The Paintings of Howard Hodgkin
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The Paintings of Howard Hodgkin |
By Wy Dot Com
To look at a Howard Hodgkin
painting is like being in on some event, but with the sound turned off.
Everything is happening at once, but there’s this gap.
His paintings are visual events, you feel the churn of intensities in your
guts.
It works by being so tightly
contained. Most of his paintings are comparatively small: 37x38 cm (Still Life),
26x30cm (Venice Sunset). It’s only in later works he takes on size: 196x269cm
(When Did We Go To Morocco?); but these are the exception.
The fierce overpainting objectifies emotional responses. The technically assured
range of brushstrokes persuades us into seeing the harmonics of the piece.
So what soundtrack would we put
here, then?
Harrison Birtwistle (Sir), for his layered textures and sense of theatre.
Because Hodgkin is dramatic, his “emotional responses” (ie his paintings) lift
and shape, throw into relief subjective experience onto an objective plane.
But also for both their idiosyncratic Englishness. Unmistakable. Hodgkin’s focus
is mostly domestic, the interior: we, the public, look either into frames in the
picture, or out of an interior. Our sense of perspective is jeapordised to such
an extent whichever way we look, that Hodgkin’s intensity becomes ours.
The unmistakable overpainting of the frame, and the painted frame within the
painting (see Snapshot) is to “protect from the world” the at times fleeting
emotion of the painting.
His paintings are deeply
figurative; witness the quantity of portraits. At their heart (the canvas level,
or, as he uses mostly board, the wood level) is generally a figurative
leitmotif, before arpeggios of response, a polyphony of tonal qualities,
describe their way
out.
Ok, joke over, but you get the idea.
Painting for Hodgkin is about creating “illusionistic spaces” through the use of a specific vocabulary: colour is to create depth, the richly textured surfaces that allow underpainting to show through create counterpoint, patternings and obliquities help suggest space, while other techniques defeat space, keeping our eyes on the surface of the painting.
He has learned, surprisingly, from Sickert: “one way to make a painting exciting is the intimation of a human drama through psychological and sexual inneuendo”. He does this through his tightly controlled focus, an almost keyhole perspective. Hodgkin himself writes: “I paint representational pictures of emotional situations”, that is, not emotions themselves. He also writes: “Pictures result from the accretion of many decisions, some are worked on for years, to find the exact thickness of a feeling.” (to Susan Sontag).
But is the Sickert so surprising?
Hodgkin studied at Camberwell School of Art 1949 to 1954. Camberwell at that
time was very influenced by the Euston Road School, in reaction to avant-garde’s
pure abstractionism, and Surrealism. The Euston Road School (William Coldstream,
Graham Bell, Victor Pasmore) was all about disciplined realism, observation,
every day life. And deeply influenced by Sickert and the Camden Town Group.
You also need to consider early Vuillard for the mood and interior scenes.
Later, of course Hodgkin’s peers, Matisse, Derain, and who were to become fellow
travellers: the neo expressionists.
His focus has always been intimacy, the understated; his figuration cubist,
similar to de Kooning. Hodgkin’s observation is very much a consideration of
remembered moments,
his disciplined realism the veracity of the self.
Of It Can’t Be True (1987-90)
Michael Auping writes, it is “echo-like in its composition. It is composed of
tilting frames jostling each other for position within the whole.” So, a
constant tension set up by structural elements: the bright yellow frame in the
centre is stopped short by a series of abrupt brush strokes that “ violate its
containment”.
And the title: what can’t be true? I question the need to know. The painting
stands for us, emerging out of the personal life of the painter. As with all
creative works there are always the unknowable elements: the subjective self’s
containment is challenged, maybe compromised, but never wholly claimed. The
titles are at times oblique because they are commentaries, jokes even, on the
self, the legislated life, the legislators of life.
Auping comments, on Snapshot (1984-93), “We are given an inside view… of how the artist allows the marks to show through other marks, how he half buries and obliterates, leaving only what is necessary to re-engage his memory of the subject, though that memory and its relation to the title remains mysterious.”
As with all things, we have to
learn to read paintings, their vocabularies, their aesthetics. Those who praise
Old Masters for their perspicacity only, in fact, see a fraction of what they
look at.
I hope to have given some indication here that it is worthwhile taking the time
to learn how to look.