Sir Howard Hodgkin

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety four, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a painter. He found being a schoolboy too restrictive and ran away from both his prep school and Eton.

Presenter0:37

Art was always his passion, and gradually he developed the representational style for which he is famous, always painting on wood, and building up his pictures with many different layers of paint.

Presenter0:48

His road to recognition has been hard. Being a painter in England, he says, is like being in enemy territory.

Presenter0:55

But now, at the age of sixty two, he's achieved fame, fortune, and, somewhat reluctantly, a knighthood. He is Sir Howard Hodgkin.

Presenter1:03

Two years ago you got the knighthood, Sir Howard, but um you were in two minds about accepting it, weren't you?

Sir Howard Hodgkin1:10

Yes, and in fact I'm still perhaps rather in two minds having accepted it, because I didn't really want a knighthood, but they don't give things like that to artists very much, and so I thought, oh well, all right. But of course I'm not for a second suggesting, as some theatrical knights have done, that they were ta I was taking it for the profession. I mean it's a entirely selfish thing to have.

Presenter1:35

But do you enjoy having it? Do you enjoy being called Sir Howard?

Sir Howard Hodgkin1:38

Not a bit, which is very irritating.

Sir Howard Hodgkin1:41

It is useful getting tables in restaurants and it is useful on aeroplanes.

Presenter1:46

But it it's recognition is what you imply for for um a group of people who are not much recognised, this enemy territory business.

Sir Howard Hodgkin1:54

Yes, I think it is and I don't really think I got it for my work. I think I got it because I designed the

Sir Howard Hodgkin2:00

A mural for a British Council building in Delhi.

Presenter2:03

But why? So why wouldn't you get it for your work? Why don't artists, you say, get knighthoods?

Sir Howard Hodgkin2:10

Nothing?

Sir Howard Hodgkin2:10

Really, we're not taken very seriously socially.

Sir Howard Hodgkin2:14

If I go into some social situation and people say, and what do you do? and I say I'm an artist.

Sir Howard Hodgkin2:21

That happens less now because people might actually know I was one. They look absolutely amused.

Presenter2:26

And perhaps they're just overawed, and perhaps they just don't know what to say next.

Sir Howard Hodgkin2:29

I

Presenter2:29

What kind of pictures do you paint? Is it a purpose?

Sir Howard Hodgkin2:30

What kind of pictures do you paint? Oh, I always get that, and I'm very happy to always say I paint portraits, still light, and landscapes.

Presenter2:37

But didn't you once um have that kind of conversation with somebody and after a while he said to you, You're really quite intelligent for an artist. Isn't that what's at the bottom of all of this?

Sir Howard Hodgkin2:46

Yes, I did. That was at the High Table in Oxford, and I was having a very happy conversation with the scientist.

Sir Howard Hodgkin2:52

who was indeed very intelligent, and I think he only thought I was intelligent because I was listening.

Presenter2:58

What about the actual experience of being knighted? Did did the Queen show proper recognition of your work?

Sir Howard Hodgkin3:04

No, it was the second time I met the Queen. The first time I met the Queen was when I was given a CBE, and she said, Oh, where do you paint?

Sir Howard Hodgkin3:12

In the south of France?

Sir Howard Hodgkin3:14

And I was so angry that I said, Oh, no, no, no, I I haven't been given which is totally wrong I haven't been given the decoration for being a a painter, but for being a trustee of the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery.

Sir Howard Hodgkin3:27

It was pointed out to me afterwards I was accusing my sovereign of lying when I said this, but

Presenter3:33

But why did it make you angry that she thought you didn't know that?

Sir Howard Hodgkin3:35

Well, that the cliché, the assumption that that was where somebody who painted coloured pictures painted.

Presenter3:43

Right, let let's have your first Desert Island disc. What's it to be?

Sir Howard Hodgkin3:47

It's to be an

Sir Howard Hodgkin3:48

For me, an absolutely haunting song from Kurt Weil's Ucali, sung by Teresa Stratus.

Speaker 44:00

So look at an old daisy.

Speaker 44:10

Le boneros la pleisi

Speaker 44:16

O glories la terulo pier pule susi.

