Howard Hodgkin Last Paintings, Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, review: One great work, but the rest feel off-the-cuff

The painter Howard Hodgkin died in March of last year. This show of 32 works is billed as his “Last Paintings”. The very title resonates, causes poignant twinges.

We want these works to be a kind of great summation of everything that he ever achieved, a fittingly resounding departure from the world, an emphatic fighting through all that physical weakening (he was wheelchair-bound towards the end of his life), and perhaps, to quote Dylan Thomas, even a memorable rage against the dying of the light.

None of this quite happens. Only one of these paintings, Portrait of the Artist Listening to Music (2011-16), could truly be described as great. Hodgkin wields the conductor’s baton. The brush strokes are furious, impassioned. It does indeed feel, in its shapely rising and fallings, its sweeping, turbulent, symphonic gesturings, as if it might have bottled the very soul of music. Its gilded frame is ostentatious to the pointy of kitschy absurdity. That frame is also wormy, which quite pleases in its way.

The gallery knows how good this painting is. It is the image on the cover of the catalogue. It also faces us as we enter the gallery, meets our eyeline, at a distance of about 50 yards. It is the largest work in the show. It is also the work over which he toiled the longest (it often took him years to finish a painting).

Half a dozen of the rest are very good too. But scarcely vintage Hodgkin.

Hodgkin always denied that his paintings were works of abstraction. He called them evocations of emotional situations. When we look at the works here, we sort of understand what he is getting at.

They are often tremendously emotional things – his juxtapositions of colours, often brash syncopations; the arcing turns of his mark making. There is a lot of broody evocation of the elements in this show. This is a man who would readily weep over the sentimentality of Somerset Maugham.

Unfortunately, while these late works often look like simpler, sparer versions of earlier works, many of them seem to lack intensity. They often feel like emotionally pallid notations, off the cuff gesturings towards completion rather than the finished things. Many of them feel a little too small for these walls. Were they all completely finished to his satisfaction before he died? Or did death rudely interpose itself? The catalogue goes nowhere near these hypersensitive topics.

Did Hodgkin perhaps paint too much in his later years? Was he satisfied with less? He certainly had a lot of shows staged by various Gagosian galleries throughout the world in his last years: eight between 2008 and 2017. Did he turn himself into a bit of a painter for the production line as his fame grew and grew? Perish the irreverence of such a thought. Which brings us on to commerce.

Twenty-six of the 32 works in this show are for sale. If you ask how much, you will not be told.

Until 28 July (gagosian.com)