The Saturday interview: Howard Hodgkin at 80

He is given to saying 'Look! Just look!' when asked about his pictures, and insists recent works have nothing to do with depression. Howard Hodgkin reflects on turning 80
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Howard Hodgkin in his London studio
‘There’s less time, so on one goes’ … Howard Hodgkin in his London studio. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

One day nearly half a century ago, Howard Hodgkin stood on the tube platform at London's Paddington station, poised to commit suicide. "Oh, that was amazing," he says as we sit in his studio near the British Museum, "standing on the platform ready to jump". What made him contemplate suicide? Something the artist Richard Smith said. "He said, 'It doesn't matter if you're a painter or not.' Just the kind of poisonous remark that stays in your head and tortures you."

Hodgkin stepped back from the platform having resolved to give up his teaching job at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, Wiltshire. Instead of what he calls "that substitute life", teaching, he would devote himself to painting.

As Sir Howard Hodgkin CBE, Turner prize-winning artist and arguably Britain's greatest living painter, celebrates his 80th birthday next month, it's worth reflecting on how much poorer the world would be had he jumped. Frequently pigeonholed as the last great English romantic painter in the vein of Constable and Turner, Hodgkin is more incendiary than that – a sunburst of an artist who exploded counterintuitively from a British visual culture temperamentally uneasy at depicting sensuality or expressing intellectual thoughts.

In a five-star review of new work at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art in 2010, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones pegged Hodgkin as giddy colourist and daring philosopher in paint. "Ideas, associations, affinities, memories, longings constitute, for Hodgkin, our real experience of the material world," he wrote.

"I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations," said Hodgkin once. But for the most part, Hodgkin doesn't talk about his work. Paint is, for him, more eloquent than words. When people ask him what he means by a painting, he's given to saying: "Look! Just look!" This makes him difficult to interview, as I learned when I met him here in this same studio three years ago, and even harder to write about.

In a catalogue essay, his friend Susan Sontag tried: "Note that Hodgkin says 'emotional situations' not 'emotions'. He is not licensing the attempt to read a specific emotion from a picture, as if that were what the picture was 'about'."

Was it not tempting, then, to paint a picture representing the emotional situation on the Circle and District Line platform all those years ago? "No, much too private. Couldn't." A surprising remark: Hodgkin has always been hailed as an intimist; one who doesn't shy from depicting intimate emotional situations. One of his most intense recent paintings, an explosion of black, red and orange, was called Privacy and Self-Expression in the Bedroom (2004-06).

Are there emotional situations you can't depict? "There are some that are insufficiently visual – that's all." The on-rushing train and you on the platform isn't an image? "Not at all, nor the person I was talking to at the time." Does that mean there are certain emotional situations that are suitable for art? "No, it's not as simple as that. There are some where it becomes inevitable. Where I'll have to do something with it one day, but at the time, not at all." So there are emotional situations that linger for you? "Yes. Years and years. As Andy [his assistant Andy Barker, who sits in on our interview] would tell you, I can sit looking at a wall trying to think what I'm going to do."

Some people, among them Prince Charles, don't get what Hodgkin does. He winces as he recalls the moment royalty visited the mural he made for the facade of Charles Correa's British council building in New Delhi. It's one of Hodgkin's favourite works, not least because he has long been enthralled by India and collected Mughal paintings (Oxford's Ashmolean Museum had a lovely exhibition from his collection this year), but also because he thinks he's rarely succeeded on such a grand scale before. Then the Prince of Wales came to see it in Hodgkin's presence. "That was horrible. He didn't know what to make of it. Poor man. He said: 'When you get close to it, it's really striking.' That was the best he could manage."

A happier memory comes from a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1995. "For me it was a moment of truth – I hate to say that because it sounds far too pompous – but it was that. A nice family came up, and the father said: 'Stop driving my wife mad.' And I couldn't think what he was talking about. I later realised. She understood exactly what my paintings were about. I thought, that's one worry I'll never have again in the same way." What had he done to the poor woman with his art? "It had a cumulative impact on her." Was that why the husband was irked? "He wasn't, really. It was a way of paying me a compliment." Perhaps the Met show did to her what the Oxford show did to Jones, who found himself seduced by the "demonic power of these life-affirming paintings". Tracey Emin has been similarly seduced: she's calling for changes at Broadgate swimming pool in London, now part of a private gym, so that a lovely mosaic Hodgkin did there can be seen by the public.

We're sitting in perhaps one of the most beautiful studios in London, a former dairy suffused with light from a glass roof. Hodgkin comes here almost every morning. He sits and stares at the blank wall. As he's aged, the ratio between thinking and painting has changed. Barker says: "You do most of your work in your head now." Hodgkin finds it hard to stand, and to walk. "I've suddenly grown old and frail. Even crossing the road to go to the BM [British Museum] is more than I can manage at the moment."

