Howard Hodgkin

This book of Howard Hodgkin's work by Andrew Graham-Dixon, one of Britain's foremost art critics, was published to great acclaim in 1994. Incisive and beautifully written, it illuminates Hodgkin's rich and complex art through its guiding themes and elucidates the passions and preoccupations that lie behind the paintings. Unlike most monographs, Graham-Dixon's focuses on the emotional and intellectual essence of the paintings as he explores their strategies. Hodgkin's complex use of scale and color, the nature of his pictorial language, and the subtle evocation in his painting of eroticism, time, and experience reveal a tension between exuberance and melancholy. This revised and expanded edition includes over twenty additional color reproductions and is brought up to date with a new chapter in which Graham-Dixon discusses the paintings created since the mid-1990s, works that are freer and more fluent, and often on a much larger scale than earlier ones. Enthusiasm for Hodgkin's paintings among art critics and historians, art collectors, and the general public has never been greater. He stands confirmed by this richly illustrated study as a master of the hesitant, truant nature of life and emotion, an artist whose great achievement is to have created equivalents in painting for the texture of memory itself.