Presenter4:23

Teresa Stratus singing Courtwell's Ucully. Do you do you work to music hard or do you need silence?

Sir Howard Hodgkin4:30

No, I don't work to music, except, I'm ashamed to say, to songs I sing myself, like

Sir Howard Hodgkin4:37

Lara's song from Doctor Givago, a film I have never seen, so how I've picked this up I don't know, but other people have who've heard through the studio door have told me that I have this unfortunate habit.

Presenter4:50

But you don't always know you're doing it.

Sir Howard Hodgkin4:52

No, I don't. And I think it's it's usually a sign that things are going very well. I sing extremely badly, rather like people are supposed to have once sung in the bath.

Presenter5:02

And what about your surroundings? Your studio is um behind the British Museum in Bloomsbury. One imagines it really quite bare. Uh I think y you've written before that there's a sort of lonely, bare, white studio you work in.

Sir Howard Hodgkin5:14

It is a completely bare white box, very big, with underfloor heating and

Sir Howard Hodgkin5:21

Completely glass roof.

Presenter5:23

But you need it to be so bad.

Sir Howard Hodgkin5:24

But I need it to be like that because it's very difficult to concentrate. And I paint on one picture at a time, and I have enormous white cloth screens which I use to cover up.

Sir Howard Hodgkin5:36

The picture I'm not working on at any given moment.

Presenter5:39

Because it's also said that your your pictures can't really be hung next to another picture, can they? They need an awful lot of space, even if they're quite small. They're very demanding because they're so vivid.

Sir Howard Hodgkin5:48

They really sort of kill each other if they're too near.

Presenter5:52

But it sounds as if mounting an exhibition of Howard Hodgkin paintings must be a nightmare because you can't hang them next to each other.

Sir Howard Hodgkin6:00

It's very difficult and I'm going

Sir Howard Hodgkin6:03

Next autumn in New York I'm going to have an enormous exhibition and I'm very worried already that there won't be enough room.

Sir Howard Hodgkin6:11

for the pictures because they need to be hung very far away from each other.

Presenter6:14

Can we describe, for the purpose of people who don't know your work, I mean, it it seems to me it's the antithesis of a Victorian watercolour, which which is very calming, and you can hang next to any number of others and and gently be soothed by it. Yours leaps out of the wall and demands of you what? It demands emotion, isn't it?

Sir Howard Hodgkin6:33

Yes, they demand that the viewer should be open to the emotion which the pictures con themselves contain. And I think that's probably why they can't be hung very close to each other, because they fight.

Presenter6:44

And they're they're also

Presenter6:46

Often things rather than pictures. They're three-dimensional. You paint on the frame and around it, and sometimes you have to walk around the thing to see the other side of it, as it were.

Sir Howard Hodgkin6:57

They are three-dimensional. They are painted in oil paint on wood, usually quite thick bits of wood, but as well as that they have many tricks of perspective and so on, so that they look like some of them at least look as if they're holes in the wall rather than something on the wall.

Presenter7:04

That

Presenter7:16

And you own none of them other than the one you're always currently working on?

Sir Howard Hodgkin7:20

Oh no, absolutely not. I hate the idea of I am not at all the sort of artist who collects his own work.

Presenter7:26

So what about your own living space? Is that as bare and uncluttered as as you've described? Or or do you allow yourself

Sir Howard Hodgkin7:32

Oh, not at all. Well, my living space is the opposite. It's full of things. I come from

Sir Howard Hodgkin7:38

A family

Sir Howard Hodgkin7:39

About which I'd rather not talk because many of them be very, very distinguished or have done lots of different things, but they have one thing in common. They've been

Sir Howard Hodgkin7:48

Dedicated shoppers for many, many generations. They've had collections of all kinds of things.

Presenter7:53

Kinds

Sir Howard Hodgkin7:55

My main collection is of course of Indian paintings, but I have become recently very interested in

Sir Howard Hodgkin8:02

eighteenth century sculpture, which unfortunately is expensive.

Sir Howard Hodgkin8:06

and takes up a lot of room.

Sir Howard Hodgkin8:08

But it's quite nice coming into a room that contains already five people.

