Page 35 - Studio International - May June 1975

culture, and the roots of abstraction are When Hodgkin had his first exhibition toy) rather than a picture. In Mr and
altogether more fundamental; because at Tooth's, in 1962, when he was thirty, Mrs E.J.P. (1972-3), it is perhaps only
man has always found, when his inner one of the works on show was Hotel. the anarchic entry of the great green egg
experience reaches a certain level of In format it has obvious affinities to that has reasserted, like a bull in a china
intensity, that the forms of the everyday Indian miniatures; but in its infantile shop, the human presence against the
world are blanked out by it. At that wit, it could be (and was) placed alongside masterly formal patchwork. Mr and
point, 'abstractions' become real. That is Hockney and other young Mrs E.J.P. was one of two works to
why Dante, in ascending into the contemporaries. But it lacks the represent Hodgkin at the Hayward
Paradiso', becomes only signs and complexity of language of Hodgkin's Gallery in 'British Painting '74'. These
numbers; and hence also the refusal of later work, and the emotional and works seemed to me extraordinarily
figuration in the art of Islam and in other intellectual content is thereby greatly dense and loaded compared to
religious systems. reduced. We feel already that these everything else around them; turning a
The whole direction of twentieth- figures have a life of their own within the corner, it was suddenly like treading
century art may be seen as a turning picture; only, instead of the later powerful heavy water. Who else in England was
inwards away from the perceived world; and ultimately affirmative presences, we using colour of such exuberance and
as has often been observed, we see around have here puppet-like absurdities, which mastery ? Who else was producing
us a culture which has refused religion, seem to huddle fearfully in the fiat objects of such intellectual and
yet the forms of whose art are, more than emptiness that surrounds them. The emotional complexity, rewarding on so
ever, those of religious experience. That element of cruelty or malice, which in the many levels ?
the act of abstraction has in itself an Tilson and other later portraits becomes Hodgkin is an artist who admits to
emotional significance should not be part of a robustly grotesque vision of feeling isolated in his work from his
forgotten. As Kandinsky wrote in society, here seems only a meanness. contemporaries. But I think it was
`Concerning the Spiritual in Art', Then, in the mid-sixties, his work helpful to see his paintings alongside
abstraction exists `to express mysteries by began to take on its present character those of Kitaj, who shares with him the
means of the mysterious'. In Mondrian and appearance. Large Staff Room was same riddling allusiveness, the
or Malevich or Rothko, 'abstract' is begun in 1964, and at six feet is one of linguistic mix, the sense of a complex
really another word for metaphysical, Hodgkin's largest works. In the state in and many-levelled world. I want to
and when Mondrian declared that, if which it was delivered and exhibited at suggest here something like a school now
Cubism were to be pursued to its Tooth's in 1967, it had arrived at a developed in England, among whom I
`logical consequences', it must abandon powerful statement, of the table around would also place Paolozzi. Paolozzi's
the object altogether, he spoke from his and beneath which human presences Wittgenstein prints (As is When 1964)
own theosophical premise of a quest for meet and mingle. But the process was and Kitaj's Marxist History paintings
the Absolute. It was only later generations incomplete; the painting was taken back share with Hodgkin's works a quality of
which made of this pursuit a merely and further blanked out, reaching its being obviously impenetrable or
formal imperative. final state in 1969, when it was shown hermetic in their reference, of both
Howard Hodgkin's linguistic ambiguity again at Kasmin's. What has been demanding and rebuffing interpretation.
comes out of a real ambiguity of feeling. emphasized is the intellectual dimension; Yet Hodgkin's work diverges, not only
For what if, although one cares mostly it is as though the moment has been held in that it is less immaculate, but that, in its
about the spiritual dimension in between finger and thumb, the great relation to its subject-matter, it is much
experience, one does not care to pursue it expanse of flat cadmium-red suggesting a less distanced. As Kitaj pointed out in the
as an Absolute, but rather to concentrate kind of mind-space in which the memory remarkable lecture he delivered at the
on the moment of transformation ? On — a knee under a table — exists. ICA; at Cambridge, and elsewhere in
the movement between dimensions ? Certainly part of the excitement of all 1966, all recent painting has been
In the same way that the language of Hodgkin's work is the sense of the artist distanced; whether through formalism in
Léger's later work no longer seems to leaping into the unknown, risking all that the case of the non-figurative, or through
young painters a betrayal or a he has, in what Matisse called 'submitting irony in the figurative. This he contrasted
compromize towards Cubism, so I think to the spirit of the picture'. When to the urgency of such images as news-
we will recognize more and more clearly in Hodgkin exhibited in Paris in 1972, the photographs, or a Balthus of two ladies
Howard Hodgkin's use of abstraction a largest painting there was Coming up with a dildo, which he suggested might
right vehicle for the kind of experience from the Beach (33x 78 in.), which he point to the art of the future. It was a
he has to convey. Although Hodgkin's had worked at over the previous three fine and very theatrical mea culpa; and
subject-matter has always remained years. In the figure which climbs up and Kitaj's long subsequent near-silence was
extraordinarily consistent, his language looks behind, to see the curving horizon proof that he really did feel this guilt.
developed slowly. Yet with hindsight we of the ocean shining beneath it, But if in his recent work Kitaj has re-
can see that the problem has always been Hodgkin captures a very characteristic emerged stronger than before, it is still
the same — that of balancing the rights of kind of pleasure; the moment when, as within the basic context of irony. Here
the subject with those of the picture. one moves from one world to another, Hodgkin's choice of a subject-matter that
Once central admiration helped to form one looks back, with nostalgia and seems ostensibly much less urgent or
him. Even as a schoolboy he had been recognition, at the world one has left. important than that of Kitaj and
deeply affected by Indian painting. It is Less obviously resolved than, for Paolozzi, has allowed him to produce
not only the flatness and the use of very instance, the Tilson portrait, its work whose warmth and vulnerability
bright colour; Hodgkin speaks also of the roughness to me carries more intensely seems in some respects more
eclecticism in their use of space, and of Hodgkin's peculiar stamp of nourishing. •
how, in Rajput miniatures, 'one looks in temperament. Only by desperate
vain for consistent styles which embrace remedies could this difficult space be
man and nature in one physically made to work; apart from the figure and 1 Hodgkin to Alan Bowness, catalogue of the
coherent system of forms, as has so often the sea, everything else has become Stuyvesant Collection.
been the case in Western painting'. Yet, frame. 2 The monograph by Richard Morphet,
he suggests, In some of Hodgkin's more recent which was to have appeared in 'Penguin
`the attraction of small Indian works, especially in the screenprint Modern Painters', was abandoned with the
paintings to European painters of Indian Views he made for Waddington, rest of the series.
much larger pictures is perhaps an increasingly formal statement has 3 Among others, Richard Smith, Gillian
because of the simple completeness of perhaps threatened to kill the emotional Wise, Anthony Hill, R. B. Kitaj, Patrick
what they depict. The relations of men content, and the frame to become the Caulfield, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and
Robyn Denny.
to each other and to their surroundings point of the picture. In these years, also, Studio International July/August, 1968.
are wholly present, with nothing of he has begun to paint on heavy wooden Studio International September, 1966.
importance missing. So that even if panels, and this has further increased 6 In his statement (in French) for the
they fall short of the linguistic unities the potential for each work to take on a exhibition at Galerie Stadler, Paris, March-
of great classical painting, the content closed, opaque character, as a painted April, 1972.
is equal'.' wooden object (a fetish or a children's Hodgkin in a letter to the author.
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