Face is a portrait of Howard Hodgkin’s friend Kate Gordon-Cumming. She was also depicted three years earlier in a frontal head-and-shoulders portrait, Portrait (fig. 1). Both paintings depict the sitter’s head and shoulders in a frontal, larger-than-life composition. In Face, the cupid’s bow of Gordon-Cumming’s upper lip is painted in lipstick red; the bridge of her nose is green. As Hodgkin’s brush marks became more legible through the sixties, so the represented subject came to dissolve in the constellation of painted forms. In a marked transgression from Portrait, the surface of Face is obfuscated by round-edged, cleanly delineated areas of opaque white paint. They counterpoint the shapes of the underlying painting, while also echoing the pale, translucent areas of white in the lower layers. The layers and translucency of the underlying painting have a rich sense of depth and modelling, in contrast to the white shapes at the surface, which have an abrupt sense of flatness. These white shapes radically simplify the composition of the painting. By partially obscuring the image of the figure, they lessen the legibility of the subject and heighten the sense of abstract design.

Notwithstanding the fluent, gestural execution of Face, it was the product of an extended process. There is a longstanding misperception about the degree of preparation involved in Hodgkin’s paintings, and his one-time dealer Anthony d’Offay once remarked to the artist: ‘all your best pictures look as if they’ve been painted in an afternoon.’ Invariably this was never the case. As with Hodgkin’s later work, Face was composed not only as a flat surface but by layering: partially visible planes interlock with others lower down (closer to the support) or higher up (closer to the final, topmost layers of paint). Drying time, which was necessary between fresh coats of paint, also afforded the artist thinking time. Furthermore, the relationship between Portrait and Face demonstrates the sustained development that underpinned many of Hodgkin’s paintings. In Face, beneath the white shapes, the painting of the figure reproduces the frontal composition of Portrait but does so using a different group of marks. It is a more concise, simplified, gestural statement of the same subject. The marks are mostly flat and impersonal, with little or no texture. With studious dexterity, a clean brush loaded with a single colour was applied in discrete, discernible strokes or blotches. Considerable forethought was required to relate the subject with such pithy execution.

In Face, the areas of opaque white paint act as a stencil and expose underlying areas of contrastingly bright, limpid painting. In the sixties, Hodgkin frequently obfuscated large areas of his paintings with opaque monochrome paint—often black or white—which created a partial mesh over the underlying polychrome painting. The process prefigured Hodgkin’s mature style in which underlayers, accumulated in earlier stages, were apparent as texture and traces of colour at the surface. It was described by the curator Richard Morphet in an essay about Hodgkin published in 1976. He called it ‘this striking device, this final act of obliteration of most of the painting, performed in a fusion of calculation with emotional fervour’. Other works that use this formal device include Girl Asleep (1964) [Price 2006, no. 49], Large Japanese Screen (1964–66, British Council Collection) (fig. 2) and Mrs K (1966–67) [Price 2006, no. 70]. In all cases, these stencil-like layers of paint were intentionally characterless besides the varied, colourful painting contained in the lower layers. These surfaces were added in the final stages of a painting, and they demonstrate considerable daring and a willingness to overwrite earlier work, the execution of which sometimes occurred years earlier.

The device of stencil-like obfuscation can be interpreted as a radical intervention, which Hodgkin used to complete paintings that had otherwise reached an impasse. Interviewed by David Sylvester in 1982, Hodgkin spoke of ‘when a picture of mine is going wrong’ and how ‘most of my pictures have had nine, ten, twelve lives.’ But always he had ‘total confidence’ that he could always ‘get it back’ by going ‘back to the subject’. With Face, the final additions of opaque white paint were intended to simplify the painting, and they refocused attention upon salient aspects of the underlying image. Obfuscation might also be interpreted as a metaphorical vale, which symbolises the distance between the remembered subject and the present.

Face was apparently completed in the first six months of 1965, prior to its inclusion in the Prix Internationale de Peinture, which opened in June that year, and its reproduction in the summer issue of the RCA journal Ark. The following year it was shown in Arthur Tooth & Sons’ exhibition Colour, Form and Texture. The exhibition also included a painting on panel by Hodgkin, Girl on a Sofa [Price 2006, no. 55], alongside work by an eclectic group of artists—William Crozier, Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis, Allen Jones, etc.—which suggests the difficulty that contemporary curators, dealers and buyers experienced when attempting to situate Hodgkin’s work.