Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Howard Hodgkin

1906. February.

Paul Klee writes in his diary:

My work in the studio will grow considerably more lively. I have succeeded in directly transposing “nature” into my style. The notion of “study” shall be a thing of the past. Everything shall be Klee, regardless of whether impression and representation are separated by days or moments.

I wonder if a similar revelation was ever experienced by Howard Hodgkin round about 1975; if he suddenly knew, instinctively, as Klee knew sixty-nine years earlier, that henceforth “everything shall be Hodgkin.” Certainly the marvellous exhibition that was in New York and moves to Fort Worth and then Düsseldorf later this year seems to imply that 1975 was the watershed.

I was, serendipitously, reading Klee’s diaries as I was visiting the exhibition and generally thinking about Hodgkin and his work. This happy accident provoked a series of parallel reactions and cross-fertilizations that wouldn’t necessarily have been made otherwise. Klee and Hodgkin are not yoked together in the way that, say, Vuillard-Hodgkin and Bonnard-Hodgkin more commonly are. It proved an interesting way of looking at Hodgkin’s work from a different angle, and in the light of a different exemplar. For simple instance, the idea Klee floats in the extract quoted above of “impression and representation” being separated by days or moments seems a succinct definition of the modus operandi that Hodgkin also avows. The impression — the private event, the memory — is transfigured in paint on wood as representation, although its final “representation” may take years, rather than days or moments, to be finalized. In Hodgkin’s case the original afflatus may be entirely lost on the viewer, or is so enigmatic as to have an identical effect, or may — simply — have been rendered in shapes and colour tones. Klee can often be quite as oblique as Hodgkin and, set beside his, Klee’s titles possess a similar hazy allusiveness — are oddly Hodgkinian — and hint at a hidden meaning rather than describing the painted image. Klee: (examples taken at random) Contemplating, Blossoming, Uplift and Direction (Glider Flight). Hodgkin: Self-pity, Writing, Talking about Art.

Klee’s remarkable diaries prove salutary and humbling reading in this the day and age of the artist on fast track, the artist as snake-oil salesman, the hype-master with limited or undeveloped formal skills, the one-smart-idea pedlar. We see in these candid and beguiling pages the fascinating record of a great artist’s growth: its almost unbearable deliberation, full of struggle, laborious self-education, moments of despair and doubt, of inspiration provided by other arts — literature and music — and we are reminded of the old definition of “genius” as being the infinite capacity for taking pains. Klee’s sheer diligence, his doggedness, his search for that moment when “everything shall be Klee,” are powerfully reminiscent of Hodgkin’s own slow and steady development, of its learned and scholarly undertones; there is a further parallel in Hodgkin’s comparatively late flowering.

That it has indeed flowered is clearly evidenced in this collection of paintings spanning two decades. Two decades of work, moreover, that display an astonishing homogeneity and occupy a near-perfect plateau of success. The nature and extent of this consistency is quite clearly revealed in two similar paintings: The Hopes at Home and Patrick Caulfield in Italy. The first was painted in 1973–7, the second in 1987–92. In both pictures we see gathered together what we might call Hodgkin’s painterly vocabulary, the key Hodgkinian tropes. Two things strike the viewer immediately: the framing effect, a dark inky green in The Hopes, black in Caulfield, and the glowing lambency of the colours the frames surround. The frame, of course, achieves several ends. It “offers” the painting; it defines its edges; its colour offsets and complements the colours in the framed space. It creates, too, a trompe l’oeil effect of, as it were, setting back the painted area. These visual consequences are commonplace and were doubtless understood by the first artist who painted a border round his picture or set it within a wooden frame. Hodgkin, however, has made it almost his trademark: the painted frame itself and the painted framed surface are integral to the whole effect of the composition and not a decorative afterthought. Almost without exception we view Hodgkin’s pictures through a painted framing device.

Klee too, interestingly enough, was very conscious of where his picture ended — took pains pointedly to establish the picture edge (often achieved in his case by a form of mounting). In both Klee and Hodgkin the rationale behind this practice can be summed up thus: the more evident the frame — the more “edged” the picture — so the more discrete the image becomes. The concomitant idea of a cinema frame is entirely wrong here. These pictures are resolutely bounded, hemmed in. Nothing is implicit beyond the picture’s border. The gaze may not wander, it is precisely focused.

And within that frame Hodgkin spreads or stipples his refulgent colour tones. The effect, it has to be said, is highly seductive. These are paintings you covet, that boldly change your mood, that — to put it very crudely — you want to steal (no higher praise?). Many artists achieve this effect from time to time, but few can sustain it over a whole body of work: Matisse, Braque, Sam Francis are some modern artists that come to mind, but it is a tribute to Hodgkin’s mastery of colour that time and again one finds oneself entranced, ravished by the intensity of contrast, of counterposing and harmonizing colour and hue.

This is, I would claim, the initial response to a Hodgkin painting: immediate and instinctive, almost physical, I find, provoking an interior shout or laugh of recognition that this sorcery has worked so swiftly upon you. It is not simply a question of electric ultramarines offset by Naples yellows. Hodgkin can work his magic with a limited palette too. A picture like After Degas is completely beguiling, playing with a pistachio green and a chestnut brown and yet managing to glow as if it were lit from within.

The paint is applied in certain basic modes. There is the splodge, or dotted, or stippled effect and then there is what might be termed the smear, or swathe, often a gentle ogee or section of a curve in which the history of the painted gesture can be read. The loaded brush passing over the wooden ground, releasing its thinning paint to reveal colours beneath. This apparent spontaneity is, we now know, the product of possible years of reflection and afterthought and is far removed from the aleatoric frenzy of the abstract expressionist. However, like the abstract expressionist, Hodgkin’s painting can often be described as “gestural,” but it is important to establish that the individual gesture has been studied, rejected and reapplied many times and is not the impromptu slashing of some tormented id.

