‘I just wanted great art’ is how Howard Hodgkin, famous print-maker and painter, explains the rationale behind his collection of Indian paintings. His collection, exhibited in full for the first time at the Ashmolean this spring, is an eclectic medley of sketches, portraits, marblings, large-scale paintings and mini-scenes. Although the Ashmolean has sought to group the pieces into regional sections (the Mughal, the Daccani, the Pahari etc.), this grouping is only superficially successful. The paintings are so soaked in the culture of the nation that they form a cohesive representation of the various styles of national art than they do of regional styles.
The exhibition opens with a simple statement from Hodgkin: ‘These pictures were chosen because I thought they were beautiful … and not for any scholarly purposes.’
In the first room, Moghul, the paintings are a riot of colourfully clashing hunters and leopards; mythological lady archers, and doped up dervishes, mixed in with sober portraits of elephants, maharajas, and yet more elephants. There’s even one named ‘Lord of happiness’, who is decorated with enough bells to adorn the feet of a dozen dancers.
These sedate elephant portraits are beautiful, but the next rooms celebrate a different side of these powerful animals. In one stunning mixed media picture an elephant crashes in from the left side of the composition, splaying a shrieking Guernica-like horse beneath it. The animals are rendered in simple brush drawing but it is the background which makes the picture: a whirligig of vibrant and abstract marbling which dramatises the conflict, swirling around and about the clashing beasts in a pulsating, technicolour roar of expressive pattern.
Violence is countered with very different kinds of paintings. Only a little further on, in an architecturally mapped-out courtyard, a nobleman sporting a pair of pink slippers gazes ruminatively at a goose. In the next room, in a three scene composition, a nobleman is entertained by the ladies of his court. He is shown watching a dancer perform, bathing in a pool, and helping the women to gather blossoms which hover and float about the scene, as though the figures have stumbled into a snowstorm of pink petals.
It is a very eclectic mix of paintings. There is certainly no ‘scholarly purpose,’ as Hodgkin puts it, but it is a beautiful selection, built up and honed over a lifetime. Even if the 115 paintings that we can see have little relation to each other, they are each individually beautiful.
