Howard Hodgkin was born in London, the son of a prominent artistic family. He studied at Camberwell College of Art and at Bath Academy of Arts, where he returned later as a teacher. Hodgkin’s pictures of friends and places attempted to capture the abstract qualities of a particular time, place and area and to make permanent in pictorial form the impermanence of feeling. Close friends and passionate moments were the subjects of his work, as well as artists he admires and the landscape of India he came to know well.

Hodgkin was selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1984 and the British Council organised his exhibition at the British Pavilion.
Read more about Hodgkin's Pavilion show

In 1992, Hodgkin was commissioned by the British Council to collaborate closely with Indian architect and RIBA gold medallist, Charles Correa on the production of a mural for the front of a new building for the British Council in Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi, India.
Find out about the mural

Printmaking has always formed an important part of Hodgkin’s working practice. He served as a Trustee of the Tate Gallery and of the National Gallery, London. He was knighted in 1992.

Further reading:
Howard Hodgkin Forty Paintings 1973 - 1984, The British Council 1984
Liesbeth Heenk, Howard Hodgkin Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, Thames and Hudson, London 2003

 

Obituary https://www.theguardian.com/tone/obituaries

 

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

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