Howard HODGKIN
London 1932 - London 2017
Biography
The British painter and printmaker Howard Hodgkin is said to have decided to become an artist at the age of five. A pupil of Wilfrid Blunt at Eton College, where among his fellow pupils was Rory McEwen, Hodgkin was unhappy there and ran away from school twice, as he also did at his next school, Bryanston in Dorset. Between 1949 and 1950 he studied at the Camberwell School of Art before moving on to the Bath Academy of Art. Hodgkin first exhibited his work at a group show at the Bath Art Gallery in 1952, and the following year produced his first print. In 1962, at the age of thirty, he had a joint exhibition, with Allen Jones, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and later that year was given his first solo exhibition at the Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery in London. Although the exhibition was not a commercial success, the gallery continued to show his work for several years, while later exhibitions were at Kasmin Ltd. in London and Knoedler in New York. Having collected Indian miniatures and drawings for some time, Hodgkin made his first trip to India in 1964, and was to return there regularly for many years, the landscape of the country inspiring a series of colourful screenprints.
By the 1970s Hodgkin had become established as one of the major British artists of his generation, with solo shows in London, Germany, Paris and New York and a first retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1976, the same year that he was appointed CBE. In 1981 his work was included in the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy and three years later he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with a display of twenty-four works; the exhibition later travelled to Washington D.C., New Haven, Hannover and London. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he continued to exhibit widely in Europe and America, winning the second annual Turner Prize in 1985. Knighted in 1992, Hodgkin was given a major retrospective of his paintings in New York, Düsseldorf and London in 1995, followed by others in Edinburgh in 2002, Dublin, London and Madrid in 2006, New Haven and Cambridge in 2007, Oxford in 2010 and Toulouse in 2013. In his last years the artist would spend the winter months living and working in India.
