AUCTION TO TAKE PLACE ON 24 OCTOBER #PortraitOfTheArtist

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1 The impulse to collect is thus a way of making art your own, but it s also a way of making art; a collection in the end is a work of art. h owa r d hodgkin AUCTION TO TAKE PLACE ON 24 OCTOBER 2017 Howard Hodgkin redefined the way in which we look at the world; he developed a personal pictorial language that speaks of interactions and emotions. Just as his eye for the exceptional resonates through his paintings, his ability to identify the extraordinary in unexpected places was deployed in his incessant hunt for art and objects of exquisite beauty. While each of Hodgkin s paintings evokes his response to a very particular place, person or situation, the items he surrounded himself with in his home offer a personal portrait of their owner, one of the greatest artists of our time. The kaleidoscope of objects he so carefully drew together take us behind his paintings and cast new light on his aesthetic innovations, revealing what inspired him and what he held close. This October, Sotheby s will exhibit some 400 items from the personal collection of Howard Hodgkin to be sold at auction in London on 24th October The objects with which he was surrounded reflected his passions, influences and interests and nourished his paintings. As items were purchased he would find a space for them, move them around and then finally settle on a place he felt they should stay, according to the other objects around them, creating dynamic visual dialogues. Objects from Italy to India, which suggest a modern day grand tour, were displayed side by side, heightened by the jewel-like tones with which the walls of his London home were painted. Spanning art history through time and geography, they offer a vivid revelation of his private world in all its intense and exhilarating glory. Speaking of his creative method, his partner Antony Peattie explains, most of his work took place in his mind. His compositions and strokes were envisaged before he took up the paintbrush, enabling him to execute his vision with swift, confident brushstrokes. It s all grist to the mill, Howard insisted... He collected in order to create new work. What he acquired fed into his work. Clockwise from bottom left: A Cobalt Blue and White and Turquoise Pottery Tile, Ottoman, 16th/17th century 4,000 6,000; Iznik Pottery Tile, Turkey, second half 16th century, 5,000 7,000; Iznik Pottery Tile, Turkey, circa , 4,000 6,000; Large Iznik Pottery Tile, Turkey, late 16th century, 8,000 12,000; Plaque, Japan, 18th century, ; Damascus Pottery Tile, Ottoman, late 16th/17th century, 2,000 3,000; Ottoman Candlestick, Turkey, late 18th/early 19th century, 3,000 4,000. There are moments in people s lives when the desire to possess works of art takes possession of them, and that is of course where as an almost registered sufferer I know all about it. h owa r d hodgkin 1

2 Hodgkin did not keep his own work as he said they got in the way of new work, though he did keep two paintings from his debut show at the ICA in 1962, Bedroom and Travelling. I have absolutely no desire to collect my own work, but do have what with age seems an almost unquenchable thirst for acquiring other things to look at, Hodgkin stated. I think of collecting as a sort of virus really, and I was infected It is an addiction. So much so that he kept auction catalogues and a tape measure by his bed, marking things that he fell in love with. Howard Hodgkin Travelling, 1961 Estimate 150, ,000 Howard Hodgkin Bedroom, Estimate 250, ,000 Speaking of the forthcoming sale Antony Peattie said: Howard liked the idea of a sale after his death. The objects have served their purpose to him, they were what he called his Must Haves that, in some mysterious way, fed his work. But now they amplify his absence. After he died the house was so sad: all these objects remained in place but, after 33 years that we spent together, everything had changed. The sale represents a personal portrait of Howard. And it will enable his executors to fulfil his wishes. A PRIVATE PASSION The discreet exterior of the house that was Howard Hodgkin s London home in Bloomsbury for over 30 years gave no indication of the richness within. Opening the door was akin to stepping into one of his paintings. Art and objects of resounding beauty diffused to stunning effect resulted in unexpected dialogues. With the surprising and inspired configurations in which he displayed objects Hodgkin created an entirely new aesthetic. He had an unusually democratic approach to collecting, not adhering to the traditional collecting hierarchy of one medium taking precedence over another an oil painting taking greater prominence Individual items listed in caption at end of press release. than a watercolour, for example. So confident was he in his selection and of the importance of each piece to his needs that he created his own collecting alchemy. His approach was instinctive and his placements created unexpected yet harmonious arrangements, new works of art in effect. Surprises lay around every corner of the house. A precious 17 th -century Indian sandstone relief formed a backdrop in the kitchen to the artfully stacked china on display. Subtle and knowing conversations between disparate objects