Sir Howard Hodgkin was one of the most celebrated artists of his generation; the pure pleasure evoked by his sensuous brushwork and usage of colour earned him almost universal appeal among critics and the art viewing public alike.
On the face of it an abstract artist, Hodgkin contrarily took immense pleasure in defining his work as figurative.
“I can’t control the viewer,” he once stated, “...but I can tell them what the picture’s about, always. I’ve never painted an abstract picture in my life.”
Rather, Hodgkin viewed his paintings as objects in themselves, and representational depictions of specific memories.
Hodgkin’s work encourages an art historical reading, with critics having written in the past of detecting traces of Turner, Hitchens, Matisse, and Seurat (as here) in his work. For his part, Hodgkin confessed to a reverence for the domestic works of the French artists Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, and again his title here invites us into the intimacy of a moment spent with peers.
The 1980s were a decade of great recognition and career success for Hodgkin, who would go on to represent Britain in the Venice Biennale in 1984 and win the second ever Turner Prize Award in 1985.
