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Under the Indian sky

British artist Howard Hodgkin's love for Bombay is evident in his latest exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield in the UK, finds Gargi Gupta

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Late British artist Howard Hodgkin —Prakash RaoCourtesy Howard Hodgkin/Gagosian
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Howard Hodgkin may not be a familiar name in India, but few who have walked through the portals of the British Council building in Delhi will have failed to notice the black-on-white mural on its facade, or been intrigued by what looks like an enormous banyan tree from afar, but breaks down into strange sinuous shapes closer up. Executed in collaboration with prominent Indian architect, the late Charles Correa, it's a work by Hodgkin, the famous British painter, who died in March this year.

It's the best known evidence of Hodgkin's India connection, one that began way back in 1964, the year the artist first visited India, and was sustained over near annual visits to the country until, finally, four years ago, he took up a studio in Colaba where he remained three months of the year, painting. The engagement with India was as productive as it was long-standing, and Hodgkin made several paintings of what he saw in India — the landscape, the weather, the sky, the river, the people he met and became friends with, and Bombay, the city where he landed in when he first came to India, and ended up spending his first night on a railway station!

Thirty-five of his India paintings, which form a significant part of Hodgkin's oeuvre, are on show now at Howard Hodgkin: Painting India, at The Hepworth Wakefield, a young gallery in West Yorkshire, England, which just last week won the Art Fund Museum of the Year Award for 2017. The show is part of the UK-India Year of Culture, a cultural exchange programme of the British and Indian governments.

Besides the paintings, the show also includes little-seen photographs, journals that he wrote about his travels through the length and breadth of India, and also some miniature paintings from his much-spoken off collection. In fact, it was Hodgkin's fascination for Mughal miniatures, that first brought him to India as travelling companion to Robert Skelton, deputy keeper of the Indian section of the Victoria & Albert Museum — both of them on the lookout for distinctive pieces to take back to London. Of course, Hodgkin's own paintings, which are best described as abstract expressions in colour of mood or emotion, bear no or little similarity to the Indian miniatures he was so passionate about.

Miniatures were not the only thing in India Hodgkin was passionate about — there was the artist Bhupen Khakhar. The two had met sometime in the late 1970s, after Hodgkin had seen and admired Khakhar's work at the Third Triennale-India in 1975, and become firm friends. Such was the bond that Hodgkin, who was closely associated with the show's mounting, "started crying" at the thought of his departed friend when the conversation turned to him, says the show's curator Eleanor Clayton​. The Hepworth show has a painting of Khakhar by Hodgkin, From the House of Bhupen Khakhar, that the latter had believed was lost, until it was traced by the museum's curators to a private collector in Wyoming, says Clayton.

This story of Hodgkin's friendship with Khakhar, with artist Vivan Sundaram and art critic Geeta Kapur, with the architect Charles Correa; of his travels across India with the writers Bruce Chatwin and Julian Barnes, hint a rich cross-cultural network about which little is known, in India at least. The show at The Hepworth uncovers one strand of this network — there must be many others waiting to be brought to light.

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