Sir Howard Hodgkin8:13

even though none of them are alive.

Presenter8:15

Let's pause there for record number two.

Sir Howard Hodgkin8:18

This record is.

Sir Howard Hodgkin8:20

of an aria from Glux Orpheus which was sung to me by my mother when I was a child of, I suppose, three, four and five, which I had completely forgotten about till I heard it being played and it was a very emotional moment when I heard it again.

Sir Howard Hodgkin8:41

And it reminded me of my mother's happier days.

Speaker 49:10

Believe God.

Presenter9:35

Karin Bransell singing Ach ichabe Zifeloran from Glux Orfeo ed Uridice. You say I remind of your mother's happier days. What do you mean by that?

Sir Howard Hodgkin9:45

Well, it reminds me of when my mother was looking after us as when the family were small children and it was before the war.

Sir Howard Hodgkin9:54

At the beginning of the war we went

Sir Howard Hodgkin9:57

my mother, my sister and I, to America.

Sir Howard Hodgkin10:00

And those were happy days as well, but they were completely different.

Presenter10:04

But but life became unhappy with your mother later.

Sir Howard Hodgkin10:07

Well, I don't think she particularly wanted me to be a painter, put it like that.

Presenter10:11

She didn't encourage you at all.

Sir Howard Hodgkin10:13

Not really. She wanted me to be a diplomat. I told her that if I became a diplomat

Sir Howard Hodgkin10:18

Wars would start, but she was unimpressed.

Presenter10:21

And you were as unimpressed apparently as a child by her furniture.

Presenter10:25

In this house that you lived in and were brought up in in the beginning in West London, which was boring brown furniture and most uninspiring, is that right?

Sir Howard Hodgkin10:33

Yes, that's absolutely true, and I think I got even crosser when she told me that it was all museum pieces, which, looking back now, with the indulgence of age, I think is rather sweet. I think she was trying to pretend it was more than it was, and there's nothing wrong with that, but at the time I thought it was terrible.

Presenter10:51

But you had said apparently at the age of five that you wanted to be a painter. I wonder

Presenter10:56

Where that aspiration came from? I mean, where were you inspired? Where was the colour in your life? Where was the interest?

Sir Howard Hodgkin11:03

I don't know, possibly from my marvellous grandmother, who was an Irishwoman who.

Sir Howard Hodgkin11:08

was sometimes the thirteenth child of the thirteenth child, sometimes the fourteenth, it depended how she felt. I was very close to her when I was a small child.

Presenter11:18

And she was a collector of some kind, too.

Sir Howard Hodgkin11:19

She was a a mad collector.

Sir Howard Hodgkin11:22

She bought and she bought and she bought. But it was more her attitude to life which was extraordinary, very generous and totally eccentric.

Presenter11:32

And your father was a collector as well?

Sir Howard Hodgkin11:35

My father collected plants.

Presenter11:37

So he got out of the boring brown furniture into the garden all the time.

Sir Howard Hodgkin11:40

Yes, that's exactly what happened to him.

Presenter11:43

And then you went off to America. You were evacuated uh in the early years of the war. What about there? Was there artistic inspiration for you there? You would still have been, what, seven or something.

Sir Howard Hodgkin11:52

Oh yes, America was wonderful. I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Sir Howard Hodgkin11:58

and I saw the kind of pictures which in England would have been very difficult to see then, and the kind of pictures that really I had been interested in for the rest of my life great paintings by Picasso and by Matisse in particular.

Sir Howard Hodgkin12:13

Wonderful School of Paris Pictures.

Sir Howard Hodgkin12:16

They made an enormous impact on me.

Presenter12:19

But then you had to come back home, back to England, back to prep school, which didn't suit you at all. But um I'll ask you about that in a minute. Let's have your third record.

Sir Howard Hodgkin12:27

My third record is Noel Coward singing Let's Do It by Cole Porter with emendations by himself.

Sir Howard Hodgkin12:36

A piece that really has something for everybody in it.