were formed across the spaces of rooms. An exquisite fragment from a carpet, with its interlocking geometric pattern, faced a series of wall-mounted Kashan star tiles, and the foliate motifs were echoed in monochrome form in the craftsmanship of an exquisite inlaid Mughal box. Ornamentation is a prominent thread that runs through the great variety of objects he was drawn to, from both India and Islamic cultures. He especially sought fragments particular motifs, calligraphy, colours and textures appearing in Ottoman, Indian and Islamic tiles, textiles and rugs. Fragments of calligraphy were not sought after for their meaning, but purely for the visual language of their linear forms, and he honed in on specific parts of larger pattern schemes. In doing so he focused on small yet powerful details, freeing his imagination from the original form. 2

3 He collected individual tiles from different periods and countries, spanning Kashan, Iznik and Mughal, and reflecting Hodgkin s status as one of the greatest colourists of the last half century his concern with colour is evident in his choice of carpets. The intense colour seen in a fragment of the magnificent Von Hirsch carpet for instance, a masterpiece that had been split into four pieces, each of which was sought after by collectors around the world including Hodgkin; or the Portuguese carpet fragment which illustrates both the very best of classical Persian dyeing skills and the mastery with which these colours were combined; the Lahore fragments showing just how well Mughal weavers could balance the acidic yellows, shocking pinks and blues of India to glorious effect, as well as including examples of quintessentially Mughal drawing of animals and birds. Textiles appear in the background to some of his prints, for example Moonlight (1980), Bleeding (1981 2) and Mourning (1982). Recurring motifs echoed around the rooms of his home, across a variety of objects of disparate cultural origins. He was fascinated by collage, inlaid items and surface patterns of all kinds: mosaics, renaissance pietra dura, Cosmati, scagliola, cuerda seca, cloisonné and marquetry. It inspired him in 1992, when he designed the giant Banyan tree shadow mural for the British Council building in New Delhi, executed in black Cuddappah stone and white Makrana marble. He was particularly drawn to sculptures as well as reliefs, in wood, in Bust of King George II ( ), Michael Rysbrack, circa 1739 marble and in engravings, which created depth in a shallow space, Estimate 80, ,000. just as his paintings did. He thought of his paintings as objects, and painted over the three dimensionality of the picture frame to incorporate it as part of the composition. He once commented that he liked to enter a room and find people present in the form of sculptures. Further themes running through the works he collected include elephants and palm trees. Palm trees were perhaps both totemic and a signifier of the exotic, while elephants proved hard for him to resist. He wrote of elephants in 1983: Perhaps the shifting volume and surface, the loose skin and the obvious structure inside it, the colossal weight which can defy gravity with a leap in the air then sink to the ground in a heap like a mountain, were to the Indian artist what the changing forms and moods of the human body are supposed to have been to the Post-Renaissance European artist. 1 His artist heroes also played their part in his collecting. He loved prints, mezzotints and engravings and was delighted to find that in these media he could own work by Breughel, Hogarth, Piranesi and William Blake. Even items that might seem anomalous are intimately linked to the other objects in his home, as well as to his own paintings, such as a selection of flags. They fascinated him for their symbolism, their stripes and colours that carry the weight of a whole country, and they appear in his paintings In a French Restaurant (1977 9) and Flag ( ), and in the print Put Out More Flags (1992). Hodgkin has always been acutely aware of social relationships between people, physical relationships between objects and the way in which we both shape and are conditioned by our surroundings His abiding interest in the way in which his paintings are placed on the wall or installed in exhibitions is an empathetic demonstration of this regard for the power of the object as a presence in the world. n i c h o l a s serota Hodgkin collected in such depth that despite covering almost every surface of his home many of his acquisitions were not displayed. The basement library held a rich trove of prints, paintings, fabric, books and furniture and exquisite fragments a palette of colours and a reference library for the treasures that he had sought out. Items consigned there were not relics, but an astounding array of source material of the most varied and wonderful kind. Many items were acquired on his travels, but never as mementos. I particularly don t like objects of sentiment: people who have things not because they like and admire them but because they have associations. You should have what you want, what you like, around you. 2 His criteria for acquiring: Things have to be acquired out of necessity, as well as passion. 3 3

