Hodgkin spent half a century working out a single, nearly paradoxical proposition — that painting could be a strictly representational practice and a fully abstract one at the same time, registering the colour, weight, and atmospheric weather of remembered emotional situations rather than the visible appearance of any particular thing — and the body of work he produced in pursuit of that proposition is among the most distinctive contributions to twentieth-century British art.
Hodgkin came to art early and against the conventional path of his social class. The Eton-educated childhood, the wartime evacuation to the United States that exposed him to American painting in his early teens, and his subsequent decision to train at art school rather than university — over the strenuous objections of his family — placed him at the start of an artistic life that would run, almost unbroken, for the next seven decades. His subsequent art-school training gave him a thorough grounding in the postwar British figurative tradition.
His mature painting emerged across the late 1960s and 1970s. Where the dominant British tendencies of the period were either Pop Art's deliberate engagement with mass culture or the geometric abstraction of the Situation group, Hodgkin pursued a third path: small, dense, hand-worked paintings on wood whose subjects were specific encounters, dinners, conversations, and rooms — remembered emotional situations distilled into pure colour and gestural mark. His own description of the work — quoted above — became the defining critical formulation of his approach.
The international recognition that followed was substantial. The Venice Biennale representation gave him a major international platform, the Turner Prize the following year recognized his standing within British painting, and the 1985 reopening of the Whitechapel Gallery with an exhibition of his work — Forty Paintings — confirmed his place at the centre of the contemporary British art world. The major retrospectives that followed in London, New York, and Düsseldorf extended his audience across Europe and North America.
His parallel career as a printmaker produced one of the most distinctive bodies of postwar British printmaking, and his teaching at the Bath Academy and his trusteeships of the Tate and the National Gallery placed him within the institutional life of British art for decades. The Indian collection, formed over sixty years through frequent travel to India and through the dealer markets of London and New York, occupied a parallel current of his life and was the source of much of the colour, line, and decorative sensibility of his own paintings.
His later years saw a deepening and intensifying of the late style — more openly painterly, larger in scale, and often dedicated to specific friends and personal occasions — and the body of work produced in his final decade has been widely celebrated as among the finest of his career. His position today is settled at the highest level of postwar British painting, and his work has continued to be exhibited and collected internationally in the years since his death.