Speaker 412:39

All famous writers in swarms do it Somerset and all the moments do it Let's do it, let's fall in love The Brontes felt that they must do it

Speaker 412:53

Ernest Hemingway could just do it! Let's do it! Let's fall in love!

Presenter13:01

Noel Card's version of Let's Do It. So you you ran away from prep school and from Eton and from Bryanston during the course of the forties, not apparently for the classic reason that you were miserable, but that you were just plain bored.

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:15

Well, it was slightly more complicated than that. I had decided that it was the kind of education from which it would be very difficult.

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:23

to be an artist.

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:25

And I would like to put the record straight a little bit in that I had wonderful teachers.

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:30

I was extremely lucky for the kind of child I was.

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:35

In virtually every school I went to I was given privileges.

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:39

which were very unusual, so instead of having to play organized games, I was able to paint.

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:46

But I was determined from

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:49

The moment I came back to England from America.

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:53

to somehow

Sir Howard Hodgkin13:55

Become a painter.

Presenter13:56

So you were completely single-minded about it from a very early age. It's it's it's quite a mature thing, really deeply selfish.

Sir Howard Hodgkin14:04

It's a deeply selfish activity, of course.

Presenter14:04

Yes.

Presenter14:08

Is it?

Presenter14:10

Surely you're you're painting things for others to see, you're giving, you're showing us your emotions, you're

Sir Howard Hodgkin14:15

Yes, I think it's also

Sir Howard Hodgkin14:17

Very generous indeed. But I I was thinking when I was a child it's it's a very selfish thing to want to be as far as everyone else is concerned.

Presenter14:27

Well, it is if you shut everything else out and won't listen to anybody else, I suppose, and that's obviously what you did. And in in that sense it w it was quite a mature thing to do, wasn't it? To be so single minded.

Sir Howard Hodgkin14:27

Uh

Sir Howard Hodgkin14:38

Yes, I accept that. But

Sir Howard Hodgkin14:41

It was very hard. I have been very lucky in all sorts of ways, and I don't want to sound as if I'm grumbling, but

Sir Howard Hodgkin14:47

When I became an art student and I had in particular one great friend who came from a very poor background and whose life had been changed by being an evacuee during the war when he'd stayed

Sir Howard Hodgkin15:01

in Cornwall with two maiden ladies who'd made much of him and clearly given him a completely new kind of life.

Sir Howard Hodgkin15:09

When he went back to his family, they gave him the front room to paint in.

Sir Howard Hodgkin15:13

and said get on with it. They didn't expect to understand what he did they didn't expect to know whereas I, of course, was surrounded by people who thought they knew all about art.

Presenter15:23

Yeah.

Sir Howard Hodgkin15:25

That was very difficult.

Presenter15:28

Did your parents despair of you, then?

Sir Howard Hodgkin15:31

Very nearly. My father loved painting, and we shared tremendous enthusiasm for the work of both Pierre Bonnard and Vuillard.

Sir Howard Hodgkin15:43

But I think

Sir Howard Hodgkin15:44

He was very worried in a proper old fashioned middle-class way that I would ever have any money to live on.

Presenter15:50

But he let you go to art school eventually, didn't he?

Sir Howard Hodgkin15:53

Well, I rather insisted on going to art school. I don't think there was much choice.

Presenter15:58

And then, as I understand it, when you got to art school and you went to um a couple and you went to Camberwell and and you went on to Bath.

Presenter16:05

At some point there was a suggestion that you weren't going to benefit from formal training in art anyway.

Sir Howard Hodgkin16:12

Yes, that came from Clifford Ellis, who was really my great teacher and to whom I still owe more than any other person as far as being a painter is concerned. And he looked at a painting that I had painted when I was about fifteen.

Sir Howard Hodgkin16:29

and said, Well, you have a language of your own. Do you want to learn another? which of course was very heady stuff in a way, but he was treating me simply

Sir Howard Hodgkin16:40

As another artist. And I was very moved by that. And I said, Yes, I do want to learn another. And he said, well.

Sir Howard Hodgkin16:49

Then you must come.

Presenter16:50

But you were able to hang on to your own as well, obviously.

Sir Howard Hodgkin16:53

No, I really tried very, very hard to do exactly what I was told. But it is very difficult.

