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.


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


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


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


Book Description
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 b/w illustrations.


About the Author
Andrew Graham-Dixon was chief art critic for The Independent between 1986 and 1998. He won the BP Arts Journalism Award three years running and, in 1991, the Hawthorne Prize for art criticism. Among his other books are A History of British Art and Renaissance, both of which accompanied highly acclaimed television series.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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 new 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. Enthusiasm for Hodgkin's paintings among art critics and historians, 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."--BOOK JACKET.

FROM THE CRITICS

Susan Sontag

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

New York Times Book Review

Delicious. Luscious. Scrumptious....[This volume] is that rare but sublime match of author and subject, paintings and text.

Times Literary Supplement

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

Publishers Weekly