Howard Hodgkin: The Way We Live Now

The Way We Live Now pairs prints by Howard Hodgkin with Susan Sontag’s 1986 New Yorker short story of the same name, which was borrowed from an 1875 novel by Anthony Trollope. Six lift-ground color aquatints by Hodgkin, all from 1990, are bound into the book—with the print Fear Gives Everything Its Hue, Its High included twice, as originally published—and the dust jacket is hand-painted in tempera by the studio. Told through fragments of conversation, Sontag’s story is about the devastating impact of the AIDS crisis in early 1980s New York on the city’s cultural elite, recounting the responses—doubting, possessive, comic—of a circle of friends when they discover that a close friend has AIDS. Housed in a new clamshell box, the edition—which is limited to 243 copies signed by both Hodgkin and Sontag—was printed by 107 Workshop in Melksham, England, and published by Karsten Schubert to benefit AIDS charities in the United Kingdom and the United States.