4 FRIENDSHIPS Friendship was important to Hodgkin. As his recent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery exhibition so eloquently demonstrated, his relationships with people - fellow artists, writers, collectors, academics, family and friends - have been at the centre of his life but also inform his best work. The two early paintings in the sale are critical to understanding both subject and style. Painted in , Bedroom recalls a moment in a hotel room in Paris together with his wife Julia, and their friend Mrs Burt. Travelling, painted at the same time, reflects a lifelong interest in experiencing other places. His friendships are powerfully represented in his personal collection by the works of fellow artists with whom he was particularly close and, crucially, those whose art he respected and admired. He once described Patrick Caulfield Patrick Caulfield R.A. Sweet Bowl, 1966 Estimate 300, ,000 as the closest I ever came to having a painter-colleague, and it is significant that one of Caulfield s most important still life paintings should end up in his collection. Painted in 1966, Sweet Bowl reveals Caulfield s heightened awareness of both colour and space, an interest that he clearly shared with Hodgkin. The dynamic minimalist style Caulfield developed where the hand of the artist is almost invisible is, however, almost the extreme opposite of Hodgkin s own energetic application of paint and it is interesting to consider their work side by side. Further friendships represented by works that Howard owned include Robyn Denny, Peter Blake and Stephen Buckley. Painting in a studio is naturally a lonely occupation Collecting, on the other hand, brings with it an almost automatic series of introductions, social contacts, with dealers, scholars and occasionally with fellow collectors. h owa r d hodgkin Bhupen Khakhar and Howard Hodgkin in Hodgkin s garden in Wiltshire, circa Photo by Anthony Stokes, Courtesy Anthony Stokes. Bhupen Khakhar De-Luxe Tailors, 1972 Estimate 250, ,000 The presence of two works by Bhupen Khakhar in the collection is also the result of a long and storied friendship between the two artists. De-Luxe Tailors, 1972 (est. 250, ,000) which featured prominently in the recent Tate retrospective of Khakhar s work, epitomises the artist s early style and is a signature work from this period. Hodgkin was in many ways his mentor and in some ways his liberator. Hosting Khakhar in England at various times in the late 1970s, finding him teaching positions and advocating for his works with galleries and museums, Hodgkin helped Khakhar to expand his horizons: his art seemed to become freer, looser, funnier and unflinchingly honest. It was Howard Hodgkin s friendship and encouragement that may have sparked Khakhar s recognition as one of India s greatest 20th century artists. Hodgkin remarked that he found painting solitary but that collecting bought him into contact with like-minded people. Furthermore, the discriminating eye that he developed was nurtured by close friendships with experts in the field. It was Hodgkin s art master at Eton, Wilfrid Blunt, who first introduced him to non- Western art and who inspired him to collect his first examples of Indian painting. Later, Hodgkin became friends with the collector Robert Erskine and through him the network of various Parisian dealers, including Charles Uncle Charlie Ratton. Robert Skelton, then assistant Keeper at the V&A, became a lifelong friend with whom the artist first visited India in It was with Skelton that Hodgkin was able to meet other connoisseurs and collectors, including Jagdish Mittal, Kumar Sangram Singh, Milo C. Beach and Stuart Cary Welch, whose own celebrated collection of arts of the Islamic and Indian world was sold at Sotheby s in

5 THE MAKINGS OF A COLLECTOR Hodgkin first encountered the word antique in a comic, at the age of seven, when he had been evacuated to America during World War II - Minnie Mouse was on the phone talking about the footstool she had just bought and he assumed the word was pronounced Anti-queue. By the time he had his first retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1976, he was better known in the art world as a collector than as a painter. In the 1970s trading in antiques supplemented his income as an artist and art teacher, and he specialised in frames - hitchhiking from Bath to London in his pursuit as he never learned to drive. His quest for particular frames continued throughout his life and they came to play a significant role in his paintings. When he travelled he often sought out frames to take home with him, incorporating them in his paintings of the place or trip from which they originated. So honed was his eye that he particularly delighted in finding overlooked treasures. There was delight in the orphan: finding some misrecognized piece, restoring it to its rightful primary place, his partner comments. He once bought an early 19th century mahogany teapot, which stood on four tiny lion s paw feet. Holes had been drilled through the faces above them. Nobody knew what they were. Howard had them photographed and the images enlarged. They are now identified as late Roman ivory casket fittings. He gave them to the British Museum, in memory of his father, Eliot Hodgkin. Howard came from a long line of collectors and grew up surrounded by the eclectic acquisitions and assemblages of his great-grandparents, John