Howard Hodgkin [Hardcover]

Andrew Graham-Dixon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2001

"Delicious. Luscious. Scrumptious....that rare but sublime match of author and subject, paintings and text."—The New York Times Book Review

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. 121 color and 22 black-and-white illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British artist Howard Hodgkin strives to depict ``emotional situations,'' to pin down ``the evasiveness of reality,'' as he explains. Sometimes obscure yet nearly always engaging, his lush, radiant, daring semiabstract paintings evoke the haphazardness of experience, the way each of us subjectively constructs reality. Hodgkin is often classified as an intimist with Matisse and Bonnard, but in this excellent study, the first monograph on the artist, Graham-Dixon, chief art critic for the Independent in London, provocatively views him as a synthesizer who fulfills Baudelaire's call for a painting of modern life rooted in a sense of the transitory and the contingent. Hodgkin creates universes out of densely packed rainbow curves, pulsating blobs of color, warring stripes. Using juxtapositions of patterns and symbols, of realism and nonrealism, he speaks of loneliness, fear, beauty, death, absence and joy in a self-sufficient pictorial language. His paintings are like rare, enigmatic gifts whose meanings sensuously unfold.

Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Delicious. Luscious. Scrumptious....[This volume] is that rare but sublime match of author and subject, paintings and text. -- New York Times Book Review

Graham-Dixon incisively characterizes the generic qualities of Hodgkin's art, and offers many interesting interpretations on individual pictures... -- Times Literary Supplement

There is heroism in the vehemence and the lack of irony of Hodgkin's pictures. -- Susan Sontag

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson; Revised Edition edition (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500092982
• ISBN-13: 978-0500092989
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 9.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,547,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A passionate and scholarly study of Hodgkin., July 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Howard Hodgkin (Hardcover)

Andrew Graham-Dixon's passionate book about the work of Howard Hodgkin, has the detail and insight serious students of this important artist want. This book is as the first monograph to be published on this artist,a very important purchase. If like me you thirst for really good reproduction,the colour plates are large and do justice to the paintings.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A readable, sensitive and comprehensive treatment of Hodgkin, February 23, 2002

By 

Mr. P. O'beirne (Ireland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Howard Hodgkin (Hardcover)

The very dust-jacket with its dynamic detail from Hodgkin's Old Sky strikes the right note in this intelligently presented and visually seductive review of the painter's career. The excellent quality of the illustrations, their logical placing directly opposite the pertinent text, marginal page references, the choice of type-face and the luxury-feel paper all make the mere handling of the book a real pleasure.
Far from being of mere coffee-table appeal, however, the author's cool authoritative voice makes one feel that here is a critic in whose hands one is safe. Such a gem of wisdom as 'whatever residue of inexplicability lodges in a work of art is also its only hope of an afterlife' establishes his impeccable credentials as a discerning critic. Graham-Dixon deals with Hodgkin's seminal influences, his eclecticism, his evolving theatrical style, his preoccupation with the vagaries of memory and its transmutation into art. 'Hodgkin does not set out to paint what the world looks like, but what it feels like.' His work has the quality of intimacy which makes its own demands on the viewer who would engage with it, Graham-Dixon observes in a book which is lucid and comprehensive without ever wearying the reader.