ARTS
Friday, July 30, 2010
Page 43
Howard Hodgkin - The last English romantic painter Jonathan Jones on the artist whose work is in the best intellectual tradition from Cézanne to Twombly
I
t is difficult to look at Howard Hodgkin’s paintings without a picture in your mind of where they might hang when they are not on loan to an exhibition. They are haunted by secret worlds, not only that of the artist, but also those of his collectors. They are paintings for and of the private sphere. Only one work in his captivating exhibition of recent work at Modern Art Oxford has been lent from a museum. The rest have come from houses and apartments, from over the mantelpiece or the bed, from a dark office or a bright dining room . . . you see? You start thinking about these absent places, the homes of the paintings, and the images keep coming. Most suggestive of all is Hodgkin’s little painting Leaf (200709). It belongs, surely, in a study. I imagine it hanging near the door. The walls around it are crammed with natural history specimens - impaled butterflies, glassed-in stag beetles. Old volumes of Darwin and Linnaeus are on the bookcases. Opposite this painting, in playful juxtaposition, is a microscopically precise 19th-century study of a leaf. Outside, through a window honeyed by the glow of the desk lamp, is an orchard. Leaf is a perfect miniature of Hodgkin’s art. In this small picture he distills everything that is original about his vision. Who else would do what Hodgkin does here, and mimic the genre of the botanical study, yet enfurl that tradition of scientific looking in a baroque robe of abstract green? His leaf is a double swirl of louche color, a wild brushstroke enclosed in a battered wooden frame. It is not a realistic leaf yet it responds to the visible world - it is the color of a leaf. It is, we accept, faithful to
reality - but how? How does the world so pervade Hodgkin’s art that each picture, placed in the dry space of an art gallery, seems to carry with it the intimacy of private rooms, the freshness of gardens, the changing light of nature? Some artists emerge fully-formed, perfect, from art school, like David Hockney in the 1960s, glittering in a gold jacket and pop spectacles, painting with an open sensuality. Hodgkin, born in 1932, also had his first exhibitions in the early 60s but to look at his early works, to read the reviews of a shared show at the ICA in 1962 with the - then - far more happening Allen Jones, is to excavate a stuttering, uncertain start. The scion of a famous family, an Eton drop-out, he did not look in his first decade of painting like a central figure in the art of his time. Yet I would argue that alone of all his British contemporaries he has remained loyal to the most interesting and serious artistic insights of the 60s. He is
conventionally praised, and occasionally dismissed, as the last English romantic, a pure painter in the mould of Constable and Turner, an artist who feels. I see him more as an artist who thinks - a philosophical painter. To return to that leaf in Oxford. Hodgkin could have dipped his brush in any colour he liked. He mixed a lime or olive-tinged green, that breaks into streaks of yellow against the bare wooden board, leaving oil stains around it and a clogged sticky pool against the frame. It is also, magically, leaf shaped. This single wide brushstroke, doubled up on itself in a bulbous curve, produces the tapering form of a laurel leaf. Then again, the wispy delicacy of the brushstroke - so casual, so light, so airy - suggests a leaf’s movement in the air, as if it were about to be blown away on an evening breeze. So he gives us the colour of a leaf, the shape of a leaf: and most importantly, the essence of a leaf, which comes of its slightness, its vulnerability to gusts.
This is a systematic, and to me profoundly moving, rethinking of what it is to see an object. Ideas, associations, affinities, memories, longings consitute, for Hodgkin, our real experience of the material world. When we think of a leaf we may have different memories from his, but we never simply see a constellation of cells. The world comes to us already composed of lyrical suggestions. The most ambitious modern artists have wrestled with this complex web of experience ever since Paul Cézanne stared at Mont Sainte-Victoire and, portraying it again and again, infused every rock, every pine branch with his own isolation and turbulent inwardness. In the 1950s and early 60s the inquiry begun by Cézanne was reformulated by three Americans - Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly - and I believe these are the artists of that epochal time with whom we should compare Hodgkin. When Johns made an American flag of collaged newsprint embalmed in encaustic, he conveyed the plenitude of stories and perspectives an apparently simple icon could hold; when Rauschenberg put his bed, smeared and spattered with paint, on a gallery wall he invited the beholder to read or invent tales of sex and intimacy in its stains. But most of all Hodgkin resembles Twombly, whose graffiti epics speak of dirty sex and high feeling in grand palatial Roman settings. Like Twombly, he has become better as he has become more openly emotional. It was with paintings of the 1980s whose titles, such as In Bed in Venice (1984-8), or Love Letter (1984-88), convey their intimacy, that Hodgkin discovered the eloquent grandeur of his
maturity. Neither of these pictures is legible in a realist way: but neither is emptily abstract, either. To engage with them is to be caught in knots and shocks of recognition and imagining: to chase after the artist’s encounters and longings. It is in the best intellectual tradition of modern art from Cézanne to Rauschenberg’s Bed and Twombly’s Ferragosto. His exhibition of recent work in Oxford reveals that he is still advancing, and still thinking. Lawn (2009), seems to want to show all the potential colours of grass in different lights, at different seasons, or in the varying vitality of different blades in a single bit of turf, within one unified smear of layered colours. Khaki, yellow, pink, grey, pine and moss all twist together in lines of unmixed oil, like a preparation for a giant microscope. At the very beginning of natural history in art stands Albrecht Durer’s 1503 watercolour The Great Piece of Turf. In this mesmerising observation of nature Durer concentrates his gaze on a tiny section of the world and depicts each blade of grass, each leaf and seed in it with intense accuracy. Hodgkin similarly excavates a crosssection of grass but we have no way of knowing if he has portrayed an entire lawn, or a two-centimeter patch. His painting Big Lawn (200810) is broader, as if seen from further away in the soft light of a summer evening, and Sky (2008-09) induces a moment of vertigo just with two alternating blues - dark and light conveying, in a small golden oval frame, the height and sweep of a Tiepolo heaven. Yet at the same time, and this complicates the show in dark ways, contemporary history intrudes. —Guardian