Sir Howard Hodgkin17:01

To feel that your individuality or your own identity is strong enough and do other things in order to learn a language, but that's what you have to do as a student.

Presenter17:12

Record number four.

Sir Howard Hodgkin17:13

This is

Sir Howard Hodgkin17:15

Habeli Sanjeet, which is in fact an evening rug.

Sir Howard Hodgkin17:19

Sung by Ama Lal

Sir Howard Hodgkin17:23

This is something of great sentimental value to me because it records the singing which I heard on the terrace of the palace at Kishangar in India when I went to India for the first time with my friend Robert Skelton who then was head of the Indian section at the VNA.

Speaker 417:41

Uh

Speaker 417:46

Uh

Speaker 418:03

In a

Speaker 418:15

E nukere

Speaker 418:26

More likely.

Speaker 418:33

Yeah.

Presenter18:36

Haveali Sanjeet, sung by Amal Lal, and a reminder of your first visit to India, Howard Hodgkin. You're a serious collector of things, Indian. How long has this been going on?

Sir Howard Hodgkin18:47

Oh well that has been going on for a very long time, since I was a child at school.

Sir Howard Hodgkin18:54

and I saw my first Indian paintings, thanks to the extraordinary dilatante artmaster Wilfrid Blunt.

Presenter19:01

Brother of Antony?

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:01

brother indeed of Antony.

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:04

about whose activities he knew absolutely nothing at all. He was a most wonderful teacher, partly because he wasn't entirely serious about anything.

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:14

but passionate about lots of things.

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:17

and he showed me some Indian paintings he'd borrowed from the Royal Library, and I thought they were extraordinary. They were another world.

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:24

They had

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:26

a vision of reality that one could easily respond to.

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:30

But

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:31

It was just slightly different.

Presenter19:34

And apparently you you mortgaged birthdays and Christmases to come for years in order to buy one little bit of this, did you? Well, not the bit from the royal household, I'm sure, but another

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:44

No, I started by in fact um it wasn't quite as dramatic as that. I bet all my pocket money on a point to point and lost it, but I

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:54

still managed somehow or other to acquire a picture for three pounds, which I no longer

Sir Howard Hodgkin19:59

have because it wasn't good enough. But I became infected. I think of collecting as a sort of virus really. And I was infected. And that was it.

Presenter20:09

So it's it's a kind of addiction, it's an obsession.

Sir Howard Hodgkin20:12

It is an addiction, but I have at the moment tried to join my own

Sir Howard Hodgkin20:17

one member organization which is

Sir Howard Hodgkin20:20

IPA, which is Indian Paintings Anonymous, but I don't know how well I'm doing.

Presenter20:27

But how do you judge what you want? Is it is it an emotional reaction to it? Do you look at something and you just get a buzz and you think I've got to have that?

Sir Howard Hodgkin20:35

Yes, that is fundamentally what it is, but it's also more complicated because a collection makes its own demands. It becomes, like Frankenstein's monster, it has a life of its own, so a sort of artistic structure, if that isn't too pretentious, begins to emerge, and then you find you have to have this because you have that.

Speaker 420:58

Hmm.

Sir Howard Hodgkin20:58

Yeah.

Sir Howard Hodgkin20:59

And as far as getting rid of things goes, well you

Sir Howard Hodgkin21:01

Can't have that anymore because this is so much better.

Presenter21:06

Next record.

Sir Howard Hodgkin21:08

Well, appropriately, my next record is all about collecting. It's part of the auction scene from the second act of The Rake's Progress by Stravinsky.

Speaker 421:18

Behold it, Roman moral, the man who has it, has it forever, yes, and holy, holy curing for body, soul and spirit, a gift of gods, a gift of gods, and not to mention this or the other, more and more, and so help me.

Speaker 421:42

Then bid, who gets them, who gets them, gets them, gets them hard. Lap come bid, ping, come by, or boss, feetle and mighty turtle, go hide some more.

Sir Howard Hodgkin21:56

Hi

Speaker 422:00

Ha ha ha ha.

Speaker 422:04

Fifty fifteen.