Despite his frailties, Hodgkin is working harder than ever. "He's finished 11 paintings so far this year. The normal average would be 10 to 11 pictures a year," says Barker. Among them is a little painting called Porlock, about being interrupted in mid-creative flow, as Coleridge was in Porlock. "It was the phone ringing in this case," says Hodgkin. Some of these new works will be exhibited by his dealer Alan Cristea in his London gallery until October, in celebration of Hodgkin's birthday. The day itself he will spend in France with close friends.

Cristea says his series of handpainted intaglio prints, titled Acquainted with the Night, are probably the largest prints ever made. The title comes from Robert Frost's poem, often interpreted as describing depression. The reference might make you think he was depressed. "No, no!" exclaims Hodgkin. "I mean, look." He points to a work from the new suite of prints, entitled Attack. "That's not a picture of depression. I'm not depressed. Where does depression come in?"

The title Acquainted with the Night is recycled. Hodgkin used it for his first lithograph print in 1953. "It's a poem I much admire, and many years ago when I was a student, Clifford Ellis, who was the principal of the art college I was at, commissioned several illustrations to poems, and he offered me that."

Was he thinking you were a depressive type and it might suit you? "Not at all, no. He thought the nocturnal would appeal to me, which it did." Do you remember what it looks like? "I remember vaguely what it looked like." After the interview, his partner, the music critic Antony Peattie, emails to say: "I wish someone would come forward with a copy and let us photograph it!" So if you have a copy, get in touch.

Hodgkin knew he was going to be a painter aged six, after doing a bright red painting of a woman's face. Nobody else shared his conviction. When I interviewed him in 2009 he told me he remembered running away from school in frustration. Which school? "I can't remember. Eton, Bryanston, Pangbourne – I ran away from them all." Why? "Because I wanted to be an artist and no one wanted me to be." But this time he was stopped by a policeman. "It was a great moment. He was the first person who ever took me seriously." Your parents weren't encouraging? "No, they weren't."

Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born in Hammersmith on 6 August 1932. His father worked for ICI and was a noted amateur horticulturist. His mother, a housewife, was also a botanical illustrator. His parents bought one of Hodgkin's paintings in 1967. "But eventually," Hodgkin said once, "my father said that he couldn't possibly hang it up in the house. And he was quite right. It was a brown-furniture sort of house, and there was just nowhere for it to go." Eventually, they gave it to the Tate.

The critic David Sylvester wrote that Hodgkin found his pictorial language early on and exploited it ever since. "No! It never comes. You keep struggling to find it. It's particularly sad in England. You come across these artists who think they've found it, and haven't, but they've grown old gracefully. They're like some Saga holidays advertisement." You're not going to name names? "No, but I can see you're thinking of them!" Was your artistic evolution more like Matisse's – a series of hard-won liberations from previous constraints? "Exactly. 'Liberation from previous constraints' is excellent."

It's difficult not to imagine Hodgkin's sexuality as similarly liberated from previous constraints. He was married in 1955 and had two sons (Louis and Sam) with his wife, Julia Lane. Today he's a gay icon. Or, rather, an unwitting gay icon. Were you proud to be on the Independent's Pink List? "What is that?" The newspaper's annual list of gay icons. You're a regular fixture – beneath Carol Ann Duffy but on top of Rabbi Lionel Blue, so to speak. Hodgkin looks blank. "You're often in them," says Barker. "Well, good," says Hodgkin. "I'm glad." You were cited for your contribution to the emotional well being of – Hodgkin interrupts " … gay people everywhere, probably".

The citation seems to suggest there's a therapeutic value to your work. Is there? "No, I don't think there is. I have painted, very rarely, small pictures for people who are dying, or great friends who are sliding over the edge. But I don't believe in it."

He tells me it's a great relief when he sells pictures, so he can get them out of his sight. You don't want to be haunted by your artworks? "No, I do rather lose interest in them. Once I'm finished, I'm out of here. I forget about them as much as I can." Why do you want to forget them? "It makes room for the next thing, which is very important. And that does come from old age, I suspect." Why? "There's less time, so on one goes." Very Beckett. But you're not painting for posterity? "I don't think of posterity ever. What would be the point? I wouldn't be around to enjoy it all."

Time for pictures. Sarah, the photographer, praises Hodgkin. "You have exactly the right expression," she says, "of pain and scepticism." He giggles himself out of that expression. Sarah tells Hodgkin she's very open to ideas if he thinks her composition is ghastly. "On the contrary, I think the only ghastly idea is to put me in it."

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