Howard Hodgkin - Absent Friends, exhibition review: Picturing reality as he felt it

Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends was planned for many years but it happens to be opening less than two weeks after his death at the age of 84. It is a show of full-on paintings that explore a great range of textures and moods, from works he created when he was only 16 in the late 1940s to a big picture he completed last year.

More than 50 paintings make up the show, each considered by Hodgkin to be a portrait of some kind. It makes sense for the venue but it also emphasises that he would cling to subject matter as a taking-off point even though he always departed into abstract realms — but always returned as well, making it clear somehow that he was picturing reality as he felt it.

After a certain point he painted only on wood, and the structures he worked on often included hefty frames, which he incorporated into the picture. His style — dotted marks, simple shapes, bright colours and doubling up picture frames so that they are both frame and painted surface — makes an ambivalent statement about the status of painting. He explored the limits of the tradition when preoccupied with frames and edges, as if he was deconstructing it. But he was also a Romantic struggling to preserve the tradition of self-expression.

The portraits gathered here are of friends, including other artists, gallery folk, collectors and lovers. He was in his fifties when he separated from his wife, Julia. A painting called In Bed in Venice celebrates his long-term relationship with Antony Peattie, whom he met in 1984, the year he began the work.

It’s a schematic representation of a naked figure on white sheets in Venice’s famous Hotel Danieli. Like all his pictures there’s a simple composition — in this case made up of stripes and bands of orange and green — which he arrived at through spontaneous improvisation from memory. How an artist invents becomes a preoccupation in many paintings from roughly this period onwards, which he regarded as self-portraits.

One done for a Save the Children benefit auction in 1983, executed in Charles of the Ritz make-up products on paper, looks a lot like Hodgkin as he appears in photos in the catalogue. His plain face with its eyes like dark dots, eyebrows and mouth a set of three thick lines — mouth level and eyebrows angled — peers blankly through an all-over field of flesh-tint thumbprints.

Others are purely symbolic. But they are full of sensations of real things, so you can believe that his stated intention regarding a particular picture, Souvenirs, 1984, to summon up “memories, all specific, of various kinds”, is also a manifesto for everything he did.

The Spectator, 1984-7, was initially titled Portrait of the Artist. It has a shape in the centre suggestive of a sculpture of a simplified head. Blotchy transparent patches of dark blue, and the same blue densely pooled, make up a kind of space around it. Then there’s a whole vibrating environment of dappled surfaces.

The head can’t be said to be recognisably him. Instead, the painting is full of hints of metaphysical or poetic self-portraiture. Thick bending lines of red in a greasy consistency, running alongside each other, one line saturated, the other muted to a reddish-brown, make up the head’s shadowed side. This might be flesh or the body. Transparent pinkish-white, making up the light side, might be spirit or mind.

In the catalogue the curator of the show, Paul Moorhouse, thoughtfully points out the significance of Hodgkin’s title. While working and deliberating, progressively applying paint, Moorhouse says Hodgkin must also have been “a spectator to his creative decisions”.

Throughout his career Hodgkin was always explaining to critics that his paintings were representations, not abstractions. But his sense of the difference was slippery. He said some of the paintings are “quite representational in a limited visual sense; others hardly at all, or not at all”. It’s as if his thought started out as one thing and slipped into its opposite. He had a great eye for a strong graphic organisation and the magnetic appeal of a line. And he wanted to break everything up and make it misty and subtle.

A work from 1959 shows people looking at objects in a museum. Blips of activity in a milky nothingness gradually reveal themselves to be something like pots or sculptures, shadows, someone’s legs and a stripey pink architectural feature. A man contemplates what might be a Greek vase, clasping his chin in his hand. There’s so much picturing it’s almost a shock when it all flickers back into a milky abstract.

Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music, a painting more than eight-feet wide, was completed last year. For the five years he worked on it he knew this show was coming up. The title encourages an interpretation in which abstract patches of colour stand for swirling sound. But these atmospheric broad transparencies — gestural swooping marks done with a big brush and exuberant pouring of very diluted paint so that it spatters and drips — also suggest a simple, almost cartoonish scene. A rotund figure looks over at light coming through a window. On the other hand, the light might be shadows, as the paint mixture it’s made from — enormous swipes and dots of diluted black with a little touch of white — is so changeable in its tonality.

Hodgkin always developed but his strongest period was the Eighties. A self-portrait with a title that some might reject as irritatingly winsome, A Small Thing but My Own, 1983-85, is one of the most powerful and effective in the show. It is a model of what makes Hodgkin good, a quality of glowing radiance that is quite different to just bright colours laid next to each other. The picture tells you about a painter painting.

What did he look like at the time, what room was it, what objects were in it? These are questions he doesn’t answer. A bright centre might say something about artistic perception. It counters a wide surrounding area of blue-blackness. This shadow, which is physically emphatic but also surprisingly transparent as if light is coming through it, eats into the central brightness, giving it raggedy edges. The painting is only about two-feet wide. Traces of a former stage can be seen at its very outer edges as if the closed-toned light blues and reds that make up the centre used to be everywhere.

We’re seeing a history of making. A leaning shape made from a very thin transparent glaze of dark blue creates an accent in the central brightness, complicating the relationship between inner light and outer shadow. Is he saying his body is nothing: he’s all eye? What an interesting self-portrait it turns out to be, a curious sort of “self”, as if oscillating between seeing and being.

Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends is at the National Portrait Gallery, WC2 from tomorrow until June 18; npg.org.uk