Almost all of the pictures in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s new exhibition, “Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1992-2007”, are on loan from private collections. This seems to be representative of a larger trend. The purchasing power of individuals now outmatches that of most art institutions. Bidding wars these days, especially in the field of contemporary art, are mostly conducted between rival collectors rather than museums of modern art. Hodgkin’s seductive and colour-saturated pictures, many of which are painted on a domestic scale, have in any case always been eminently, covetably collectable. So public sightings of his works are liable to become increasingly dependent on the goodwill of those who own them.

One lender to the current exhibition is said to have lamented his decision to part with a picture by remarking that it would leave him in unfathomable state of “Hodgkinlessness”. But as a result of the assorted lenders’ generosity, the exhibition galleries at the Fitzwilliam are Hodgkinful to overflowing. The painter will be seventy-five later this year, and this show focusses on the work of the last 15 years. It is a measure of the artist’s increased fluency – certainly by contrast with his early career, when he rarely managed to paint more than six or seven paintings every twelve months – that not one picture in the present display was included in the retrospective of his art curated by Nicholas Serota for Tate Britain last year.

The walls are hung less sparsely than they have been in many of the painter’s previous exhibitions, creating an effect of cornucopian richness enhanced by the unusual colours that have been chosen for the walls. These alternate between a subtle grey – the aptly Hodgkinesque trade name of which is, apparently, “Rain Hope Grey” – and a bright, fractured gold leaf design that might...

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