Critical Essays

This is one of Howard Hodgkin’s largest paintings, measuring 164 x 179.5 cm, but you wouldn’t necessarily guess in reproduction. The blocks of colour, the heavy dark stripe and the characteristic ‘frame’ of blue, seem to be constituted of single brush strokes. The effect of the larger paintings, as the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has noted, is […]

GRIST TO THE MILL Collecting ran in Howard Hodgkin’s family: he was named after an ancestor, Luke Howard, who was the first man to identify and name cloud forms (Essay on the Modification of Clouds, 1803). Howard’s great-grandparents, John Eliot Hodgkin, and his wife Edith filled their house with English ceramic tiles, and published Examples […]

Originally printed in Howard Hodgkin (New York: Gagosian, 2013). A catalogue made for Hodgkin’s exhibition which opened at their gallery in Rome in the same year.

A review of the show of Hodgkin’s paintings 2001-2010 at the San Diego Museum of Art, from the San Diego Reader.  The writer, W.S. Di Piero, is a Professor of English at Stanford University and a published poet.

Essay by Henry-Claude Cousseau, first published in the catalogue for the British Council’s touring exhibition ‘Petits Formats’, shown at the Musee des Beaux Arts, Nantes.

In continuing the tradition of inviting a person eminent in the arts to select their favourite objects in the V&A, it seemed appropriate this year to ask an artist to cast his critical eye over the collections. It is hoped that the shift in perspective might be an interesting one, following as it does the […]

A report written by Bernard Richards, Fellow in English at Brasenose College, Oxford, from 1972 to 1996, describing Hodgkin at work in his studio in Shoe Lane, Oxford on 16th November 1976 whilst he was artist in residency at Brasenose.

The following text is transcribed from a leaflet accompanying Hodgkin’s 1976 prints exhibition at Modern Art Oxford.

Howard Hodgkin has said that he particularly likes this text about his printmaking.