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1932
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Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin is born 6 August in London. His father,
Eliot Hodgkin, a manager for Imperial Chemical Industries, and his
mother, Katherine, live in a redbrick house in Hammersmith, west London.
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“I came from a fairly but not very wealthy middle-class background of the
kind in which relatives help pay for your education.”
Burlington Magazine, September 1982.
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1937
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Decides to become an artist at the age of five. Remembers drawing a picture in
crayon of a woman with a red face and bushy hair, and declaring that he wanted
to be a painter.
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“I think it was because of the picture over the mantelpiece that I became
aware, at a very early age…of pictures as things like tables, chairs, cups
and saucers and so on. That conviction about the nature of pictures has
perhaps saved me, helped me and protected me ever since.”
Burlington Magazine, September 1982.
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Hodgkin’s parents, however, resist his choice and urge him to consider his
painting as an amateur hobby.
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1938
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As a child Hodgkin starts to collect antiques, an activity encouraged by his
Irish grandmother, Florence Hodgkin.
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1940-3
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Lives in the United States with his mother and sister as an evacuee from
wartime London; stays on Long Island. During his three years in America,
Hodgkin occasionally visits the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
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“Here I was, aged nine or ten, learning all about French painting from
looking at those marvellous pictures by Vuillard, Matisse, Léger,
and so on in MoMA. It would have been impossible in England because people
simply didn’t collect them at the time.”
Vanity Fair, November 1984)
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1943
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Upon returning to England, Hodgkin’s family sends him to a series of private
schools, including St Andrews, Pangbourne. By the age of fifteen Hodgkin has
run away from several boarding schools.
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1945
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Visits an exhibition of Picasso and Matisse at the Victoria and Albert Museum;
remembers being particularly inspired by the paintings of Matisse.
Attends Eton, but runs away after eighteen months.
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1946
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Introduced to Indian painting by his art teacher, he begins to collect
Indian paintings and drawings.
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‘[I]t’s the eclecticism of Indian painting which I think fascinated me
right at the beginning….to find such a totally and shamelessly eclectic
art which was yet totally different—or so it seemed—from European painting
was very exciting….they use all kinds of illusionistic devices that you
find in Western art in a different way and somehow in a different sense.”
(Howard Hodgkin: Forty Paintings: 1973-1984, The Whitechapel
Art Gallery, London, 1984)
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Exhibits in a drawing schools exhibition at Eton. Remembers hiding under a table in order to hear people’s comments on his work.
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1947
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Enters Bryanston School for one year.
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“I was very fortunate in my teachers all the way through. They would talk to
me as if I was not a child. And—I’m not being arrogant—I could say that
artistically I wasn’t entirely a child.”
The Observer Magazine, 31 October 1999)
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1948
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First return visit to the United States. Hodgkin spends the summer with the
same family he lived with as a boy on Long Island.
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“It was thought I must be disturbed having run away by that time from five schools, always giving the reason I had left that I wanted to be an artist, they said, ‘Clearly something wrong with the boy.’ I was sent to a nice doctor….Thanks to him I got back to America...”
Burlington Magazine, September 1982.
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1949-50
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Upon returning from America, enrols at the Camberwell School of Art, London, under the tuition of the leading Euston Road School painters Victor Pasmore, William Coldstream and Claude Rogers. Hodgkin recalls considerable pressure at that time to conform to the realist Euston Road style.
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“Art school in England is different from art school anywhere else. To go to an English art school is like going into some kind of limbo which is not like going to a monastery, nor like going back to boarding school, but it is I think both totally destructive and the main reason why to be an artist in England is like being squeezed out of the wrong end of a tube of toothpaste.”
Burlington Magazine, September 1982.
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To supplement his income as a student, Hodgkin buys picture frames in junk shops and hitchhikes to London where he sells them to a dealer in Soho.
In 1949, at age seventeen, Hodgkin completes Memoirs, which the artist considers his first mature work. It is based on a memory of Hodgkin’s stay on Long Island.
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