Howard Hodgkin: farewell to a matchless master of colour

The brilliance and subtlety of Hodgkin’s intensely emotional works about love and loss made the artist a Turner for the modern age

Howard Hodgkin was a great artist of sex and death. Like the handful of British modern painters who are his peers – Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney – he rebelled against the austerity of abstract art and instead put the human self, in all its desire and suffering, at the centre of his universe.

Unlike Bacon, Freud and Hockney, though, he did this in a poetic, indirect, allusive way that can be superficially mistaken for the very abstract art that he rejected, body and soul. That made Hodgkin too difficult and strange ever to be a painterly pop idol, and he was regularly left out of the daft media game of naming the “greatest living British artist”.

His wafts of colour resemble translucent gossamer fabrics in the breeze

He was Proust with a paint​brush, an artist whose work seems to evoke – and communicate with – all times

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