Howard Hodgkin was a British painter known for his abstractions that were deeply embedded in the tradition of representational easel painting. Constructing pictorial space using expressive brush marks and lush colors, his works were almost always painted on the backs of old picture frames—creating a tension between the painted frame and its ground. “It is simply impossible to control a large painting with the edge in the same way that you can control a small one,” he once explained. Born on August 6, 1932 in London, United Kingdom, Hodgkin and his family fled the war sometime between 1940 and 1943, and settled in Long Island, NY. Once there, the young artist studied the paintings of Stuart Davis, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso...