Creativity Quote by Howard Hodgkin

Hodgkin’s line is a quiet provocation aimed at the museum habit of outsourcing looking to language. “Words come between” frames text not as a helpful guide but as a physical obstruction, like glare on glass: the label, the wall essay, the critical vocabulary that slides in front of the work and starts doing the seeing for you. It’s a defense of painting’s core claim that meaning can be carried by color, touch, scale, and rhythm without translation into tidy sentences.

The subtext is also strategic. Hodgkin’s own paintings, often called “abstract” yet rooted in memory and emotional weather, practically bait viewers into asking, What is it of? Words promise an answer, a story you can hold. Hodgkin resists that bargain. He’s not anti-intellectual; he’s suspicious of the kind of interpretation that closes the experience too quickly, turning an encounter into a solved puzzle. Language, in his view, can reduce sensation to a caption and ambiguity to a category.

Context matters: postwar British painting lived under a thick fog of critical terms and movements, while galleries increasingly trained audiences to read before they look. Hodgkin pushes back with a painter’s ethics: attention first, explanation later, if at all. The remark isn’t a rejection of criticism so much as a warning about sequence and power. Once a description lands, it colonizes perception. You start hunting for confirmation instead of letting the picture change you on its own terms.