TRUE COLORS.(Howard Hodgkin)(Biography)

The first time Howard Hodgkin came to the United States, he was seven years old. The year was 1940, and Hodgkin, whose father was serving in the Royal Air Force, had been evacuated from his native England, along with his mother and sister. They lived in New York, whose many advantages he now summarizes in a single phrase: "I could go to look at pictures."

An early injection of America is recommended for any British subject bent on creativity. Nobody reading Martin Amis, for instance, on the year that he spent in Princeton in 1959 (his father had come to teach there) can doubt the fluorescent shock that it administered to his system. In Hodgkin's case, nothing in ...