Evans is a place on Earth: Reflecting on Hodgkin:Howard Hodgkin @ the Cristea Roberts Gallery.

"I think words come between the spectator and the picture" - Howard Hodgkin.

That comment can certainly be true - but truer still is that reflective perspex screens come between the spectator and the picture. I understand the need to protect these works (you can buy them and the prices go up to £30,000 - £34,700 if you want a frame. That's not a cheap frame) but when the screens are as reflective as they were when I visited Howard Hodgkin:Strictly Personal (Part I) at the Cristea Roberts Gallery in Mayfair last week it's difficult to make a fair assessment as to whether or not the art would be worth half, or even a tenth, of that, as a lot of the time my own reflection made up half of the image.

I could, of course, have found (most of) these paintings with a quick Google search and included them on the blog but I thought I'd let you see them how I saw them. You can play a little game of spot the blogger if you like. You'll probably find that more fun than reading my thoughts if past experience is anything to by!

Venice, Evening (1995)

Hodgkin died in 2017 (so, we can presume, has had no say in how his work has been displayed) and this free show, held in collaboration with the artist's estate, covers a vast period of Hodgkin's career. Despite it being pretty small. just two rooms of your average sized commercial gallery, there are works from as far back as 1966 and as recently as 2005. Part II will cover the last twelve years of Hodgkin's life.

Even though the show has been split into seven, vague, sections and eras (Early Prints, Palms, Venetian Views, Into the Woods, Acquainted with the Night, Green Thoughts, and After All:The final prints) it hangs together as a whole pretty well. Hodgkin's style didn't change particularly dramatically throughout his career. He always worked at the exact point just before figurative art moved over to outright abstraction.

His images of Venice may not look very much like Venice but, believe it or not, they are. They're inspired by an abandoned project to illustrate Thomas Mann's novel Death in Venice and Hodgkin spent so much time on them, trying to capture the essence of Venice in the morning, that he swore at the time they'd be his last collection of prints.

Venice, Afternoon (1995)

For Jack (2005)

Which perhaps explains their inflated price. It doesn't, however, explain why, as an artist, Howard Hodgkin came to be so venerated. I've seen works of his before that have worked better but this show left me feeling more than a little nonplussed.

We can read about how his art, in the sixties and seventies, "conjured up the atmosphere and the emotions of social engagement within an intimate context", his links with Braque, Picasso, and Matisse, and how his introduction to carborundum printing allowed Hodgkin to "increase the emotional intensity" of his work but in this poorly laid out experience we can't see, or feel, that.

Into the Woods, Winter (2001)

Cigarette (2001)

Sure, the colours are bold and the brushstrokes are bolder still. But the price list you can pick up on the way in, those damned Perspex screens (look at Tears, Idle Tears below, ffs, if I'd wanted to visit a hall of mirrors I'd have visited a hall of mirrors), and the idle notes that explained what Hodgkin did but never really why he did it and why people liked it. All of that combined to provide me with something of an underwhelming art experience and, thus, this lukewarm assessment.

I read that some of these works were inspired by trips to India, others by Paris metro stations, and others from poetry (Robert Frost and Andrew Marvell are both mentioned, the latter a name I'm unfamiliar with) and even discovered that one work was made at the request of Queen Sonja of Norway but none of this told me anything that really helped with decoding, or deciphering, the paintings.

Tears, Idle Tears (200-02)

Indian Tree (1990-91)

Perhaps words, as Hodgkin said, really do come between spectator and picture but it was words I was crying out for. Without them these not unpleasant images were meaningless daubs rendered in a language I am not fluent, or even conversational, in and that would surely be self-indulgence of the highest order.

Works like Indian Tree, Flowering Palm, and Night Palm, to be fair, made a great save. There was something rather obviously tropical and other worldly about them. They had a beauty where elsewhere there was tumult. Clarity in place of bewilderment. I enjoyed these works more than the rest of the show in its entirety but, for the most part, I think Howard Hodgkin's memory would be served better by a full retrospective in one of London's more august galleries.

Despite my reservations about this show I'd more than likely attend and I'm willing to bet that a slightly less muddled curation, a few explanatory notes, and less fucking Perspex would have me coming away from said, and imagined, exhibition with a far brighter view of Hodgkin than that which I took away from Strictly Personal I. Howard Hodgkin once said "I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am nothing because I fit in no category". Many more shows like this and he'll be proven correct.