Sir Howard Hodgkin, who has died aged 84, was the greatest British contemporary artist and the last direct link between 21st century painting and French modernism.
A painter of exceptional originality, verve and delicacy and a dazzling colourist, he was unique in absorbing every postwar trend – abstraction, pop’s clean graphic lines, minimalism’s austerity – while continuing to explore the tight formal structures and interiority of Edgar Degas, Édouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse.
Working within what he called “the classical wall of feeling that Degas has built for us”, Hodgkin called his paintings “representational pictures of emotional situations”.
Since the 1960s they have looked mostly abstract, evoking rather than describing moments of intimacy, pleasure or embarrassment in signature marks of feathery, ragged, pulsating, swarming dots and swathes of paint.
There are suggestions of figures at a table in Dinner at Smith Square, scarlet swipes denoting Red Bermudas, undefined yet eroticised reclining forms framed by pink barley stick curtains in the overheated Interior with Figures.
Uneasy relationship
Hodgkin was born in 1932 into what his friend, the writer Bruce Chatwin, called a family of “well-ordered minds and well-furnished houses”. Thomas Hodgkin, who discovered lymphoma, painter Roger Fry and writer Aldous Huxley were all relations.
Hodgkin had an uneasy relationship with his parents and, following evacuation to the US during the second World War, a turbulent adolescence, running away from both Eton and Bryanston schools. He returned to the US in 1948 and the following year made his first important work there, Memoirs, the precocious, flattened composition of a psychoanalyst and his outrageously jewelled patient on a sofa.
His conversation pieces of bourgeois experience, introspective, elusive and ambiguous, won little acclaim at first. Back in England by the 1950s, Hodgkin taught, made frequent visits to India, always a source of inspiration, and collected Indian miniatures.
In the 1970s, at his first major show at Modern Art Oxford, he was better known as a collector than a painter. In the 1980s that changed; as conceptual art came to dominate globally, Hodgkin’s painterly integrity stood out.
Cultural currents
Hodgkin represented Britain at the Venice biennale in 1984 to stunning effect. Critic Robert Hughes wrote that “not since Robert Rauschenberg’s appearance at the biennale 20 years ago has a show by a single painter so hogged the attention of visitors or looked so effortlessly superior to everything else on view by living artists”. The following year Hodgkin won the Turner Prize; he was knighted in 1992.
He had a remarkable late career, working at ever larger scale and to bolder degrees of abstraction and always responsive to cultural currents. The dissolving, reforming, jumbled patterns of Out of the Window, Mumbai (2012-14) suggest not just a view, but the digital, visual overload of the 21st century.
Hodgkin married and had two sons in the 1950s, but since 1983 his devoted partner was the musicologist Antony Peattie. Their home in Bloomsbury, where Hodgkin converted a former dairy into a luminous studio, was a haven of warmth, fine food and conversation for a wide circle of friends, including many writers.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017