Page 58 - Studio International - May 1969

London
commentary

JOHN HOYLAND RECENT PAINTINGS AT
WADDINGTON GALLERIES, 6-31 MAY;
LES LEVINE SCULPTURE AT ROWAN GALLERY,
9-30 MAY; PATRICK PROCKTOR RECENT
WATERCOLOURS AT REDFERN GALLERY,
22 APRIL - 16 MAY.

The rectangular empty canvas presents to the the shape of the support, thus acknowledging osity and openness in the work of these paint-
modern abstract painter a range of problems and emphasizing its literal form and flatness. ers which is not easily found elsewhere. Each
which his predecessors would never have This has resulted in some stunningly irredu- of them successfully avoided the danger of
needed to recognize. There are two kinds of cible and unified images; Stella's black paint- their work becoming illustrative by conceiv-
space available to abstract painting. The first ings of 1958-9 are the supreme examples. ing of the painting from the start as a total
is the illusory space generated by the rela- Another solution has been to aim at the crea- image —an imperative for modern abstract
tionship or isolation of forms upon a ground tion of simple forms with a sufficiently blatant painting which is also certainly a Modernist
which appears relatively transparent. This and general identity in relation to the overall imperative. The necessity that every modern
kind of illusionism relates back to representa- format to impose themselves as an absolute painter faces is to make the picture shape
tional painting and depends for its effective- visual priority in any one painting; e.g. particular in terms of what he has created for
ness on our instinct—bred of centuries of Noland's target paintings and early chevrons. it and in no other terms. If there is an illusion
perspectival painting—to read real depth and These two solutions to one problem represent of depth it must be envisaged in particularly
distance into a flat surface. Paint a cow on it extreme opposite points of view within visual rather than literary imaginative terms
and the canvas becomes a field. An abstract Modernism,2 which one might sum up re- and must be felt as particular to one arrange-
shape with too strong and separate an iden- spectively as 'A painting is a thing', and 'A ment of colours in one format.
tity in relation to its surroundings will gener- painting is something else'. John Hoyland has associated himself, in his
ate an appropriate space : the abstract cow in If the concept of Modernism is to be success- work, with a search for those virtues of rich-
a colour-field. fully opposed (not that such an opposition ness and openness which these painters dis-
The second kind of space is more purely would necessarily discredit any good paintings, play. He had a long and conventional aca-
optical and is not so indiscriminately open to which were not after all painted by the critics) demic training but responded unequivocally,
the influence of the individual imagination. it can only be on the grounds that both options as did all the best English painters of his
This is the space generated by the relationship are still open and that work of the highest generation, to the impact of American paint-
of any two or more colours across a flat surface, quality can still be produced by painters who ing in London in the late 1950s, and in par-
dependent upon the degree of resistance they are prepared to entertain some imaginative ticular to the work of Rothko which he saw
offer to the eye, upon tone, texture, area..etc. illusion of depth. The evidence would suggest in the US painting exhibition at the Tate in
The Development of 'Modernist Painting'1 is a that it can. The finest works of Rothko (like 1956. By 1960, the date of the first Situation
concept sustained by the belief that the two the painting in the Kunstsammlung Nord- exhibition, he was painting abstract pictures.
kinds of picture space, the illusory and the rhein-Westfalen), and of Barnett Newman, (The requirements of the exhibition itself
optical, are mutually exclusive. Much of the the Unfurleds of Morris Louis and the late probably hastened and strengthened his
recent history of painting has been interpreted papiers découpés of Matisse (for instance The commitment to abstraction, as I suspect they
in terms of the recognition of a need to close snail and The souvenir of Oceania) offer possi- did for several of the other exhibitors.) It is
off the first before exploiting the second. One bilities which have certainly not been ex- now becoming clear that of all the English
recent solution has been to make the decora- hausted and set standards which have not yet painters of his generation Hoyland has most
tion of the surface directly dependent upon become irrelevant. There is a richness, gener- successfully assimilated major influences from