Born: August 6, 1932 - Hammersmith, London, UK
Died: March 9, 2017 - London, UK
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"[P]ainters [...] have to build up a reservoir of feeling which is real but which can be tapped on demand."
Summary of Howard Hodgkin
Howard Hodgkin was amongst the last great luminaries of a tradition of twentieth-century British abstraction that included figures such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Many older artists associated with this tradition could be loosely attached to particular styles or movements, such as the St. Ives School of the mid-twentieth century. But Hodgkin was a more singular presence in the British art world, not least because his own contemporaries and friends included the British Pop artists: Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Peter Blake, and others. Hodgkin was thus a curious liminal figure, celebrated for an emotionally invested abstraction at a time when such an approach had largely been consigned to recent art history. At their best, Hodgkin's bold canvases and panel-based paintings occupy a thrilling intersection between pure arrangement of color and texture and subtly evocative figuration.
Key Ideas
Howard Hodgkin was born into a middle-class family in London in 1932. His maternal grandfather, Gordon Hewart, was Lord Chief Justice between 1922 and 1940, and his cousins included the art critic Roger Fry, the artist Eliot Hodgkin, and the conductor John Eliot Gardiner. By the age of five he had already decided to become a painter, a fact he often publicly commented on later in life. His upbringing was disturbed by the Second World War, and between 1940 and 1943 he lived on Long Island in New York with his mother and older sister, avoiding the Blitz in Britain. This was a formative time for Hodgkin. He visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and took an interest in paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and Stuart Davis.
Important Art by Howard Hodgkin | |
 Artwork Images | Indian Subject (Blue) (1965-69)Artwork description & Analysis: This work is a typical example of the semi-abstract, loosely representational style that Hodgkin developed in the 1960s, in which the picture-surface is smooth and flat, constructed from areas of rectilinear, brilliantly colorful paint. A distinction between ground below and sky above is implied by a break between the various outlined shapes suggested in the lower half of the painting - a palm, a pink oval, a yellow circle, a blue triangle - and the flowing area at the top, consisting of reds, pinks and yellows. The work suggests Hodgkin's attempts to visually imbibe the dazzling colors of the Indian subcontinent, which contrasted so strongly with the muted palette he associated with England. It was an ambience he sought to capture frequently for the rest of his career. Oil on wood - private collection |
 Artwork Images | Grantchester Road (1975)Artwork description & Analysis: Like all of Hodgkin's mature work, this painting lies somewhere between representation and abstraction. The title, and certain details of the painting itself, suggest that we are looking into a domestic interior. In the middle of the picture are a chimney breast and perhaps a small fireplace, though both motifs are incorporated into a partly non-representational arrangement of colorful shapes. Hodgkin also used strong patterning to create surface-effects bearing no resemblance to any subject-matter. The spots which dominate this composition - black on orange at the edges, red on blue and orange on the chimney breast - are distinctive of his style of painting during the first mature stage of his career. Oil on wood - Pallant House Gallery, Chichester |
 Artwork Images | Rain (1984-89)Artwork description & Analysis: This work, in the style that is perhaps most readily associated with Hodgkin, demonstrates the impressive fluency that he had achieved as a painter by the 1980s. The brushwork in Rain is broader, his use of color is more focused and cohesive, than in earlier works, and he seems less concerned with suggesting a representational setting, though he continues to generate a subtle sense of depth. As with many of his later works, the painted frame - created with loosely handled applications of a loaded brush - is a prominent feature. We seem to peer through this frame into a central space containing a receding landscape, or perhaps a more abstract space, consisting of a patchwork of single brushstrokes laid on top of one another. Having previously created pictures on a domestic scale, the size of Rain - nearly two meters wide - partly reflects the institutional recognition and creative freedom that Hodgkin was enjoying at the time. The curator Nicholas Serota wrote at the time of Hodgkin's death that "[a]s his confidence grew his paintings became bigger, and he painted with so much more confidence, almost with abandon." Oil on composite panel - Tate Gallery, London |
More Howard Hodgkin Artwork and Analysis:
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Content compiled and written by Luke Farey
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Greg Thomas
" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Luke Farey
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Greg Thomas
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First published on 02 Sep 2018. Updated and modified regularly. 
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