Exhibition: Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox – 14 March – 10 April 1990 – Eliot Hodgkin: Painter and Collector
Article: A rare talent for common subjects by Geraldine Norman
Publication: The Independant, 17 March 1990

Geraldine Norman welcomes the late-flowering reputation of Eliot Hodgkin, whose paintings of turnips, fruit and wild flowers on bomb sites are masterpieces of the ordinary

To find the directors of both the London and Edinburgh National Galleries at the opening of an exhibition in a commercial gallery is a rarity. When you throw in the director of the National Art Collections Fund, the former keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum and the heads of Sotheby’s Victorian and Old Master picture departments, it begins to look a very “in” crowd.
All of them own paintings by Eliot Hodgkin whose memorial exhibition opened in London at Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox at 39 Bury Street, St James’s, on Wednesday. And the crush of people at the opening party were all friends or admirers of the artist, who died in 1987.
Hodgkin’s work is still virtually unknown to the general public. It was only the cognoscenti who found it and bought it in his life- time. The exhibition will surely set in motion a reassessment of his importance. He may even come to be seen as one of the more distinguished figures of twentieth-century British art .
The timing is right. Last week saw the emergence of Stanley Spencer as the most highly rated British painter of his generation when his Resurrection: Waking Up fetched a record £770,000 at Christie’s. He was of roughly the same generation. Both Spencer and Hodgkin were figurative painters at a time when abstract art was the focus of all influential critics’ attention. The buying public appears at last to be sloughing off its fixation with the abstract.
At first glance you might think Hodgkin a minor master, since the vast majority of his works are small, still-life paintings. It is, however, a genre in which many great artists have distinguished
themselves. The highest price (more than £30m) reached by a painting at auction remains Van Gogh’s close-up study of a bed of irises. Hodgkin is also a master at rendering growing flowers and foliage most memorably in his war paintings of bomb sites rampant with wild flowers.
It is hard to pinpoint what makes a painting of common objects great but art history, in a line from the Brueghels through Chardin and Fantin Latour to Morandi and Matisse, demonstrates that it is possible. The greatness stems from the arrangement of the objects depicted (or composition), the use of colour execution. It is recognisable but not describable. The fact that Hodgkin’s patrons were virtually all connoisseurs of Old Master paintings suggests that his greatness lies in the technical tradition that was elbowed out of the lime light by modernism.
His subjects are very ordinary a single peach or an apple half wrapped in paper. He paints each object with meticulous care in sparkling egg tempera. The exhibition catalogue quotes a hilarious exchange of letters between Hodgkin and the Tate in 1982 after it had acquired one of his paintings of turnips and was trying to catalogue it. Hodgkin patiently ex plains:
“Turnips are merely an example of the small natural objects that attract me . . . There are just as many paintings of garlic or flints or dead leaves . . . I can only paint what I have in front of me, if it doesn’t move or fade. I rarely paint flowers because they do both. I very rarely alter any object or ‘improve it’ for the sake of composition.”
He was sent the resultant catalogue entry for approval and exploded: “I am even sorrier to say that, though I supplied you with facts, I find the proposed catalogue entry very embarrassing. I would be grateful if you could eliminate it altogether. I think you have transcribed very faithfully what I wrote. I think Turnips is a very ordinary little picture and does not call for such solemn treatment. It sounds so self-important and I do not want to taken so seriously. In any case, of the three pictures of mine you have it is the least good.”
He had earlier told the Tate cataloguer: “I find it rather boring to talk about this painting. You have two others: one called Undergrowth I think more original and I wish I could buy it back.” Undergrowth is perhaps the star of the show. It dates from his bomb-site years and is a painstakingly rendered close-up of a tangle of wild flowers stems and foliage with the sun filtering into its depths. It belongs to the same aesthetic as Richard Dadd’s Fairy Master Stroke in the Tate and the overgrown London back gardens in Lucien Freud’s recent paintings.
Hodgkin came of a well-to-do Quaker family – the painter Howard Hodgkin is a cousin. He was at Harrow with Cecil Beaton and Victor Pasmore. He studied at the Byam Shaw School and briefly at the Royal Academy Schools. In his early years he painted a range of figure and landscape subjects and also had a special line in murals. He spent the war in the Ministry of Information, as a withered left arm precluded him from the services. After that he went back to painting. He was happily shielded, by a private income, from the struggle to paint fashionably.
He exhibited faithfully in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition but rarely with dealers, once at Wildenstein’s in 1951, once at Agnew’s in 1966 and once in New York at Durlacher’s in 1958. The New York Times commented in amazement: “The wonder is not that they are so well done but that they can have been done at all in this decade, can have so serenely escaped the whole glorious rough and tumble of art since 1800.”
The highest auction price on record for one of his paintings is £4,180 at Phillips two years ago for a wartime masterpiece, St Paul’s and St Mary Aldermary from St Swithin’s Churchyard. It was bought by Michael Simpson, a leading Old Master dealer, for his wife. In 1983 the contents of Hodgkin’s studio was dispersed by Christie’s South Kensington, 40 lots which included about 300 items and five sketchbooks. They realised £3,705.50.
Most of his paintings were bought by his friends for £40 or £60 a time. The paintings shown at the Royal Academy were priced a little higher. Sir Brinsley Ford, who owns one of the finest private collections in Britain, records a meeting with Hodgkin on 13 May 1975 in his introduction to the catalogue: “I told Eliot how much I had admired his little painting Skulls and Bones and that I had noticed when I was last at the Academy that it was unsold . . . He suggested I should make an offer (it was priced at £300).
“This I declined to do, observing that skulls were unsaleable. He offered it to me for £200 and, after two minutes’ reflection, I bought it. He told me one of the skulls was that of a hare and belonged to Wynne Jeudwine, the other, on the right, he suspected might be that of his mother’s Maltese terrier.”
Prices are already beginning to rise. Christie’s sold a minor painting, Roses, last December for £750. But there is a long way to go before Eliot Hodgkin’s work becomes overpriced. The only problem is finding his paintings. Most of those who own his works hang on to them. The paintings at Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox are lent for the exhibition by private collectors and institutions but the gallery does have paintings for sale from time to time.

By Geraldine Norman. Reprinted with permission from the March 17, 1990 issue of The Independant.