1964

First visits India, where he travels with Robert Skelton, then Assistant Keeper of the Indian Collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Hodgkin returns every year for many years. “I think my main reason for going back to India”, he told David Sylvester in 1984, “is because it is somewhere else.”

“Painting in a studio is naturally a lonely occupation”, he wrote in 1991, in the catalogue to his collection of Indian paintings and drawings. “Collecting, on the other hand, brings with it an almost automatic series of introductions, social contacts, with dealers, scholars and occasionally with fellow collectors.” New friends include scholars (Simon Digby and Ellen Smart); dealers (Terence McInerney and John Hewitt); collectors (Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, who lived in Smith Square) and contemporary Indian artists such as Bhupen Khakhar and Vivan Sundaram.

Shows 10 new paintings at Arthur Tooth & Son’s, London, including Gardening and The Japanese Screen (which was owned by his friend the writer Bruce Chatwin).

Hodgkin’s work is included in London: the ‘New Scene’ at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, Minnesota. His friends include artists like Patrick Caulfield (who takes a studio in Hodgkin’s house), R.B.Kitaj, Richard Smith, Stephen Buckley, Mick Moon and Robyn Denny. He paints many of their portraits, as though to emphasise his outsider status: he is never part of Pop Art, or the Situation movement or Kitaj’s ‘School of London’. His work resists classification. His “are not abstract pictures”, Alistair Smith points out later, “– the marks and shapes often refer to their figurative origin. In a picture of Anthony Hill and Gillian Wise, for example, the black and white rectangular image is a witty parody of one of Hill’s own reliefs as much as it is a formal dance within the picture.” (From the introduction to the catalogue for ‘The Artist’s Eye’, 1979).