The British Pavilion was devoted to an exhibition of twenty paintings, concentrating on his work of the previous three years, and including a small selection of prints.

Howard Hodgkin was born in 1932 and from an early age decided to make painting his profession. His first mature painting, completed when he was seventeen, already embodies his lifelong concern to distil the experience of a remembered encounter in a specific interior space. At school, his art teachers, Wilfred Blunt and Charles Handley Read, introduced him to Indian painting, initiating an interest which has developed into a expert knowledge of the subject. The influences of Indian art, the colour and forms of the rural and urban landscape, has been strengthened by frequent visits to the sub-continent, and is evident obliquely or directly in many of his paintings and prints.

In 1949 Hodgkin spent a brief period at Camberwell School of Art, followed by four years at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham (1950 - 54). During the late fifties and early sixties he taught at Charterhouse School and at Corsham and he still divides his time between homes in London and Wiltshire. His last teaching post was at Chelsea School of Art until 1970. During 1976-7 he wasArtist in Residence at Brasenose College, Oxford.

Hodgkin’s work was slow to be appreciated, offering no easy attachment to style or movement. The 1950s, the key decade of gestural painting, was for him a period of painful isolation. In the 1980s his paintings first gained notice, by association with the figurative painters of the Pop Art movement to which his work bore superficial resemblance, but it was not until the 1970s that the independent and exceptionally personal qualities of his painting were fully recognised.

Hodgkin’s paintings have may contradictory qualities; their subject matter is traditional and figurative, but the images are masked, disguised, even obliterated, by strokes and dabs of luxuriant paint, which assert the abstract autonomy of the picture surface. Relatively small in scale, Hodgkin’s paintings have qualities of restraint and concentration which distinguish them from works of the European 'new wave', but he shares with this new sensibility an intensely personal vision and passionate involvement with his subject.

Further reading
Britain at the Venice Biennale 1895-1996, edited by Sophie Bowness and Clive Phillpot, The British Council, London 1995. ISBN 0 86355 283 8

www.britishcouncil.org/biennale/pages/venice_biennale.html

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.