The teachers, particularly Clifford Ellis from the Bath Academy of Art at
Corsham, shone out. Hodgkin himself taught for years – “a great trap for an
artist as it becomes a substitute life”. He told his students “all sorts of
things quite vociferously. I wanted them to take art as seriously as
possible. Amazingly enough, they listened.”
He was in his mid-forties when he had his first major New York show. “I
remember the occasion when I decided to stop teaching. I was standing on the
District Line platform at Paddington, looking down thinking, not that I was
going to fling myself off, but that I was teaching too much. That I had a
wife and two children to support and all the things that could make one
carry on teaching for ever, but no. When I told Clifford I was giving up, he
said, ‘I know what you’re going to say and I’m amazed it’s taken you so
long.’”
In the late Seventies, the writer Bruce Chatwin said a change in Hodgkin’s
painting style was down to a “new-found engagement with the erotic”, an
intimation of the artist’s homosexuality. “That was Bruce up to his old
tricks,” says Hodgkin. “Life isn’t that simple. There isn’t a before or
after.” Did he know, growing up, that he was gay? “Yes I did, but I didn’t
act on it very successfully,” although he did “a bit”. “It can take for ever
for some people, even now, and for me, after being married and having two
children, a different kind of guilt came pouring down afterwards.” Because
he felt he was letting his family down? “Exactly. I only recently realised
how many people had done the same. Fortunately, I don’t think a lot of gay
people get into that situation now.” Did he remain close to his children,
Louis and Sam? “Absolutely.” They were never estranged? “Never.”
I ask if he had fun, or lots of sex, after coming out. “Not as much as I would
have had had I been younger and prettier. I was middle aged by that time and
a respectable, ugly man,” he says. The commercial gay scene was a
no-no. “I was too old and my pre-occupations were different. I didn’t
really experiment.” He met his partner, the music writer Antony Peattie,
more than 20 years ago at a party, “like people always do”. Love at first
sight? “I think it was after...” Four gin and tonics, I joke. “I think it
was whisky and soda,” he says with perfect timing.
Hodgkin looks to Barker after I ask whether he and Peattie are a good match.
“Yes,” says Barker, who is then bidden to get a postcard of a painting David
Hockney did of the couple. They both look similar, I say. “But we aren’t,”
says Hodgkin. His greatest gay achievement, he reveals, was persuading his
friend Carmen Callil to publish Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City in
Britain. For someone who came out so late that’s a pretty heroic act of gay
advocacy.
Hodgkin represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1984, won the Turner
Prize in 1985 and was knighted in 1992. But, he says, “recognition hasn’t
come yet”. Really? What about the Tate retrospective? “Yes, OK, but I’ve
never had the feeling that I’ve arrived. I was always sceptical. I never
believe that it’s actually happened. I remember at my first New York show
thinking, ‘I ought to feel this is it,’ but it never was. There’s always the
next picture to paint. People think I’m ungrateful,” he says, his voice
clotting slightly. “I’m not, but I always feel my best work is to come. When
a great friend of mine had his first retrospective, he went around it,
weeping very discreetly and said, ‘Not enough, not enough.’ I didn’t know
what he was talking about at that moment, but I know now.”
Hodgkin emits a stifled sob and then says that “one day” he is sure a piece of
work will be “good enough”. Does he get depressed or unhappy? “Oh, most of
the time, when it’s another shit review.” Look above the house and you can
see a black cloud, he says. He turns to Barker, who points out that Hodgkin
will say, “I’m not going to paint any more” on a particularly bad day.
Much of his frustration is down to that critical pasting. “He’s just not that
good,” was one response to the retrospective at Tate Britain. “There have
always been too many things getting in the way: embarrassing, self-regarding
and frequently silly titles, the obviousness of many of the paintings, their
repetitiveness, the painful colour, the shipwrecked compositions... Quick,
fetch a mop.”
“I thought they were rather malevolent,” says Hodgkin. “I was hurt. One never
gets inured to it.” He has never considered changing anything in light of
the criticism he gets, though. “They’ll just kick me in the teeth all over
again. I’ll keep on trucking. Perhaps they feel I have been overdecorated. I
don’t. Artists are traditionally so kicked around.” Sir Nicholas Serota
says: “He’s regarded as part of the establishment now, but for
20 years Howard ploughed a lonely course. He had to watch his close friends
get all the acclaim, but he kept working and his work accumulated strength.
He’s resilient when it comes to critics… The press like to cut down their
tall poppies, but the new paintings are daring. He’s a great British
artist.”
Would Hodgkin ever retire? “Oh, that would be wonderful. I would have
beautiful staff looking after me... No, I can’t. Someone I know said
that ‘YBA’ stood for ‘Why be an artist?’ I don’t know, but passion comes
closest.” His remaining aim, besides renovating his house, is to be “taken
seriously as a painter. People are too lazy to bother to look at what I do.”
What should his detractors look for? “They should discard their
preconceptions. I’ve done my best. I want them to do their best back.”
He apologises for “talking a lot of rubbish”. I ask about the hobbling again
and he lifts up a trouser leg to reveal a purple mass of discoloration on
one knee, the result of a recent fall. “I had a blood clot in my leg, too.
They’ve sorted it out.” A friend said he should have a stick: “They’re
considered quite sexy in New York, but I’m not having one.” You must have to
paint quite carefully I say, observing the canvases with their huge
swooshes. Hodgkin offers a deadpan smile. “Well, you can see how carefully I
paint.”
Howard Hodgkin Paintings runs from April 3 to May 17 at Gagosian Gallery,
6-24 Britannia Street, London WC1 (020-7841 9960; www.gagosian.com)
