Page 48 - Studio International - November 1970

Paintings by words, Grosz had lost all his beliefs (at the Italy, rented an apartment and painted inces-
height of the McCarthy troubles, Grosz santly, moving into landscape imagery. He
John Hubbard said Now there's nothing left to satirize?') had always used colour schematically or
and, a lamentable teacher, had retreated back
conceptually, and continued to do so, as well
to academic drawing. as to make, as usual, numerous black and
Bryan Robertson At this time, Hubbard had a studio in the white drawings with pencil, charcoal or
`Hell's Kitchen' area of Tenth Avenue. His brush. Hubbard returned to London in the
own painting was irresolute. He had com- autumn of 1960, lived at Wandsworth, had
menced to paint before enrolling at the Art little contact with painters except Sandra
Students' League, but was at last working Blow, whom he had met in Italy, and
John Hubbard was born in Ridgefield, Con- hard, in earnest. A liberating force at this Anthony Fry. He had been interested in the
necticut, in 1931, the son of a lawyer whose time was Morris Kantor, also teaching at the work of Davie and Lanyon, possibly as some
forebears had emigrated to America from League, and a passionate believer in abstract kind of counterpart to American painting, and
Somerset around 1660. His mother was from expressionism and automatism. His reputa- this continued. He avoided English landscape
Pennsylvania; her family had settled there tion came from a kind of figurative painting painting, abstract or otherwise, and pro-
for several generations and it was modest which developed into something not unlike duced a series of dark expressionist paintings
financial help from her father, who had Grace Hartigan's work. Hubbard's sym- with surrealist undertones of buried imagery
invented machinery for drilling oil wells, that pathies went toward Pollock, Motherwell, which gradually gave place to more directly
enabled John Hubbard to study painting. Brooks and Kline, though he was involved `gestural' landscape paintings probably affec-
From eighteen to twenty-two Hubbard was with de Kooning and others. Hubbard was ted by de Kooning. These paintings were
at Harvard studying for a degree in English not especially committed to 'modernity' as an exhibited at the New Art Centre in 1961.
literature; during that period he became issue : he listened to Bach and Mozart, In 1962, Hubbard felt the first resistance to a
interested in art history and studied Italian Baroque music, Schubert and Beethoven; gestural expression of landscape when he
art, the history of art in general, and, rather went to the opera and ballet when he could experienced the totally individual light and
particularly, far Eastern art since his teacher, afford it and found his most acute point of terrain of the Greek mainland and islands. He
Benjamin Rowland, was an authority in this contact with 'modernity' in the ballets dev- had his first sense of a different structure in
field. Hubbard also studied at the architec- ised by Graham, Robbins and Balanchine. landscape for which gestural handling was
tural school, attending the lectures of Gropius. As a free student, with a scholarship, Hubbard not applicable. It is perhaps from this mo-
In 1951, Hubbard paid his first visit to spent the summer of 1957 studying with Hans ment that Hubbard began, slowly, to discover
Europe, whilst still a student at Harvard, and Hofmann in Provincetown. himself as a painter: when the landscape
travelled in France, Italy and England. He He found him a ruthless teacher, with healthy began to answer back in different terms.
was affected at once by the English landscape, repercussions; he said Hubbard's work was Certain things in Hubbard's work are
as well as Tuscany, and by the first-hand dreadful and said so at every opportunity. constant. There is a deep and obsessive con-
experience of Venice and Venetian art. Hubbard was not influenced by Hofmann's cern for place, ranging from Dorset itself, to
In 1953, during the Korean War, Hubbard own work (then moving into the slabs of pure Greece as a recurrent point of departure, to
left Harvard and enlisted in the army, in colour becalmed in atmospheric space), but Africa, notably in recent years North Africa,
counter-intelligence, spending one year study- found the school a tonic and clarifying experi- and the area from Marrakesh across the Atlas
ing Japanese at an Army language school ence. mountains to the Sahara. Drawing plays a
in Monterey, California. He was then posted In 1958 Hubbard left the Art Students' constant part in the give and take between
to Japan in the counter-intelligence unit League, where he had ended his time as perception and imaginative response through
stationed at Hokkaido, off the coast of Siberia. Kantor's assistant. In the face of general the way in which a pencil line or brush stroke
He stayed there, with a certain amount of disapproval, Hubbard decided to travel to is placed so 'openly' as to be atmospheric and
travelling in Japan, until 1956. At Harvard Europe for about a year. At that time, abstract as well as descriptive.
he had studied Japanese and Chinese paint- Europe was discredited by most American In painting, there is a reconciliation between
ing, gardens and architecture, but was artists as any possible source of inspiration: the eccentricities of place and specific visual
equally absorbed by the relationship between Paris was dead, nothing was known about circumstances with the demands of the paint-
work and life in Japan, and by landscape or London. Hubbard came straight to England, ing as a separate entity which embraces those
bird and flower painting in black and white. spent time exploring Cornwall and Scotland, characteristics whilst extending into other
In Chinese art, this is the area which also and drawing; met some of the artists based in and less predictable, certainly less descriptive,
interests Hubbard most; and as a whole he Cornwall, but had the idea of Rome firmly in areas of abstract construction. Hubbard wants
prefers Chinese to Japanese art. his mind as an ultimate destination. He to make allusion as concrete and exact as
In 1956, when he was twenty-five, Hubbard travelled to Rome via Spain, and worked in a straightforward description might be. With
left the army and forfeited his claim to grants studio in Rome until 1960, after making con- the gradual, bitterly self-critical and slow
from the G.I. Bill of Rights because of tact with some expatriate American painters advent of confidence and freedom in painting
restrictions placed on certain schools and in Rome : Cy Twombly, James Wines, Philip terms slowly won throughout the sixties,
institutions; to have entered the Boston Perlstein; and renewed acquaintance with Hubbard has still gone through concentrated
Museum School seemed a retrogressive step de Kooning when he spent the summer of phases of drawing straight from nature.
after leaving Harvard. Still not totally secure 1959 in Rome. Hubbard made rather less Recently, however, a remarkable series of
over the idea of becoming an artist, Hubbard contact with Italian artists, though he paraphrases, in charcoal, after some late
went to New York where he lived for two and intensely admired Morandi. drawings by Palmer, were made in 1969.
a half years, studying at the Arts Students' Arriving in London in 1960, Hubbard Hubbard found an odd affinity in these draw-
League. He enrolled under Edwin Dickinson, arranged to show work at the New Art ings of Palmer, with their accurate graphic
an exceptionally cultivated man and a fine Centre and showed four paintings at that notations or condensations of the form and
teacher, but Hubbard was reacting strongly gallery in the summer of 1960. (These, like essence of sticks, stones, grasses, foliage, rocks
against the rather genteel, civilized 'New nearly all the paintings made in Rome, were and water, which touched on drawings by
England' tradition, and he gravitated toward based on still-life themes.) During this same Breughel that he also admired, though Palmer
another teacher, George Grosz. In Hubbard's summer, Hubbard went to Porto Ercole, in seemed more free and, in some ways, more