DEVOLVING NOW, the modernist tasks and liberties have stirred up a canny diffidence among painters of the largest accomplishment when pressed to talk about their art. It appears unseemly, or naïve, to have much to say about the pictures or to attach to them any explicit “program.” No more theories expounding an ideal way of painting. And, as statements wither and with them counterstatements, hardly anything in the way of provocation, either. Decorum suggests that artists sound somewhat trapped when being drawn out, and venturing a few cagey glimpses of intention. Complementing that venerable fortress of modernist taste, the white wall of the gallery, is a final redoubt of modernism under siege, the white mind of the painter. And the thoughtful—as distinct from the inarticulate—may have good reason to be wary, anxious, at a loss (for words).
EARLIER IN THE CENTURY, it was the most responsive writers who might begin their setting of the encounter with a much admired body of pictures to words by paying tribute to painting as a form of the unsayable.
As Paul Valéry wrote in 1932 (it’s the first sentence of “About Corot”): “One must always apologize for talking about painting.”
From the summoning of each art to what its means only could enact, it follows that nothing can be paraphrased or transposed into another medium. Painting, like music and dance, does not signify in the verbal sense; what you see is what you get. “A work of art, if it does not leave us mute, is of little value” (Valéry again). Of course, we don’t stay mute.
But there is a further incentive to be self-conscious about what can be said now, as the aim and justification of art after modernism becomes precisely to generate talk—about what is not art. A mighty repudiation of the idea of art pursued out of reverence for art has overwhelmed art-making and critical discourse in the last decade. It has centered on the equating of aesthetic purposes, and their unforgivingly “high” standards, with illegitimate or indefensible forms of social privilege. For those whose principal interest is neither to come clean about adventures in selfhood nor to speak on behalf of fervent communities but rather to perpetuate the old, semi-opaque continuities of admiring, emulating, and surpassing, prudence may suggest saying less rather than more.
THE ATTACK ON ART—for being, just, art—has to have been abetted by modernism’s peculiar, reductive way of affirming the autonomy of art, which derived much of its energy by denying the idea of hierarchy among kinds of art. Shorn of the support of received ways of discriminating among subjects and destinations, the nature of pictures was inexorably subjectivized; and archly plebeianized.
There are two leading assertions in this reduced field of saying for the painter. The painter asserts that the pictures don’t need to be “explained.” The painter explains that the pictures should, properly, be regarded as “things.”
THERE’S ONE JUST AHEAD … or nearby … or over there …
And perhaps not in the obvious place, such as a museum or the collector’s living room; it may be on the wall of a restaurant or a hotel lobby.
But wherever we see it, we know what it is. We may not know which one. But we know, even from far across the room, who did it.
In contrast to the painting of earlier eras, this is one of the regulating aspects of the experience—and making—of art in this century. Each artist is responsible for creating his or her unique “vision”—a signature style, of which each work is an example. A style is equivalent to a pictorial language of maximum distinctiveness: what declares itself as that artist’s language, and nobody else’s. To use again and again the same gestures and forms is not deemed a failure of imagination in a painter (or choreographer), as it might be in a writer. Repetitiveness seems like intensity. Like purity. Like strength.
A FIRST OBSERVATION about Howard Hodgkin’s work: the extent to which everything by Hodgkin looks so unmistakably by him.
That the pictures are done on wood seems to heighten their rectangularity—and their “thingness.” Usually modest in size by current standards, they seem boxy, blunt, even heavy sometimes because of the proportions of frame to interior of the picture, with something like the form, if not the scale, of a window, displaying a ballet of plump shapes which either are enclosed within thickly emphatic brush strokes that frame (or shield) or are painted out to the edge of the raised frame. The pictures are packed with cunning design and thick, luscious color. (Hodgkin’s green is as excruciating as de Kooning’s pink and Tiepolo’s blue.) Having renounced painting’s other primary resource, drawing, Hodgkin has fielded the most inventive, sensuously affecting color repertory of any contemporary painter—as if, in taking up the ancient
quarrel between disegno and colore, he had wanted to give colore its most sumptuous exclusive victory.
“MY PICTURES TEND TO destroy each other when they are hung too closely together,” Hodgkin has remarked. No wonder. Each picture is, ideally, a maximum seduction. Harder for the picture to make its case if, at the distance from which it is best seen, one is unable to exclude some adjacent solicitations. But the viewer may be tempted to solve the problem, abandoning the proper distance from which all the picture’s charms may be appreciated to zero in for immersion in sheer color bliss—what Hodgkin’s pictures can always be counted on to provide.
TOO CLOSE A VIEW of the picture will not only yield a new round of voluptuous sensation (say, the streaks of salmon-pink now visible beneath what reads ten feet away as cobalt blue). It will also remind the viewer of what is written beside or below: its title.
