Howard Hodgkin

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Sir Gordon Howard Eliott Hodgkin (6 August 1932-to-September 2017) was a British painter and printmaker.

His art is most often associated with abstraction.

Early life

Gordon Howard Hodgkin was born in Hammersmith, London, the son of Eliot Hodgkin (1905-1973), a chemical engineer and an amateur horticulturist, and Katherine, a botanical illustrator. Eliot Hodgkin, an RAF officer, who rose to Wing Commander and was assistant to Sefton Delmer in executing his black propaganda drive against Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Gordon Hewart, the eldest grandson of his great-grandfather, was a journalist, advocate, Member of Parliament (MP) and Lord Justice; and scientist Thomas Hodgkin was his grandfather's older brother. Hodgkin was a cousin of English still life painter Eliot Hodgkin (1905-1977).

Hodgkin and his mother and sister were evacuated to the United States, where they lived on Long Island, New York, during the Second World War. He was educated at Eton College and then at Bryanston School in Dorset, before returning to Eton College. In early childhood, he had decided on a career in art and moved away from school to pursue this.

He studied at the Camberwell Art School and later at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, where Edward Piper studied drawing under him.

Personal life and death

Hodgkin married Julia Lane in 1955, by whom he had two children. Even before he was married, Hodgkin knew he was gay and later divorced his wife. In 2009, The Independent revealed that he had been together with his partner, music writer Antony Peattie, for 20 years. They lived in a four-story Georgian house in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum.

Hodgkin died in a hospital in London on March 9, 2017 at the age of 84. Several figures in British art, including Tate director Nicholas Serota, paid tribute to him.

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Career

Memoirs (1949), one of Hodgkin's earliest recorded paintings, shows the artist, then aged 17, listening to a female figure reclining on a sofa. Painted with angular forms and black outlines, the work precedes Hodgkin's distinct abstract style.

Hodgkin's first solo show was in London in 1962.

In 1980, Hodgkin was invited by John Hoyland to exhibit work as part of the Hayward Annual at the Hayward Gallery along with Gillian Ayres, Basil Beattie, Terry Setch, Anthony Caro, Patrick Caulfield, Ben Nicholson and others.

In 1981, Hodgkin had collaborated with the Rambert Dance Company's Resident Choreographer, Richard Alston, for his abstract work 1981 for the production of Night Music and later for the production of Pulcinella in 1987.

In 1984, Hodgkin represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, in 1985 he won the Turner Prize, and in 1992 he was knighted.

Hodgkin was invited to design a mural for the front of Charles Correa's 1992 headquarters for the British Council in India. Hodgkin's mural is of a banyan tree spreading its branches across the walls. It is a symbol of the British Council's work rooted in the Indian cultural scene. Hodgkin said of Correa: “Charles Correa is the most perfect architect you could imagine. He first suggested that I think about the mural as an Indian flag turning into a Union Jack. I said no.”

In 1995, Hodgkin printed the Venetian Views series, which depict the same view of Venice at four different times of day. Venice, Afternoon – one of the four prints – uses 16 sheets, or fragments, in a hugely complex printing process that creates a colourful, painterly effect. This piece was given to the Yale Centre of British Art in June 2006 by its Israeli family owners in order to complement the museum's already-impressive collection of Hodgkins.

A major exhibition of his work was mounted at Tate Britain, London, in 2006. Also in 2006, The Independent declared him one of the 100 most influential gay people in Britain, as his work has helped many people express their emotions to others.

In September 2010, Hodgkin and five other British artists, John Hoyland, John Walker, Ian Stephenson, Patrick Caulfield and R.B. Kitaj, were in an exhibition entitled The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art From the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie, at the Yale Center for British Art.

Before his death on 9 March 2017 he was working on two UK exhibitions, one at the Hepworth Wakefield, and another at the National Portrait Gallery.

His prints were hand-painted etchings and he worked with the master printer Jack Shirreff at 107 Workshop.

A feature of his painting was that he made the frame intrinsic to the work "incorporated physically into the painting as part of its making, or created as an illusion to give definition to his subject."

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C466/286) with Howard Hodgkin between 2008 and 2017 for its Artists' Lives collection held by the British Library.

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