The British novelist Julian Barnes tells a story about a seaside holiday that he and his wife once took with their friend Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017). The artist took a fancy to a black towel that he saw in a shop window. After going inside to make a purchase, he was unimpressed with the choice of seven or eight towels that the shopkeeper offered him from the shelves. None of them, Hodgkin said, was as black as the item in the window.
To resolve the matter, the shopkeeper brought out the towel in question — and was surprised to find that it was indeed a shade blacker than the others. A sale was then concluded. According to Barnes, ‘You know, intellectually, that painters have a more highly developed sense of colour, but this was a brilliant, and unwitting, public demonstration.’
It’s fair to say that, even among painters, Hodgkin was a standout colourist. Proof of this can be found in his painting Goodbye to the Bay of Naples (1980-82)— which fetched £1,688,750 at Christie’s in 2017, the highest price ever paid for a work by Hodgkin at auction. At its centre is a bar of brilliant cobalt blue (representing the sea), above which can be seen a touch of cerulean blue (the sky) and a piercing flare of yellow (the sun).
