Howard Hodgkin.

A simple but essential question arises after reading this well-written, well-illustrated monograph: "Who is it for?" It has no gossip, no biography, no judgments; almost nothing about the reception of Howard Hodgkin's work, the slow, sure rise of his reputation, or the peculiar and in some senses isolated position he occupies. It will satisfy neither the art historian's desire for hard-core information nor the common reader's need for accessibility. Hodgkin's dealers may be pleased to see so much of their artist's work "in print," but the attentive reader, at first beguiled by Andrew Graham-Dixon's mellifluous prose, soon notices the omission of Hodgkin's considerable oeuvre as a printmaker, of his stage and fabric design, and of his spectacular decoration of the facade of the British Council building in Delhi. The purist might say that these are peripheral activities to Hodgkin's single-minded pursuit of the possibilities of oil paint on wood. But can their exclusion be justified?

How we are to read this book begins to have the same nagging urgency that Graham-Dixon brings to his central exposition of how much or how little we should read into Hodgkin's painting. Is MoMA's Red Bermudas a "comical epiphany" about the "mysterious character of recollection," as characterized here, or a painting about drop-dead sexiness? Graham-Dixon's decoding of these works from a variety of viewpoints occupies 14 brief chapters larded with nearly 100 color plates. It is leisurely, civilized, congenial; personalities are kept out, no naughty asides, not a whiff of dissent. Graham-Dixon wears a different hat here from the one he recently donned to wipe the floor with R. B. Kitaj or to give Willem de Kooning a dressing-down in his London Independent column. The terms of the commission for this book (his first) obviously tied his hands, his references curtailed by a cordon sanitaire thrown around the privacy of la maison Hodgkin. Although I am not suggesting that he should have acted the part of Clio's chambermaid, snooping in closets and sniffing under duvets, the inclusion of some personal history might well have illuminated the sources of Hodgkin's complex and unsettling images, which frequently dwell on human frustrations and on the passage of time.

Granted this restriction, Graham-Dixon is frequently acute, observant, and articulate. Hodgkin is lucky to have been paired with a writer on art who knows how to put together a sentence. The text is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and though this involves some repetition, the book gains in richness like the cumulative layerings of the paintings it describes. But when Graham-Dixon generalizes he is unconvincing. He clutches at "the crisis of representation," and says that it's misguided to "trust what artists have to say about their own work," that size was a dangerous legacy of Abstract Expressionism, that erotic images tend to be small. And surely it is naive of him to attribute only to artists of this century the pathos of art's recognition of its own artifice. Furthermore, as a rookie critic who welcomed many of Britain's most adventurous young artists, Graham-Dixon's freshly tailored conservatism of thought is disturbing. Contrary to his expressed opinion, radicalism does count and always has, long before Modernism. Of course there is room for achievements that are synthetic and consolidatory - most good art is only that. But genuine radicalism is as vital to art as to any other discipline, and cannot be dismissed with the yawning indifference embodied in Graham-Dixon's generalizations on art.

However, by mostly keeping to the works themselves, Graham-Dixon furnishes us with a plausible picture of how and why they emerge as they do. Hodgkin has always been concerned with how his paintings might look rather than with how he might "represent" a room, a person, a sunset. He is at his best when he is most allusive and least literal. How good he is, for example, at suggesting, through the tempered melancholy of his color, absent friends and unvisited places. His relatively limited repertory of marks - those celebrated swatches, blobs, blooming sweatbands and jismic flourishes of paint - has a remarkable capacity for renewal, invoking yet more subtle and exquisitely painful stages along his Via Dolorosa. Graham-Dixon has taken us on the scenic route, leaving to future guides the more inclusive tour.

Richard Shone is a writer based in London and an associate editor of The Burlington Magazine.