143 Illustrations, 121 in colour.

First published to great acclaim in 1994, this book has now been brought up to date with over twenty-five new colour plates and a new chapter in which Graham-Dixon discusses Hodgkin’s paintings since the mid-’90s, works that are freer and more fluent and often on a much larger scale.

Incisive and beautifully written, the text illuminates Hodgkin’s art through its guiding themes and elucidates the passions and preoccupations that lie behind the paintings. Unlike the authors of most artist’s monographs, Graham-Dixon focuses on the emotional and intellectual essence of the paintings as he explores their strategies. Hodgkin’s complex use of scale and colour, the nature of his pictorial language, and the subtle evocation of eroticism, time and experience embodied in his painting, superbly reproduced in this volume, reveal a tension between exuberance and melancholy.
Hodgkin 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.

A szerzőről:
Andrew Graham-Dixon was chief art critic at the Independent between 1986 and 1998. Among his other books are A History of British Art and Renaissance, each of which accompanied its own highly successful television series.