Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin was born in London on 6 August 1932. During World War II he was evacuated to Long Island, USA. In New York’s Museum of Modern Art he encountered the work of Stuart Davis, Matisse, Vuillard and Bonnard.

Back in Britain in 1943 his art teacher Wilfrid Blunt introduced him to Indian art and to the idea of collecting it. Nevertheless, he kept running away from school, convinced that study would impede his progress as an artist. Hodgkin supported his collecting by dealing in picture frames.

As a student at Camberwell and Corsham Hodgkin did not fit in with the dominant Euston Road ethos. Afterwards he did not become a Pop artist, join the Situation Movement, the School of London or the Royal Academy. He was thirty before he had his first solo show.

He moved from portraits of his friends to more abstracted work that he called representational pictures of emotional situations. He first visited India in 1964 and returned ‘as often as possible’. He once said that he ‘couldn’t work without it.’ He showed with Knoedler Gallery in New York, Leslie Waddington and Anthony D’Offay in London before joining Gagosian Gallery. Among his print publishers were Petersburg Press and Alan Cristea.

Hodgkin worked on set designs for Ballet Rambert, the Royal Ballet and the Mark Morris Dance Group. He designed a stamp for the Royal Mail and textiles for Designers Guild, as well as posters/prints for the Olympic Games, 2012 - 2016. His mural in black stone and white marble fronts the façade of the British Council Headquarters in New Delhi, opened in 1992.

Retrospectives of Hodgkin’s paintings began with a show at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford in 1976, curated by Nicholas Serota, who was also responsible for his retrospective at Tate Britain in 2006. Hodgkin represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1984 and, won the Turner Prize in 1985. He was knighted in 1992 and made a Companion of Honour in 2003. He died on 9 March 2017.

For more information visit www.howard-hodgkin.com