Howard Hodgkin: the Complete Prints

The definitive celebration of the most popular area of this artist's work. Howard Hodgkin's prints represent an extraordinary body of work, a parallel and very different achievement from his paintings. They have been internationally celebrated and passionately collected, but never brought together. Now available in paperback, this first-ever comprehensive survey and catalogue raisonne, compiled by Liesbeth Heenk, includes a major essay by Nan Rosenthal, Senior Consultant in the Department of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. As a painter, Hodgkin has preferred to create small works using oils and working on wood. As a printmaker, he has challenged the format, techniques, and expressive potential of the medium. He began in 1953 and has now made over 140 works on paper. Far from seeing them as poor relations to his paintings, he has consistently explored the print medium for its own sake, making astonishingly varied, emotive, and persuasive works that are paradoxically unique as well as multiples. He chooses to work at one remove, giving his assistants detailed instructions and using metaphors such as to handle the material "like a silk stocking." An interview with Hodgkin sheds light on the genesis of the prints and investigates his conviction that printmaking is an independent process.The book features over eighty color plates and a fully illustrated catalogue raisonne, plus a chronology, an extensive bibliography, and a list of solo and group exhibitions. 209 illustrations, 83 in color and 126 in duotone.