It was especially poignant that, after Howard Hodgkin had chosen the title of Absent Friends for his major exhibition of portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, his sudden death on 9 March meant that at the private view last night (22 March) he was the most absent friend of all.
Inevitably there was much reminiscing amongst the artist’s many friends that did attend the packed opening. The unprecedented gathering of Hodgkin’s evocative, atmospheric portraits—in which he uses colour and form to explore emotions, events and relationships rather than to depict exterior likenesses—acted as a prompt for memories.
At the beginning of the show I spotted veteran British Pop artist Joe Tilson and his wife Jos talking animatedly in front of The Tilsons, their exuberantly abstracted 1960s portrayal by Hodgkin. Richard Morphet, former deputy keeper of the Modern collection at the Tate, could also be found enthusiastically explaining Hodgkin’s Small Durand Gardens (1974), which depicts a convivial dinner party at the south London home of Morphet and his late wife Sally, then a senior civil servant at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
What the wall label for Small Durand Gardens does not reveal—but Morphet did—is that the other three guests, indicated by a trio of pinky-orange protuberances running along the bottom of the work, were Angelica Garnett (the artist and daughter of Vanessa Bell), the poet Stephen Spender, and the artist Keith Milow. Oh, and that black square on the right is actually a painting by the Bloomsbury Group artist Roger Fry, although, according to Morphet, “not in that orange frame”. A swell party, indeed.