act of remembering. His paintings often take years to complete, and during that time, the memory or experience that inspired the piece continues to evolve. He embraced the fluid nature of recollection, letting his paintings reflect not a fixed moment but the shifting resonance of that moment over time.
This temporal complexity is echoed in his technique. He would frequently revisit and rework canvases, layering paint to both obscure and reveal. Each layer becomes a palimpsest of emotion and thought. The viewer is invited not to decipher a narrative but to sense it—to feel the tension between visibility and concealment, spontaneity and restraint.
A Well Rounded Critique of Hodgkin’s Paintings
Lack of Theoretical Depth
Hodgkin’s work leans heavily on bold, sweeping strokes of paint intended to evoke emotion, memory, or fleeting psychological impressions. However, much of his brushwork feels theatrically empty rather than genuinely metaphysical. While abstraction originally emerged as a symbolic and metaphysical representation of theosophical doctrine, pioneered by Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky in the early 20th century, Hodgkin's abstraction lacks the originality and shock value that accompanied these forerunners.
There is a fine line between abstraction and aimlessness, and Hodgkin’s work repeatedly crosses into the latter. His paintings often seem arbitrary, operating under the assumption that bold color and loose application are enough to carry emotional depth. They are not.
Weakness of Emotional Impact
Hodgkin's abstraction is a painting experimenting “emotions, not scenes. But the paintings rarely deliver on a real emotional impact or retinal pleasure. Instead, they present viewers with a chaotic brushstrokes, color, and compositions that might hint at something expressive and spontaneous, but ultimately leave one with neutral feelings without no emotional impact, clear artistic intention, or a ideological challenge.
Framing as A Clutch
Another persistent issue in Hodgkin’s oeuvre is his use of the painted frame—the integration of the physical frame into the painting composition. While initially this might appear as an innovative expansion of painterly space or a push towards some kind of a shock value, it soon feels like a repetitive persistent clutch to support the limited technical approaches he use.
Incorporating the frames into the canvas painting feels like a convenient way to mask compositional deficiencies or to artificially deepen otherwise flat, unresolved works.
Weak Compositions
Hodgkin’s abandonment of any anchoring form often results in paintings that are neither liberated nor theosophical, but shapeless. Actually, abstraction as a style during the late decades of the 20's century often feels like an excuse for artistic laziness.
Without form, structure, or meaningful composition, these paintings too often resemble nihilistic experimentation but empty of originality and depth.
A Hollow Abstraction
Howard Hodgkin’s paintings often feel hollow at their core and rarely deliver actual thoughtful insight, philosophical message, or technical innovation. His redundant abstraction suggest more than it shows, and his theoretical justification hides more than it say and ultimately rely too much on the viewer’s willingness to fill in the abstract blanks.
Limited Technical approaches
Technical approaches are essential for an artist to evoke emotions and convey conceptual or philosophical messages to the viewer. Mastery of color, along with the full utilization of light and shadow, forms the foundation for creating visually compelling and emotionally engaging artwork.
In the case of Hodgkin’s paintings, however, the technical pathways he employs often appear clogged with chaotic stagnation and nihilistic undertones. A viewer standing in front of a Hodgkin painting may find it difficult to connect with the work on an emotional level.
Influence and Legacy
While Hodgkin resisted being grouped with movements or trends, his influence is palpable among contemporary painters interested in the boundaries between abstraction and representation. Artists like Peter Doig and Cecily Brown, for example, share Hodgkin’s interest in memory, sensation, and the act of painting as a deeply subjective process.
Hodgkin was also a collector, curator, and writer, with deep knowledge of Indian miniature painting, which subtly informed his sensibilities—especially in his attention to the intensity and psychology of color. In 1985, he was awarded the Turner Prize, affirming his central role in British contemporary art. Yet he remained idiosyncratic, a painter's painter whose work defied fashion.
His final paintings, completed shortly before his death in 2017, retained all the vibrancy of his earlier work. Pieces like Last Paintings (2016–17) are poignant, luminous, and resolutely alive—proof that for Hodgkin, painting was a lifelong conversation with feeling, one that never settled into stillness.
Conclusion
Howard Hodgkin’s paintings are not easily explained—they must be experienced. They ask the viewer to let go of expectation and instead dwell in sensation. To enter a Hodgkin painting is to be enveloped in an atmosphere, a trace of something once felt and still somehow alive. His legacy is one of emotional authenticity, visual daring, and a radical reimagining of what it means to remember with paint.
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