Eliot Hodgkin, and his wife Edith, whose inventory of art was published in 1900 in three volumes as Rariora, listing things wondrous rare and strange. He evidently shared their passion for tiles they collected English tiles, whereas Howard was drawn to tiles from Persia, India, Turkey and Damascus from the 12th century onwards. THE ARTIST S JOURNEY It was partly with the help of his cousin, Margery Fry, that when Hodgkin left school in 1949 he won a place at Camberwell Art School, and then moved on to the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham. At Camberwell, he was taught by leading Euston Road School painters Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream, and remembers considerable peer pressure to conform to a house style. I was already an outsider even then, he recalls, and by the time he went to Corsham, he already had his own artistic language. He studied at the Camberwell School of Art in London and the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham from Critical recognition for his work grew steadily through the 1960s and 1970s, and by 1984 he was asked to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, swiftly followed by being awarded the Turner Prize in Since then Hodgkin has been the subject of numerous major international exhibitions, including the Hayward Gallery, London (1996), Howard Hodgkin: Time and Place , Oxford, Tilburg, California, ( ), Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends, The National Portrait Gallery, London (2017), Howard Hodgkin: In The Pink at Gagosian, Hong Kong (2017), and the current show Howard Hodgkin: Painting India at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire, England, which closes on 8 October Howard Hodgkin: India on Paper will open at the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, on 14 October 2017 and will run until 7 January Click here to download a selection of high resolution images Highlights on view in Mumbai: September Highlights on view in Dubai: 8 12 October Full exhibition in London: October Press Contacts: Sarah Rustin sarah.rustin@sothebys.com Abi Tavener abigail.tavener@sothebys.com Melica Khansari melica.khansari@sothebys.com Further information on all aspects of the collection will be available at For further information: Howard Hodgkin s paintings are represented by Gagosian Gallery and his prints by the Alan Cristea Gallery 5

6 News & Video: Twitter: Instagram: Facebook: Snapchat ID: sothebys YouTube: Weibo: WeChat ID: sothebyshongkong Sotheby s has been uniting collectors with world-class works of art since Sotheby s became the first international auction house when it expanded from London to New York (1955), the first to conduct sales in Hong Kong (1973), India (1992) and France (2001), and the first international fine art auction house in China (2012). Today, Sotheby s presents auctions in 10 different salesrooms, including New York, London, Hong Kong and Paris, and Sotheby s BidNow program allows visitors to view all auctions live online and place bids from anywhere in the world. Sotheby s offers collectors the resources of Sotheby s Financial Services, the world s only full-service art financing company, as well as the collection advisory services of its subsidiary, Art Agency, Partners. Sotheby s presents private sale opportunities in more than 70 categories, including S 2, the gallery arm of Sotheby s Global Fine Art Division, and two retail businesses, Sotheby s Diamonds and Sotheby s Wine. Sotheby s has a global network of 80 offices in 40 countries and is the oldest company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (BID). *Estimates do not include buyer s premium. Prices achieved include the hammer price plus buyer s premium and are net of any fees paid to the purchaser where the purchaser provided an irrevocable bid. Images are available upon request Browse sale catalogues, view original content, stream live auctions and more at and through Sotheby s apps for iphone, ipad, Android, Apple TV and Amazon Fire Footnotes Image caption from left: Shrub Carpet, Joshugan, North Persia, first half 19th century, 3,000 5,000; Male Saint, Spain, 16th century, 1,200 1,800; Pilgrim Flask, Deccan, India, 16th/17th century, 8,000 12,000; Bidriware Bottle (Surahi), Deccan, early 17th century or earlier, 12,000 18,000; Ottoman Candlestick, Turkey, late 18th/ early 19th century, 3,000 4,000; Fauteuil, France 18th century, circa 1775, 2,000 3,000; one of seven Damask fragments (on Fauteuil), France, 19th century, estimate for seven ; Bust of King George II ( ), Michael Rysbrack, circa 1739, 80, ,000; two of three Reliefs with Allegories, Britain, 18th century, 8,000 12,000; Carpet, Spain, possibly Alcaraz, first half 17th century, 8,000 14,000; Mirror, Manor of John Vardy, circa 1740, 30,000 50,000; Bowl, Qing Dynasty, 19th century, ; Bidriware Tray, Deccan, India, 19th century, 3, ; one of four Kirman, Vase carpet fragments (on table), 17th century, estimate for four fragments 800 1,200; Bust of King Louis XIV circa , 20,000 30, Preface to the catalogue for his 1983 exhibition Indian Drawing at the Hayward Gallery, co-curated with Terence McInerney. 2 Mirabel Cecil: Howard s Way, in World of Interiors, February 1989, pp Mirabel Cecil: Howard s Way, in World of Interiors, February 1989, pp