Leaves, Interior with Figures, After Dinner, The Terrace, Delhi, Venice/Shadows, Clean Sheets, Red Bermudas, Mr. and Mrs. James Kirkman, After Corot … titles like these indicate a pleasingly large range of familiar subjects: the still life, the plein-air scene, the intimate interior, the portrait, the art history homage.
Sometimes the title corresponds to something that can be discerned.
More often, it doesn’t. This is most obviously true of the portraits—that is, the pictures whose titles are someone’s name; usually two names, a couple. (The names, those of friends and collectors, will be unfamiliar to viewers.)
Some titles that are phrases, such as Like an Open Book, Haven’t We Met?, Counting the Days, seem to be drawn from the history of a love life. In Central Park, Egypt, On the Riviera, Venice Evening—many titles evoke a very specific world, the world known through tours of
seeing and savoring. (We hear about quite a lot of meals.) Some titles hint at a submerged story, which we can be sure we’re not going to hear—like the glimpses, in several of the pictures, of the form of a body on a bed. But there’s as much an impulse to play down as to reveal the charge of some of the pictures. Thus, one of the largest of Hodgkin’s recent pictures, and one of the most glorious and emotionally affecting, has the title Snapshot. While offering a shrewd spread of signals, from the diaristically offhand, like Coming Up from the Beach and Cafeteria at the Grand Palais, to the bluntly plaintive, like Passion, jealousy, and Love Letter, the majority of the titles are casually nominative or slightly ironic, which makes them nicely at variance with the pictures’ proud exuberance of feeling, their buoyant, ecstatic palette.
Of course, the fact that a person or place is named does not mean it is depicted.
In the Bay of Naples, Still Life in a Restaurant, In a Hot Country—the “in” in a fair number of titles carries a dual meaning. It signifies that the artist has been “in” these places, on these fortunate holidays. (We don’t expect a Hodgkin title that tells us we are “in” a dungeon.) And that, whether the space named is outdoors or indoors, the picture itself is a kind of interior. One looks into the picture, to something which is both disclosed and hidden.
Some titles—Lovers, for instance—confirm the suggestiveness of certain enlacing shapes. A few titles—like Egyptian Night and House near Venice—succeed in making the pictures seem representational in the conventional sense. But, exception made for such bravura performances as Venetian Glass, Hodgkin is not offering the look of the world, an impression. (An emotion is not an impression.) Hardly any of Hodgkin’s paintings harbor mimetically distinct shapes, and only a few have shapes which would seem even allusively distinct without the clue supplied by the title. The subjectivism of these pictures is the opposite of the one associated with Impressionism: to preserve the visual freshness of the first fleeting moment that something is seen. Hodgkin aims to reinvent the sight of something after it has been seen, when it has acquired the heavy trappings of inner necessity.
OPERATING ON A BORDER very much of his own devising between figuration and abstraction, Hodgkin has made a sturdy case for regarding his choreography of spots, stripes, discs, arcs, swaths, lozenges, arrows, and wavy bands as always representational.
“I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances” is how he puts it. “I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.” Note that Hodgkin says “emotional situations,” not “emotions”; he is not licensing the attempt to read a specific emotion from a given picture, as if that were what the picture was “about.”
Hodgkin’s formula is as elegantly withholding as it is incisive and alert.
Whose emotional situations? The artist’s?
Obviously, titles like After Visiting David Hockney or Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi or Indian Sky would seem to be deceptions if the painter had never met David Hockney, had never visited Italy or India. One has to assume that, in this sense, all the pictures are autobiographical, though only some of the titles make this explicit. Still, few of them are self-referential in the narrow sense. What’s on display is not the emotional state of the artist. And the pictures offer the most earnest, emphatic tribute to the world outside, its treasurable objects and beauties and opportunities. Indeed, the sublimity of the color in Hodgkin’s pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude—for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents. Two passions which we associate with this painter, traveling and collecting, are both expressions of ardent, deferential feeling for what is not oneself.
SO MANY OF the pictures refer to “abroad,” as it used to be called. To sites of dalliance already consecrated by great painters of the past, which one never tires of revisiting: India, Italy, France, Morocco, Egypt. Seasons in their foreign plumage: fruit, palm trees, a searingly
colored sky. And home pleasures consumed on foreign premises. (In Bed in Venice, not in bed in London; the painter is not traveling alone.) There is lovemaking and dining and looking at art and shopping and gazing out over water. The sites bespeak an avid eye, and a taste for the domesticated; gardens and terraces, not forests and mountains. The evocation of sensuous, congenial tourism—dinner parties, nocturnal promenades, cherished art, memorable visits——boldly affirms the idea of pleasure.
But the titles also intimate another relation to pleasure, with their naming of weather and seasons and times of day. The most common weather is rain; the season is invariably autumn; if a time of day is cited, it’s usually sunset—which, apart from being the biggest color story in the daily existence of most people, has a large place in the thesaurus of melancholy.
