Howard Hodgkin - Absent friends - Howard Hodgkin

Hodgkin's
art can be seen as providing memorials for people, many of whom are friends,
whose absence is countered by th e corresponding physical presence of particular paintings.
Descriptive elements visible in his earlier portraits from the 1950s are subsumed within
paintings that have, over the course of more than fifty years, become more psychologically
charged, but no l ess connected with evoking specific individuals in particular situations.
This book, like the exhibition it accompanies, surveys the development of Hodgkin's portraiture
from its beginnings in 1949 to the present, including new paintings. Comprising key
works from
a range of international public and private collections, it traces the evolution of the artist's
visual language and his engagement with a range of friends and others within the artist's circle.
Exhibition curator Paul Moorhouse provides a compe lling introduction to Hodgkin's portraits,
his subjects, working methods, the role of memory, and his distinctive approach to
representing people.
Peter Blake, Stephen Buckley, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Philip
King, R . B . Kitaj and Richard Smith are among the many leading artists portrayed, so that the
British art world emerges as the
wider subject of Hodgkin's art. The book also contains a fully illustrated
chronology and commentaries on individual work