Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin – Escape from school to art studies

Howard Hodgkin was born in Hammersmith, London on 6 August 1932 and spent his childhood in Dorset. The son of the industry manager, hobby gardener and war hero Eliot Hodgkin, he probably inherited his artistic talent from his mother Katherine who worked as a botanical illustrator. During the Second World War, Hodgkin was evacuated with his sister and mother to the USA and during their three-year stay on Long Island, New York, he wandered through the Museum of Modern Art, admiring the works of Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnar and Édouard Vuillard, discovering his passion for art. After the war, he attended Eton College and Bryanston School in Dorset, but decided early on to pursue a career as an artist and left school prematurely, against the wishes of his parents. He went instead to the Camberwell Art School followed later by the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham. There, he himself gave tuition, where his most prominent student was Edward Piper, whom he taught drawing.

Reclaiming lost time with art

Howard Hodgkin often processed memories of past moments in his pictures and reflected this in the naming of his works, called for example Dinner at West Hill (1966) or Goodbye to the Bay of Naples (1980/82). For him, the artistic examination of past experiences meant a recovery of that which has happened, using the creative imaginative power, an act that only artists were capable of. With his paintings, he was to make thoughts and feelings tangible and to form a visible realisation from these fleeting memories. To reach this, Hodgkin broke with painting conventions and drove his paintbrush against the wood stretcher and over the edges of the picture. One of his earliest extant works is the picture Memoirs, dated 1949, which shows the then 17-year-old painter listening to a female figure lying on a sofa. The angular forms of the figures anticipate the imminent development towards abstraction. 

International success as painter and graphic artist

Howard Hodgkin held his first solo exhibition in London in 1962 and in 1980 took part in a group exhibition at the renowned Hayward Gallery, presenting his pictures alongside artists such as Terry Setch, Patrick Caulfield, Gillian Ayres, Basil Beattie, Anthony Caro, and Ben Nicholson. In 1984, he represented his homeland of Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Howard Hodgkin has received prizes and awards for his art, was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1977, won the Turner Prize in 1985, followed by the award of Knight Bachelor in 1992 and Companion of Honour in 2003. Alongside painting, print graphics was an important facet of his work; from the 1950s, he also translated his visual language onto paper, produced stage designs for the Royal Ballet and a stamp for the Royal Mail, as well as textiles and posters for the Olympic Games in Sarajevo, London, Sotchi and Rio de Janeiro.

Howard Hodgkin died in London on 9 March 2017.