Speaker 422:08

Quarters sixteen.

Speaker 422:10

Ziftine, going and zipting, going!

Presenter22:18

Part of the auction scene from the Rake's Progress by Stravinsky, sung by John Dobson with the London Sinfonietta Chorus, conducted by Riccardo Schaille. Your your paintings let's go back to talking about them for a moment, Hard, they're they're all on wood. What sort of wood? Anything special?

Sir Howard Hodgkin22:33

I like wood that's been around for a long time, partly because it's...

Sir Howard Hodgkin22:37

very well seasoned, but also because it's already got some kind of identity to which I can relate.

Presenter22:44

So it's chopping boards, pastry boards.

Sir Howard Hodgkin22:46

Yes, one one of my best pictures.

Sir Howard Hodgkin22:49

It was painted on the back of a blackboard from an RAF mess, which had had so many notices pinned on it that the corners had become rounded, though rather irregularly. I like that very much.

Presenter23:03

But how did you come across these? Are you a sort of picker up of unconsidered bits of wood?

Sir Howard Hodgkin23:07

Absolutely. In more recent years people have sometimes given them to me as well.

Presenter23:12

But why would? Is it because canvas would be too flimsy to withstand all the layers of painting?

Sir Howard Hodgkin23:16

Yes, I can't remember the exact quotation, but Dogo once said the trouble with canvas is it gets very easily tired, and it does. And if you go on painting on canvas, you get this revolting sort of linoleum surface. Whereas wood y is very tough, it's always there.

Presenter23:34

You can see from from the dates on your paintings that that you work on them in some cases for years. I mean, Snapshot dated nineteen eighty four to nineteen ninety three, DH in Hollywood, David Hockney in Hollywood, nineteen eighty to eighty four. Why do they take so long?

Sir Howard Hodgkin23:49

Well, the shortest and perfectly true answer is because I take so long to make up my mind.

Sir Howard Hodgkin23:55

It's very difficult.

Sir Howard Hodgkin23:57

To keep all the elements going that are in a painting. The feeling, the emotion, the memory of course as it invariably is has to be turned into something else and that takes a very long time as well. I keep making false moves.

Sir Howard Hodgkin24:15

I think really the

Sir Howard Hodgkin24:18

The problem is making the picture stand up by itself.

Sir Howard Hodgkin24:23

Because the memory has to be transmuted into a thing, into an object, and that is a very slow process for me.

Presenter24:31

And does the object?

Presenter24:33

Ever end up being better than the original thing, the thing which inspired it.

Sir Howard Hodgkin24:37

Ah ideally it takes the place of it.

Sir Howard Hodgkin24:40

And yes, it that does happen.

Presenter24:41

It's a it's a representation. Yeah. It's a it's representing

Sir Howard Hodgkin24:43

Yes, it's represented.

Presenter24:45

But how do you know when it's finished?

Sir Howard Hodgkin24:47

Oh.

Sir Howard Hodgkin24:48

That, uh forgive me, is a question I've often been asked, and it's very easy to know. It's when the distance from the or original feeling is such that the original feeling comes back at you.

Sir Howard Hodgkin25:02

Then I know it's finished, and then there's nothing more to be done.

Presenter25:05

But the interesting thing is, of course, that that the finished product looks bright and exuberant and spontaneous.

Sir Howard Hodgkin25:13

Yes, I remember long ago I was very disappointed when Antony Doffey said to me, All your best pictures look as if they'd been painted in an afternoon.

Sir Howard Hodgkin25:25

But then I thought about it and thought that was a great compliment.

Presenter25:27

It is it's a compliment, isn't it? To have achieved it after all those those years of work at it. And uh, as you said, we you often paint the frame as well, but um you didn't, in the case of of DH in Hollywood, didn't the person who bought it from you ask you to paint it?

Sir Howard Hodgkin25:29

I didn't

Sir Howard Hodgkin25:44

Yes, he did ask me to paint it because he said you cannot have

Sir Howard Hodgkin25:48

Barewood.

Sir Howard Hodgkin25:49

in a drawing room. I was very angry. I got someone else to paint it for me. I said, Well, if you want that done, you must ask a picture restorer. So he came and he painted it.

