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Like long-held echoes, blending somewhere else
into one deep and shadowy unison
as limitless as darkness and as day
the sounds, the scents, the colours correspond.

There are odours succulent as young flesh,
sweet as flutes, and green as any grass
while others – rich corrupt and masterful –

possess the power of such infinite things
as incense, amber, benjamin and musk,
to praise the senses´ raptures and the mind´s.

I have quoted the poem at length for it will give those unfamiliar with a Howard Hodgkin painting an accurate sensual image of his work, one in which the world is both concealed and revealed in his colourful, looping, swooping brush marks and where there is a synaesthetic correspondence between scents, colours, sounds, tastes and tactile sensations.

This major retrospective of the work of Howard Hodgkin provides a comprehensive survey of the artist´s work by bringing together some 50 key paintings, from the 1960s to date. It traces the development of his distinctive visual vocabulary, from early portraits and interiors through his emphasis on the painting as object, to the gradual loosening of the paint surface in recent years, and offers new insights into the development of his work over four decades, demonstrating the qualities which have made him one of the most popular painters of his time with both cognoscenti and public punters alike Hodgkin is a very poetic painter. I do not use the word, here, in its populist sense to mean beautiful – though his paintings, rich in colour as any stained glass window, are, indeed, beautiful – but rather to show that through his sensual application of paint he conjures an equivalence of emotion, rather as the poet does in a poem, of a moment, a memory, a place, a smell, even a lover´s touch. He paints what eludes verbal expression concentrating on feelings rather than facts. Not that his paintings are cathartic outpourings, for only very occasionally in his later work, in a painting such as Italy, 1998-2002, does he come near to anything truly expressionistic. Rather the residue of feelings is the stuff of his art. Emotion is his fuel but, as Wordsworth said of a good poem, it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity."

There are other ways in which Hodgkin´s paintings resemble poems. His brush marks have their own sense of weight and rhythm. His paintings are self-contained worlds. He creates mise en scenes, framed spaces – which might also be a good description of a poem as well as of his paintings – which are not narratives as such but where emotion, incident and meaning can occur. In Snapshot 84-93 a dark border, which functions like a proscenium arch, directs the eye inwards into a space beyond the picture frame, one that is luminous, pastoral in its suggested forms yet also inchoate and ecstatic. It conjures many things; looking out of a window at a sunset, the memory of looking out of a window at sunset, as well as what it feels like to inhabit a painting. It suggests a sacred space, a lost domain, a paradise out of reach or even a mood. All this is articulated with a huge sensual and visual intelligence and an understanding of the materiality of paint. The green is, indeed, as Baudelaire suggests as "green as any grass", while the vibrant yellow orb, the red and purple zones imply the power of "infinite things".

Hodgkin works on framed wooden boards, and the frames (often found in junk shops) tend to be painted over and incorporated into the work giving the whole a sense of "thingness" or "objecthood". Colour is, of course, what characterises a Hodgkin painting. Seductive and jewel like, it is never simply there for its own sake, never there as mere decoration. Erudite, though very accessible (in IMMA, Dublin, where I saw this show, they had a very high attendance on Mother´s Day) Hodgkin is essentially a very European painter, closer to Vuillard and Bonnard in his sensibility of dissolving space and colour and to Matisse in his joy of pattern than to the American Abstract Expressionists. His colour is endlessly inventive, mindful, perhaps, as Susan Sontag points out of the ancient quarrel between Michelangelo´s preference for disegno over Titian´s for colore. It is as though he wants, she says, "to give colore its most sumptuous exclusive victory."

He is a secretive painter. No one has seen him paint and he keeps his unfinished workes screened and hidden. Born in 1932, for a while he went to Eton, which he hated, where he was taught by Wilfred Blunt, (the brother of the art historian and traitor, Anthony), who stimulated his interest in Indian art, which for many years he collected. But he ran away from Eton and was sent to a shrink. After that he spent time in America, which added a florescent shimmer to his troubled adolescence, then was sent to Bryanston and later attended Camberwell School of Art and Bath Academy.

Hodgkin´s paintings could not be mistaken for anybody else´s. He has created an immediately identifiable choreography of marks, spots and stripes, the harsher more geometrical forms in his earlier work giving way to looser, looping, bravura curves and lyrical swirls, which allow him to work on the border between figuration and abstraction. His titles such as Haven´t We Met? Counting the Days, In Central Park, Venice Evening read like song titles and remind us that all his paintings start as an emotional rather than an intellectual response to a situation or something he has seen. There is lovemaking as depicted in the fecund curve and comma of Lovers 1984-92, there are dinner parties and there is India and Italy, gardens and Venetian glass. There is autumn and there is rain as well as the small, the incidental and the common place observed in the little grey painting Dirty Mirror, 2000. And there is war.

Undertones of War, 2001-3, a large canvas more than six feet high and eight feed wide, is different to anything else in the exhibition. Bare wood surrounds the painting; as if the whole had been stripped of all lyricism. The marks are urgent and tortured, truncated rather than flowing, the colours muted blues, blacks and browns - mud colours - with a touch of red. There is enormous force behind the marks almost as if Hodgkin had lost patience with his own visual language. In its looseness and determination to work against his natural virtuosity it reminds me of late Picasso. It is a potent and tragic statement. There among all the brilliant colour, the sweeping crescendos and diminuendos of red and green and blue this seems to be Howard Hodgkin´s Guernica. This, perhaps, suggests a more introverted, questioning and tragic "late" style. Yet A Rainbow – that symbol of optimism if ever there was one – painted the following year returns us, with its raindrop splodges of green and yellow and its lyrical central motif of visceral red, yellow and black, to the joy of the sensual.

For Hodgkin´s paintings speak first to the eye, then to the heart and finally to the mind. Like Proust´s Madeleine they stir memories of particular times and places, of smells and sounds and emotions. They conjure spring rain or the partial view from the window of the sea, they suggest rooms where lovers have loved or friends have met. Like poems they capture the intensity of a particular moment; what it is to be sentient, erotic, conscious and alive.

Sue Hubbard is a poet, novelist and art critic for The Independent where this article was originally published.

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Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, award-winning poet and novelist. This article was originally published in New Statesman.

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