A painting by the British abstractionist Howard Hodgkin has been slapped with an export bar by the DCMS. Ministers have placed a ban on Mrs Acton in Delhi, valued at £1,753,400. This will give UK galleries and institutions until 4 June to make a case for keeping it here. It’s a significant work not just because of the price point, which seems high for the artist’s work.
Hodgkin first went to India in 1964, and it never left him. By 1967, he was back, keeping detailed travel diaries and spending days with John Stewart Acton, the British Council representative in Delhi, and his wife. Out of that came this painting. Mrs Acton on a terrace, a specific afternoon, specific light, specific people. That’s all it is, and that’s everything it is. Hodgkin had no interest in being called an abstract painter. “Representational pictures of emotional situations” was his own phrase for it, and it remains a more honest account of what he was doing than anything the critics came up with.
Mrs Acton in Delhi was painted between 1967 and 1971, which extended the gestation period to be entirely characteristic, and it sits at a hinge point in his development. The early Pop influences are still visible, the debt to Hockney, Kitaj, and Caulfield legible if you look, but the emotive abstraction that would define his mature work is already pushing through bold colour, swirling motifs, European and Indian visual traditions folding into each other. Mark Hallett of the RCEWA put it plainly: it shows Hodgkin at his best.
The provenance adds another layer. It passed through the J. Walter Thompson Collection the advertising agency’s corporate art holdings, making it part of a wider story about how British corporations engaged with contemporary art in the postwar decades. That history is less studied than it deserves, and works like this are part of the evidence. It also featured prominently in the 2017 UK-India Year of Culture, which at least confirms that its diplomatic and cultural significance has been recognised well beyond the gallery circuit.
Hodgkin died in 2017. His reputation, which dipped slightly in the years around his death as reputations sometimes do, has been recovering steadily. A painting of this quality and biographical weight shouldn’t be leaving.
The deferral period runs to 4 June 2026. Anyone with serious intent and the funds should contact the RCEWA at rcewa@artscouncil.org.uk or 020 7268 0534. The recommended purchase price is £1,753,400 plus VAT. A Tate acquisition feels like the obvious answer, but obvious answers have a way of not happening quickly enough in these situations.
This is not the first time this has occurred. Last year, a Barbara Hepworth Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form), Pale Blue and Red, 1943, was sold at Christie’s London for £3.5 million and immediately hit an export bar. The Hepworth Wakefield and Art Fund, between them, raised £3.8 million and brought it home. It can be done. The question is whether the will and the money arrive in the same place at the same time.
Photo Howard Hodgkin: Mrs Acton In Delhi Courtrsy Bonhams