Life & Mortality Quote by Howard Hodgkin

Hodgkin’s line lands like a confession dressed up as practical advice: the dead are easier to be intimate with. On the surface it’s a studio habit, a preference for old masters over the churn of the current scene. Underneath, it’s a canny refusal of the social economy of “contemporary” art, where looking at peers is never innocent. To study a living rival is to enter a hall of mirrors: envy, anxiety, gossip, market positioning, the fear of being “influenced” in a way that will be noticed and scored. The dead don’t tweet. They don’t show up at the opening. Their work can’t be weaponized as a comparison in real time.

“It’s much easier to get near their paintings” is the pivot, and it’s doing double duty. Literally, museums and archives make proximity possible; your relationship is mediated by canvases rather than personalities. Psychologically, distance becomes a form of access. Once the artist is gone, the work stops being a negotiation with an ego and turns into a conversation with an object and a legacy. You can press your face up to the brushwork without feeling like you’re trespassing on someone’s private territory.

Coming from Hodgkin, whose paintings are famously memory-soaked and emotionally atmospheric, the remark also reads as a defense of internal weather over external trend. He’s not arguing against the present; he’s choosing a cleaner kind of influence: one that’s been filtered by time, stripped of hype, leaving only what still insists on being seen.