Presenter26:01

And you've never spoken to the purchaser.

Sir Howard Hodgkin26:02

Oh yes, I have, I have, he he's someone I like.

Presenter26:06

Right, next piece of music. Tell me why you want this one.

Sir Howard Hodgkin26:10

And the next piece of music.

Sir Howard Hodgkin26:12

Trois Morceaux en forme de poix by Eric Saty is a great favourite. When I was at Bath Academy of Art, which was the school run by the great Clifford Ellis,

Sir Howard Hodgkin26:25

He was very interested in music as well as painting and he got William Glock, Sir William Glock, to come and talk to the students and play the piano to us and when he played this it was the first time I'd ever heard it.

Presenter27:40

That was the beginning of Eric Zatti's Trameau sour enforme de pois, played by Gabriele Tacchino and Aldo Ciccolini. So your art, Howard Hodgkin, is representational, as we've said, not abstract. But you have quite often narrative titles like When Did We Last See Morocco or Reading the Letter. How important is it to know the title of your painting when you look at it?

Sir Howard Hodgkin28:05

I think it's probably very important, but it's very important to me.

Sir Howard Hodgkin28:08

What it's about.

Sir Howard Hodgkin28:10

is of course part of the image you see.

Presenter28:12

So if you I mean, for example, if you look at your painting Reading in Bed and you know that's what it's called, you can see the head, you can see the the the the curve of the head or the the sh the bed cover, the fall of the bed cover, part of the book.

Sir Howard Hodgkin28:24

Yes.

Sir Howard Hodgkin28:27

You can.

Presenter28:27

Otherwise you wouldn't know what it was, or you could think it was anything.

Sir Howard Hodgkin28:31

That happens to be one of my more literally representational pictures, is insofar as what is left in the final version.

Sir Howard Hodgkin28:40

As most of my pictures are about feeling, I don't in the end think it necessarily matters. When people write about my pictures, they often add a narrative element that perhaps isn't entirely there, which never worries me in the least, because I think that will be a way in for the spectator.

Presenter28:57

Hmm.

Presenter28:58

So so it is much more a um a feeling, as you say, it's your your emotion there for us to see. So that perhaps

Presenter29:06

The colour is predominantly important because our emotions are colourful.

Sir Howard Hodgkin29:13

Yes, it's interesting you should mention colour.

Presenter29:13

Yeah.

Sir Howard Hodgkin29:16

Colour is a sort of wild card in painting. You find it even in the old treatises on painting. People will talk about composition, drawing, the design of a picture. But colour is something that is

Sir Howard Hodgkin29:29

makes people uneasy, particularly in this country.

Presenter29:33

We don't like brilliance. We don't like these

Sir Howard Hodgkin29:36

I think because it's thought to be over emotional.

Presenter29:36

I think it's

Presenter29:39

But y you say that we, the English, um don't like colour. I mean, people have said of you that your use of colour is very un Anglo Saxon. Um have you always used such exotic colour? Was it a sudden and conscious decision?

Sir Howard Hodgkin29:54

Well, to me it isn't exotic at all.

Sir Howard Hodgkin29:56

If I go into a shop that sells paints and I pick out, as I did for many years, I used only primary colours and mixtures of them because I wanted very strong colour. But to me it wasn't at all exotic. Yellow was yellow and red was red.

Presenter30:11

But some critics say that you were were were stuck in low gears, they called it, until the mid seventies, and that you got braver because you nearly died of hepatitis in nineteen seventy five. I mean, is there is there any truth in that? Was there a great change in the matter?

Sir Howard Hodgkin30:23

Well, it's certainly true that I nearly died, and hopefully it may may have concentrated my mind a little bit.

Presenter30:30

But what what critics say is that you became a totally free spirit. H his palate, said one, became more exotic and experienced and the old traces of hesitation were lost. Something happened to you.

Sir Howard Hodgkin30:43

How wonderful. I don't think it really did.

Sir Howard Hodgkin30:48

It's simply that

Sir Howard Hodgkin30:50

Trying and trying and trying to do something over many, many years means perhaps you begin to succeed.

