Night and day

Since the earliest phase of his career Hodgkin has sought to paint the material equivalent of emotional intensity and intimate personal experience. Hodgkin’s works embody recollection, sensation and sentiment, and are triggered by social activity, the sensuality and eroticism of private relationships, landscapes and interior spaces. There are no clues to these autobiographical episodes, however, in the blazes of colour and dynamic gesture of Hodgkin’s paintings. It is the titles that suggest the story for his paintings, providing a point of access into their allusive density.

Hodgkin’s work rises directly from the French tradition of intimism, within which the works of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse can be seen to have shaped Hodgkin’s particular view of the private and the everyday. It is the intimist tendency toward a modesty of scale and a privileging of modest subjects with which Hodgkin corresponds conceptually. In contrast to the usually small-scale of his works this piece is one of a handful of large paintings by Hodgkin. The painting has an operatic visual grandeur, yet retains an intimist sense of peering through a window onto another realm.

Text © National Gallery of Victoria, Australia