Page 49 - Studio International - November 1969

minerals, semi-precious stones (aquamarine,
topaz, etc.) and, most adamantly in its non-
referential character, the colour of un-
explored but dreamed-of space, or terrain.
This colour has the expectant air of imminent
visitation.
It is certainly not purely physical in unasser-
tive resonance, transmitting interior light as a
dramatic agency or dimming its lustre; for
the pitch, hue and density synthesize as an
atmosphere, like a gas, in which these events,
that seem to relate to a premeditated future
rather than an absorbed, experienced past,
may occur. The surface of each painting has
a silkily-muted, non-abrasive impartiality.
Colour is undisturbed by texture.
Time, place, and situation are additional keys
to Huxley's work. There is of course thesis
and anti-thesis, in formal language; and here
the artist remembers playing as a child with
a box of toys owned by himself, a brother and
sister, and, as a family game, holding one toy
up at a time with the demand: `Quis ?' Who-
ever wanted the toy called 'Ego !' Direct
thesis and anti-thesis are thus confounded.
The memory came to mind when working on
the paintings of 1963-4 and listening to late
Beethoven quartets. Isolated themes were
extracted by the composer, for his op. 135, from
other, earlier scores and transposed into the
final Introduction and Allegro so that the
phrases, in intonation, seemed like question
and answer. They are believed to have sym-
bolized in Beethoven's mind the demand :
`muss es sein ?' and the response 'es muss All Huxley's paintings are invigorated by an We had the experience but missed the mean-
sein !' exact sense of situation supported by time, in ing,
Huxley feels no over-riding allegiance to any the visual sense of observably fast or slow And approach to the meaning restores the
one figure in the history of art but has, rather, movement, and place, from the way in which experience
a connoisseur's regard for particular works of the 'placement' of shapes acquires the near In a different form, beyond any meaning
different schools: The Ambassadors of Holbein, ritualist decorum of the disposition and We can assign to happiness.
with its trompe l'oeil skull; Piero di Cosima's shifts in posture of personages in the Nōh And in East Coker, Eliot writes:
Mythological Subject in the National Gallery, plays, or Kabuki theatre. And here, in
the paintings of Piero della Francesca, addition to balance or disequilibrium, trans- There is, it seems to us,
Uccello, Poussin and Ingres. The great mutation and illusionism, we have to con- At best, only a limited value
Burning of the City Japanese scroll in the Boston sider a state of being as opposed to a condition of In the knowledge derived from experience.
Museum and the Court Ladies Winding Silk existence; or concede the difference between The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsi-
Chinese scroll in the adjoining gallery have custom and tradition, external pressures fies,
particular meaning for him; the action and against internal forces, manners versus be- For the pattern is new in every moment
calligraphic incisiveness of the one, the un- haviour, and causality itself. Huxley was And every moment is a new and shocking
emphatic tension and elaborate formal reading Borges in the early 'sixties; and the Valuation of all we have been.
organization, through the disarmingly simple compression of time, place and incident, with We are only undeceived
arrangement of spatial pauses, in the latter. the undermining of one state of being by Of that, which, deceiving, could no longer
Its sweet-sharp colour may also touch on another crucially relevant circumstance, com- harm.
Huxley's liking for certain surrealists, notably bined with that awareness of simultaneity in
1 'Paintings today should be about question-
Tanguy, Ernst (when unburdened by time that is so peculiar to Borges in his
making, not story-telling ("it happened like this"),
Alt-dorfer-Böchlin topography), Dali, and Ma- Fictions, have great relevance to Huxley's or recording ("I was there and it looked like this").
gritte. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he vision, as a painter working on a flat plane. The sermon and the conducted tour have been
has never turned his back on Picasso; whilst The Tropisms of Sarraute, also known to the dealt with and painting can only be enlightening
by posing questions and making reconnaissance
Leger's clarity and flat volumetric definition artist, come into this same sensorily compac- trips rather than supplying answers. We become
have also impressed him. The phase of Mon- ted category. In the Four Quartets, Eliot
more wise by not knowing. If I were asked to give a
drian in which an especially tough pink was speaks a language that is existential and con- guide as to how my work should be understood I
used, first in the ovoid, embryonic paintings sumed by the recognition of change and would remember Mailer's quote from Gide:
and then in the paintings of subsequently passing time as well as the paradox of motive. "Please do not understand me too quickly", and
released rectangles of pink and blue on a white Certain lines convey something of the non- say that the curiosity that is possibly aroused in the
spectator and the queries he may wish to make are
ground : this almost 'surreal' use of pink, committal irony as well as the measured, the pictures' subject-matter.'
milky but hectic, is relished as much as the expositorily detached nature of Huxley's best [Paul Huxley's statement in 'The New Generation'
abstract evolution and achievement. work. In Dry Salvages, for instance : 1964 catalogue: Whitechapel Gallery.]