Eliot Hodgkin (1905-1987) is best known as a painter of still life
subjects beautifully executed in tempera. His depictions of
everyday objects - such as lemons, radishes, dead leaves and
feathers - have always been much prized by collectors. Less well
known are his haunting views of bomb-sites in London after World
War II, with rank weeds and wildflowers pushing up through mounds
of rubble. This revealing, fully illustrated catalogue accompanies
the first survey exhibition on the artist since 1990. Eliot Hodgkin
is best known for his still life paintings in tempera, but there
are several other facets of his career as an artist which have
never been fully explored. In the 1930s, once he had got into his
stride, he produced large, almost flamboyant flower pieces in oil,
but towards the end of the decade his style became more precise as
he began to discover the refined quality of tempera as a medium.
His subjects took on a distinctly surrealist treatment, echoes of
Dali, and this led on to an almost obsessive attention to detail,
each painting being preceded by an elaborate, scaled drawing in
pencil and brown wash with colour notes scribbled all over the
sheet. Hodgkin's 1940s paintings of the City of London after
bombing - half-ruined buildings, mounds of rubble and rank weeds -
are mesmerizing and will come as a surprise to many viewers. In the
next decade there is more concentration on still life subjects,
although there are some highly evocative landscapes in the 1950s
and 1960s resulting from holiday tours through France, Switzerland
and Italy. However, it is as an exquisite painter of objects,
usually of ordinary things like lemons, radishes, birds' eggs, dead
leaves etc., that Hodgkin is best known for among art connoisseurs.
It is the `placement' of the object, as much as the way the surface
texture is described in paint, that makes these small pictures
fascinating and deeply memorable. Hodgkin is very much in the
tradition of Adriaen Coorte and Sanchez Cotan, two artists that he
much admired. Hodgkin and his wife were also keen art collectors,
and, not surprisingly, they owned a fine still life painting by
Giorgio Morandi, which now has its home in the Tate Gallery.
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