"The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed"
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Hodgkin is poking a thumb in the eye of the tidy museum story that modern art “flattened” painting while the Renaissance “invented” depth. His claim that the picture surface “recedes” just as much in the 20th century is a sly reversal: perspective isn’t a historical achievement you unlock once and then move past, it’s a perpetual psychological effect. A canvas always offers two simultaneous facts - pigment on a literal plane and an invitation to enter an implied space. Modernism didn’t end illusion; it just changed the alibis for it.
The sharper barb is in the second sentence. “The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed” sounds conservative, even reactionary, until you hear the real target: the fetish for novelty. Hodgkin is insisting that painting’s drama doesn’t come from new gadgets but from persistent problems - how edges create distance, how color creates atmosphere, how a mark can be both a thing and a depiction. Oil, brush, ground, and the artist’s hand still do most of the heavy lifting; the revolution is in emphasis, not equipment.
Context matters: Hodgkin’s own work lives in that tense zone between abstraction and memory. He built images that feel like rooms, encounters, afterimages - spaces you “step into” even when the geometry is minimal. So the line doubles as a defense of painting’s ongoing relevance: not because it reinvents itself every decade, but because it keeps re-engineering perception with stubbornly familiar means.
The sharper barb is in the second sentence. “The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed” sounds conservative, even reactionary, until you hear the real target: the fetish for novelty. Hodgkin is insisting that painting’s drama doesn’t come from new gadgets but from persistent problems - how edges create distance, how color creates atmosphere, how a mark can be both a thing and a depiction. Oil, brush, ground, and the artist’s hand still do most of the heavy lifting; the revolution is in emphasis, not equipment.
Context matters: Hodgkin’s own work lives in that tense zone between abstraction and memory. He built images that feel like rooms, encounters, afterimages - spaces you “step into” even when the geometry is minimal. So the line doubles as a defense of painting’s ongoing relevance: not because it reinvents itself every decade, but because it keeps re-engineering perception with stubbornly familiar means.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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