Hodgkin, Howard (Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin), 1932–2017, English painter and printmaker, b. London. He attended the Camberwell School of Art, London, and Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, later teaching there (1956–66) and at the Chelsea School of Art, London (1966–72). His lush, dramatic paintings, which he worked and reworked, often taking years to complete them despite their apparent spontaneity, fall somewhere between abstraction and representation. His early works were small figurative paintings on canvas, but his work grew increasingly abstracted and less representational. In the late 1960s he began to paint on wood, painting the frames as well, or simply including rectangles representative of frames in his paintings. As he grew older his brushwork became freer and his pictures even more abstract, but even apparently abstract late works were sometimes suggestive of figurative images. Some of his better-known works include Mr. and Mrs. Robyn Denny (1960, Saatchi Coll., London), Jealousy (1977), Dinner at Smith Square (1975–79), and Red Bermudas (1978–80, Mus. of Modern Art, New York City). Hodgkin, who represented Britain at the 1984 Venice Biennale and received the Turner Prize in 1985, was knighted in 1992.
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