Nantucket, Massachusetts USA

In the course of an immensely productive and varied career spanning six decades as ‘artist-reporter’ (as he modestly liked to style himself) Paul Hogarth (1917-2001) established a secure reputation as the leading watercolourist of his time, working within a long tradition of British artists who have drawn their subject matter from their extensive travels. Over the years Hogarth kept aside for his own pleasure selective examples of his work going back as far as the early 1950s. The Francis Kyle Gallery is now proud to present this collection, largely of watercolours but including also a range of early pencil drawings which have only rarely been offered for sale, as the artist’s first major retrospective.

It was my good luck to meet Paul Hogarth – already a legendary figure in his field, whose name had come to represent a fresh and idiosyncratic way of looking at everyday life in the context of architecture – as he was returning to Britain from a stay of some three years in the United States. For his last twenty-one years the Gallery showed his work exclusively in Maddox Street in some thirteen exhibitions through to his unexpected death, still at the height of his powers, (and on the threshold of a new project) in 2001.

For the Hogarth enthusiast aware of the artist’s adventurous career these were the well-earned, mellow years: a far cry from the Hogarth who had gone at the age of nineteen to fight with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War; who had worked in the later war years as a camouflage artist; was then stirred by strong communist sympathies to travel extensively in the Eastern bloc, particularly in Russia, at a time when the region was inaccessible to other artists from the West; and who with Stanley Spencer and Hugh Casson formed a cultural delegation which for many weeks toured the length and breadth of Red China, culminating in a face to face meeting with Zhou Enlai in 1954.

The turning point in Hogarth’s career, oriented until then around his political convictions, came on a trip to Poland when he witnessed the violent suppression of anti-government demonstrations in support of the 1956 uprising in Hungary. He definitively renounced his communist sympathies, turning instead to a broad programme of travel projects as an ‘artist-reporter’, often working together with writers with humane concerns such as Doris Lessing and Brendan Behan.

As a descendant collaterally of the eighteenth century painter William Hogarth, Hogarth followed, appropriately enough, his forebear’s singular example in favouring ‘the street as his studio’. Working from now on largely in watercolour rather than pen or pencil, Hogarth deployed colour for the first time as a major feature in his work. His fascination with vernacular architecture of every hue, interpreted with his familiar ‘Hogarthian’ distortion, which imparted a human scale and intimacy to every subject – probably the aspect of his work most widely cherished by practising architects – was nurtured in the 1970s with his many journeys across the United States. It was a retrospective survey of this period which in 1980 formed the subject of Hogarth’s first exhibition in Maddox Street, Travels through the 1970s.

In the 1980s and 1990s a succession of projects in collaboration with authors from Lawrence Durrell to John Betjeman and D H Lawrence (posthumously) allowed Hogarth to give fullest expression to his love affair with architecture and its relationship with its users as an expression of humanity, particularly in the Mediterranean lands. From the base he established for himself in the 1960s in Majorca – where he collaborated on occasion with Robert Graves – he embarked in these years on some of his most ambitious travels. For the Graham Greene project alone he visited and interpreted afresh locations which featured in Greene’s fiction in some fifty cities in twenty different countries across four continents.

Celebratory, gently humorous, uncompromising and executed always on the spot under often challenging circumstances, Hogarth’s watercolours and drawings in his characteristically ‘blithe and tender line, backed up with seraphic colouring’ (Lawrence Durrell) locate and capture unerringly a ‘spirit of place’ which has spoken strongly not only to collectors and connoisseurs of the medium but no less to so many of the numberless individuals who are the subject of his works, from the vast throngs who crowded his early touring shows in Russia to the Italians and Portuguese who so enthusiastically endorsed his last London exhibitions in 1999 and 2001.

Francis Kyle