All those titles with “sunset,” “autumn,” “rain,” “after … ,” “goodbye to … ,” “the last time …” suggest the pensive shadow cast on all pleasures when they are framed, theatricalized even, as acts of memory.
Hodgkin may often be en voyage, but not as a beholder (the Impressionist project). In place of a beholder, there is a rememberer. Both pursuits, that of the traveler and that of the collector, are steeped in elegiac feeling.
AFTER THE SHOP HAD CLOSED, The Last Time I Saw Paris, When Did We Go to Morocco?, Goodbye to the Bay of Naples … many titles focus on time (“after”), on the awareness of finalities.
Art made out of a sense of difference, a sense of triumph, a sense of regret.
If there are so many pictures which offer homage to the feelings and sensations that Venice inspires, it is because that city is now, as it could never have been for Turner, a quintessential evoker of the sentiment of loss.
IT’S NOT THAT the exotic, or the southern, is required to release the impulse of this “northern” sensibility to paint.
But it may be that this painter needs to travel.
A trip is an intensifier, license to the avid eye (and other senses). You need the separation from home. And then you need the return home, to consider what you have stored up.
In principle, the painter could make pictures out of everything he has lived through and done and seen. This creates an unbearably acute pressure to paint, and an equally acute feeling of anxiety.
Travel, the impression that one has ventured outside oneself, can be used as a filter and goad. It organizes the desire to paint. It gives it a rhythm, and the right kind of delay.
It is important not to see too much. (And there is nothing to reproduce.) Hence, Hodgkin doesn’t sketch, doesn’t take photographs, doesn’t do anything obvious to commit to memory the scene or an interior or a view or a face—instead trusting what will happen when the sight of something has burrowed itself deep down in memory, when it has accumulated emotional and pictorial gravity.
A way of feeling is a way of seeing.
What is worth painting is what remains in, and is transformed by, memory. And what survives the test of long-term deliberation and countless acts of re-vision. Pictures result from the accretion of many decisions (or layers, or brush strokes); some are worked on for years, to find the exact thickness of a feeling.
LOOKING CLOSELY at what the swipes and plunges of Hodgkin’s brush have deposited on a surface is to feel, sometimes, that one has divined the brush’s itinerary, starting from the first, generative surge of feelings. The distinctive shapes in Hodgkin pictures read like a vocabulary of signals for the circulation, collision, and rerouting of desire.
Sometimes it feels as if the flooding or brimming has spilled over onto the frame. Sometimes it is the frame that has moved inward, thickened, doubled, as if to contain what cannot be contained. (The fat verticals of Snapshot, like the sides of a proscenium stage or
a gate; the thick oval frame of Love Letter that squeezes, crowds the heart of what lies pulsing in the center.)
a gate; the thick oval frame of Love Letter that squeezes, crowds the heart of what lies pulsing in the center.)Framing hems in, keeps one from falling off the edge of the world. And framing gives permission to emote.
It makes possible the ambitiousness of Hodgkin’s work, and its tight, cunningly judged compactness of statement. Hodgkin has understood that if the pictures are dense enough, they can go in two directions, doing justice to intimate textures as well as to emotions of a large expressiveness. (Vuillard and opera, so to speak.)
VENICE: ONCE, AGAIN. Imagining the imagined. When you want to see Venice again, and you have seen it many times, rising out of the sea, in winter perhaps, semi-deserted, what you appreciate is that it will not have changed at all.
Or you stand at the railing of the boat going up the Nile, a day’s journey from Luxor, and it’s sunset. You’re just looking. There are no words you are impelled to write down; you don’t make a sketch or take a photograph. You look, and sometimes your eyes feel tired, and you look again, and you feel saturated, and happy, and terribly anxious.
There is a price to be paid for stubbornly continuing to make love with one’s eyes to these famous tourist-weary old places. For not letting go: of ruined grandeur, of the imperative of bliss. For continuing to work on behalf of, in praise of, beauty. It’s not that one hasn’t noticed that this is an activity which people rather condescend to now.
Indeed, one might spend a lifetime apologizing for having found so many ways of acceding to ecstasy.
THE IDEA IS to put as much as possible, of color, of feeling, in each picture. It’s as if the pictures need their broad border to contain so much feeling. As if they need to be painted on something hard, wood, since they embody such a large sense of vulnerability.
The sense of vulnerability has not diminished. Nor has the sense of gratitude: for the privilege of feeling, the privilege of voluptuousness, the privilege of knowing more rather than less. There is heroism in the vehemence and the lack of irony of Hodgkin’s pictures. He labors over them as if painting could still be a vehicle of self-transcendence.
In such matters, with such purposes, the race is to the slow.
[1995]