Presenter30:58

Record number seven.

Sir Howard Hodgkin30:59

This is part of Stravinsky's Italian suite.

Sir Howard Hodgkin31:03

Pachello and piano, which

Sir Howard Hodgkin31:06

Many people may recognise as being actually something else.

Presenter32:09

Part of Stravinsky's Italian suite for cello and piano played by Torlev Tedane and Ruland Perntinin.

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:16

which, however, may be recognized by many people as being

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:20

The music for Stravinsky's banner Pulchenena.

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:24

I designed.

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:26

The band A Pulchinana

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:28

Four.

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:29

The Ballet Rombert

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:31

And it's my one successful attempt at designing for the theatre.

Presenter32:36

How many have you tried? How many times?

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:39

I've tried three times altogether.

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:41

And I think the other twice are better forgotten.

Presenter32:45

You don't see yourself um if not as a theatre designer, you don't see yourself as a teacher, do you, telling others how to do it?

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:52

Well, I was a teacher for

Sir Howard Hodgkin32:55

Really too long, I think, partly because I felt there would never be any audience for my work.

Presenter33:00

But you don't want to do it any more you don't see that as your role.

Sir Howard Hodgkin33:03

No, not at all. I

Sir Howard Hodgkin33:05

think at long last that probably the best thing I can do is to do my own work.

Presenter33:09

Get in your studio and keep doing it.

Sir Howard Hodgkin33:11

Yes.

Sir Howard Hodgkin33:13

I think that any artist of any kind, if they succeed and I mean purely artistically, if they succeed at all.

Sir Howard Hodgkin33:22

In communicating what they have, which is of course what we all want to do.

Sir Howard Hodgkin33:28

That is the best I have to give.

Presenter33:31

And does all that mean that you will that you are?

Presenter33:35

self contained, that in that sense you'll be absolutely fine on this desert island, because you know about being alone. You don't suffer or fear loneliness.

Sir Howard Hodgkin33:45

Oh I hate being alone.

Sir Howard Hodgkin33:48

Because my work is so lonely.

Sir Howard Hodgkin33:52

The awful thing about being on a desert island is there'll be no audience for what I do.

Presenter33:58

That really matters, does it? It doesn't to some artists.

Sir Howard Hodgkin34:00

Yeah.

Sir Howard Hodgkin34:01

It really matters very much.

Presenter34:03

Let's have your last record.

Sir Howard Hodgkin34:05

My last record I want to really be my last record because I want it to be played at my funeral, and it's the Andrews Sisters singing Patience and Fortitude. I think that Patience and Fortitude are probably the most necessary attributes for any artist.

Speaker 434:24

Patience and fortitude, patience and fortitude, patience and fortitude, and things will come your way when you have solitude.

Speaker 434:44

Can make life dull and crude. Patience and fortitude. And things will come.

Presenter34:53

Your way

Presenter34:55

The Andrews Sisters and Patience and Fortitude, a funeral song for Howard Hodgkin. If you could only take one of those records, Howard, which would it be of the eight?

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:04

I think probably I would take the first.

Presenter35:07

The court file.

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:08

Yeah.

Presenter35:08

Yes. You call it. Why?

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:11

Because it has no sort of overtones in my life at all. It's just extremely beautiful.

Presenter35:17

And what about your book?

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:20

My book would be

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:22

Delacoir's journals in French.

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:25

It's a wonderfully long book. I don't read French.

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:28

with much facility.

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:30

It's completely fascinating. It's all about an artist's life, but it's full of gossip about the art world, about machinations between one artist and another, and so on.

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:40

I think it would be totally fascinating.

Presenter35:43

And what about your luxury?

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:45

Well, if I'm allowed, I would like a permanent supply of mayonnaise.

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:51

Presumably, there'll be a lot of fish to eat.

Sir Howard Hodgkin35:54

And cold fish with mayonnaise is something I probably like eating better than anything else.

Presenter35:59

A permanent supply of fresh mayonnaise. Difficult, but it will be achieved. Thank you. Sir Howard Hodgkin, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Sir Howard Hodgkin36:04

But

Speaker 336:17

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.