8 NOVEMBER 1975, Page 25

Art

Howard Hodgkin

John McEwen

Jeremy Rees founded the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol some years ago, but its enhanced status, now that it's moved to a converted tea warehouse on Narrow Quay, is immediately recognisable from the blue signs that guide one to it through the city. And so they should, because the new ArnoIfini is an institution: more lavish and complete in its facilities as a modern art complex than any similar establishment anywhere else in the country, including London. Something, it's true, will have to be done about the hopelessly wide and low ceilinged main gallery, but criticism of other aspects of the building would be Churlish at this early stage. With an excellent cinema/theatre, bars, restaurant, picture loan scheme and art bookshop it's difficult to envisage any similar enterprise succeeding if this one fails. Jeremy Rees deserved every hand-clap of the ovation he received at the opening, and in his new role he has started well. His first exhibition is devoted to recent paintings by Howard Hodgkin. Why Hodgkin isn't more famous is a mystery. Perhaps it's a reflection of his long development and painstakingly slow method, Perhaps his Tate trusteeship, and his acceptance within the art establishment, actually tend to distract attention from his achievement as a painter; perhaps due acclaim will follow his first large scale public exhibition, which comes to the Serpentine from Oxford next May. Whatever the reason, it's a pleasure to proclaim his major stature slightly ahead of the chorus.

Why is he so importariff Preeminently because of his mastery of the technique of oil painting itself. His pictures are small, brightly coloured and painted on wood emphasising their autonomy. Apart from the range of brushstrokes used, and the way in which that range serves so precisely the subject matter as well as the construction of the picture, there are specific and easily appreciable demonstrations of this mastery, independent of other considerations, in several of the works under discussion here. How many people, for instance, will notice that the large beige patch in 'Talking about Art' is the unpainted surface of the wood itself? (The remains of an earlier and failed attempt at this can be discerned in 'Durand Gardens'), Or appreciate the virtuosity of creating at one go the modulated grey convex frame that surrounds 'In the Cafeteria of the Grand Palais'?.

There is also the maturity of his assimilation and the breadth of his stylistic knowledge. Hodgkin decided to be a painter at an exceptionally young age so that his schooldays • were of abnormal frustration. However, he still declares a great debt to two famous masters from that unpropitious time, Wilfrid Blunt and Charles Handley Read. A long apprenticeship postponed his first one-man show till he was thirty, and even now, in his mid-forties, he has completed less than ninety paintings. This patient development has been rewarded with the fruition of a highly eclectic style. Hodgkin is a great admirer of Indian miniatures because, among other things, they make a virtue of stylistic impurity. He delights in obvious pastiche and reference, often, if he is painting a fellow artist, echoing that man's style as in, for example, 'Robyn Denny and Kate Reid', but the deeper effects of seventeenth century trompe l'oeil or Leger have long been subsumed.

Lastly, he has been unafraid of his Englishness, turned it in fact to his advantage. His paintings are semi-abstract configurations of real people and events as their titles suggest: celebrations of domesticity, of friends and moments in a friendship, . moments of a very English humour, generosity and introspection. The eccentricity of Sandy Wilson's self-designed house in 'Grantchester Road'; the pure cobalt blue of the window during dinner at Richard Morphet's at 'Durand Gardens', Kate Reid recalled by her Harrods evening gown. These collages of memory on memory, paint on paint, transcend specific concerns and elevate Hodgkin to a position of international and, surely, historical importance.