Howard Hodgkin: A life In Colour

As two major shows celebrate the great British painter’s work, Rosalind Ormiston looks at the life and inspiration behind his near-abstract art

- Rosalind Ormiston

On 9 March this year the news one of Britain’s greatest artists, Sir Howard Hodgkin CH CBE, painter and printmaker, had died, aged 84, rocked the art world. His paintings are instantly recognisable for their celebration of sensational colour in near-abstract form. Personal relationships with friends and colleagues, and places important to Hodgkin, were committed to memory and reborn in paintings of emotional sensuality, generating a unique body of work. To some, his painterly style – of dashing blobs and slashes and swaying, pigment-loaded brushstrokes – is abstract, but Hodgkin said: “The subject matter of my pictures is of primary importance. I could not make a picture that was not ‘about’ anything; I wouldn’t even know how to begin a picture without a subject.” We should look closely into the heart of each work by the artist to see its subject framed there in his mind’s eye.

ARTISTIC ASPIRATIONS

Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born in Hammersmith, London, on 6 August 1932, into what he described as a “fairly but not very wealthy middle-class”. His first thoughts toward becoming a painter were partly inspired by a David Cox watercolour hanging over a mantelpiece in the family home. He was five years old. While evacuated to Long Island, USA, with his mother and sister from 1940-43, he was inspired by visits to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and seeing works by Léger, Matisse, Picasso and Stuart Davis, along with other modern and contemporary artists.