True colours or waste of emulsion? ... Hodgkin's Cafeteria at the Grand Palais displayed against a green background at Tate Britain.
The colours hit you as soon as you walk into the Howard Hodgkin exhibition at Tate Britain - lilac and gold, blue and brown ... and these are just the colours of the walls.
Some vermilion spark had the bright idea of painting the walls in every room of Hodgkin's retrospective a different colour that, presumably, is meant to compliment, or say something about, the works. What is most distracting is the variety. If the entire show were hung against black walls, you would get used to it. The constant variation in background hue implies a running commentary - you wonder why the particular section you're in is one colour rather than another.
The worst rooms use wishy washy DIY shades. I wondered if they were using up excess stock of the Tate house paints launched a few years ago.
This folly stays in your memory after you leave the show in a way that competes with, and corrupts, the after-image of Hodgkin's paintings. On the other hand, it does achieve something. It is such a stupidly insensitive setting that it functions as an extreme phenomenological test of Hodgkin.
Those sumptuous painted oval panels that look like they should be in a decaying stately home above a marble mantelpiece are exhibited in a setting as bizarrely inappropriate as if they were propped in the street. And they survive. The vulgar treatment reveals a core of scintillating imagination in Hodgkin's sensual smears that convinced me, who arrived a sceptic, that here is a real painter.
So perhaps curators should deliberately subject artists to the most unhelpful display they can think of, just to see if the art can stand it. Video art should be shown in brightly lit galleries, or on primetime television before Dr Who. Drawings by Michelangelo should be exhibited at the White Cube gallery in London. Damien Hirst should show at the RA summer exhibition. Let chaos rule and quality glisten like a diamond in the morass.
