Howard Hodgkin

There was an evening, just two years after we had started out as art dealers, when Rebecca and I sat down to dinner in our tiny flat in Brighton. For company we had hung four Howard Hodgkin prints - one for each wall - and as we raised a glass to toast each other (and Howard Hodgkin of course), part of me wondered if our new career had, in this moment, already reached an unmatchable peak. As it turned out, we decided that this was not the time to retire but over the twenty years since that special dinner, Howard Hodgkin graphic works have always cast a particular spell. One of life's enduring pleasures is to sit at a table cradling a glass of something velvety and red and just lose myself in the bewitching, opulent, sonorous depths of a Howard Hodgkin print.

Perhaps part of the attraction lies in the fact that Hodgkin was such a reluctant printmaker. He deliberately distanced himself from the technical mechanics of the medium, preferring to entrust its complexities to master printers and specialist collaborators. Yet it may be precisely this detachment that made him such an original printmaker. As a self-described 'painter who makes prints', Hodgkin remained free to ask a different question: not how a print should be made, but what a print might make possible. He approached printmaking not as a craft to be mastered for its own sake, but as a means of extending the expressive possibilities of his image making.

The results are remarkable. Print offered him forms of mark-making unavailable on canvas: the extraordinary luminosity of pigment on white paper; the sculptural weight and muscular energy of carborundum, impossible to achieve with oil paint alone; the thrilling potential of the silkscreen process, capable of fragmenting and reconstructing an image with crisp layers of colour. Throughout his sustained engagement with print, Hodgkin embraced these possibilities with increasing confidence and evident delight. The result is a body of work that does more than parallel his paintings—it often extends them, revealing emotional and formal possibilities that could scarcely have been realised on canvas. His prints deserve to be regarded not as an adjunct to his painting, but as one of the great achievements of post-war British printmaking.