Klee, 1908:

By using patches of colour and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.

This was Klee documenting his slow shift from a heavy reliance on the graphic to a greater confidence with colour. By 1975, the graphic element in Hodgkin’s work is almost entirely subsumed by the process Klee describes above. The drawn object — a figure, a window, a tree — is at most blurrily present or is hugely stylized in the paintings of the last two decades. But Hodgkin does not rely only on colour and tone to achieve all his ends. There is no doubt — whatever protestations to the contrary — that the titles he appends to his paintings are designed to have an effect on the whole. Otherwise why not call them Composition no. 168 or some such, if it were simply a matter of designation? But in almost every Hodgkin the totality of the “impression” the painting conveys is adulterated, sometimes significantly, sometimes in a minor way, by the title the artist gives to it. (Again, this is an old trick — even the banal can be rendered portentous by a suitable title, as both Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys were aware.) Hodgkin has consistently individualized his paintings by the titles he bestows on them. Sometimes this has the effect of a lens twitched into focus. In Red Bermudas, for example, crude columns of beige and red suddenly become the bottom half of a sunbather. The title In Bed in Venice makes the painting immediately semi-figurative. Whereas Haven’t We Met? Of Course We Have or Burning the Candle at Both Ends remain impenetrably private references. This form of titling can also, it must be said, be an irritating affectation. The innocently ignorant viewer is stymied, redoubtably bogged down in his ignorance, denied the significance that the painting clearly holds for the artist and a few privileged others. A sense of exclusion is fostered, and nobody likes to be left out.

The late Bruce Chatwin was the subject of a Hodgkin painting (of the 1960s and not exhibited) and explained its genesis and key points de repère. The inspiration was a dinner in Chatwin’s minimalist flat decorated only by a Japanese screen and “the arse of an archaic Greek marble kouros.” Mr and Mrs Hodgkin and a couple called the Welches were the other guests. “The result of that dinner,” Chatwin wrote,

was a painting called Japanese Screen in which the screen itself appears as a rectangle of pointillist dots; the Welches as a pair of gun turrets, while I am the acid green smear on the left, turning away in disgust.

Chatwin gives a further insight into Hodgkin’s approach:

I remember Howard shambling round the room, fixing it in his memory with the stare I came to know so well.

Chatwin also elucidates another painting called Tea, which he explains as “a seedy flat in Paddington where a male hustler is telling the story of his life.”

Hodgkin may not encourage us to attempt an interpretation or to try to seek out a figurative element in his paintings, but there is no doubt that an important side effect of the titles is to make us do exactly this. In fact I think this tendency is a distinct advantage even though we are frequently balked and defeated. There is a figurative undercurrent in Hodgkin’s work, sometimes strong, sometimes subtle, and the paintings, even the most seemingly abstract, benefit from this potential urge to investigate and decode.

It is an instinctive and natural process in any event. The eye and the mind unconsciously seek to arrange and interpret the phenomena they encounter, and particularly those things deliberately presented to them, a category that includes abstract paintings hanging in art galleries. This natural human urge has to be curbed voluntarily or by some formal element in the painting, if we are to respond to it, judge and appreciate it solely, purely, in terms of shape, colour and composition. Hodgkin’s paintings — with their knowing allusiveness, their taquineries, and their representational shadowings — encourage us to look deeper, to go beyond the initial aesthetic thrill and try to see if there are more profound chords to be struck.

What we are talking about here is a particular stimulus common to certain works of art where visceral delight cohabits with analytical curiosity or even analytical imperatives. The two responses are not mutually exclusive, they can exist separately and can be present fortissimo or piano. But in Hodgkin’s case I find that what I have described as the aesthetic thrill generates a potent need to understand how this thrill was brought about. Vladimir Nabokov said that the first response to a work of art should be with the nape of the neck, but there is more going on in a Hodgkin painting than mere spine tingling. There is a complexity of reaction that functions on deeper, more cerebral levels too, and that demands further deliberation. The best of Hodgkin’s paintings, and there are many of them, provoke this response, and this explains, I think, both the unique frisson his work delivers — its sheer pleasure quotient — and its ultimate seriousness.

Klee’s art functions in the same way, it seems to me: it both delights on a simple level and reveals complexities of more profound and complex tenor. I don’t want to push the Klee-Hodgkin thesis too far — I’m reluctant to posit Hodgkin as a late twentieth-century Klee; there are marked differences on the graphic level, for example — but time and again the correspondences illuminate and odd affinities elide harmoniously: reasons for admiring Klee will be found to be similar to the reasons for admiring Hodgkin.

For example, Klee, in 1915:

I have long had this war inside me … And to work my way out of my ruins, I had to fly. And I flew. I remain in this ruined world only in memory, as one occasionally does in retrospect. Thus, I am “abstract with memories.”

Abstract mit Erinnerungen: it could be the cipher to unlock almost all of Hodgkin’s work. That combination of private event, recalled and eventually transfigured (with words, with music, with paint), is the deep source of much artistic endeavour in many art forms. One thinks of Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” and, indeed, it is to poetry that one can go, in my opinion, to find a key to Hodgkin’s particular alchemy.

Klee and Hodgkin choose memory as that function of the mind which provides the motor for their art. The American poet Wallace Stevens was obsessed with another transforming power of the human mind — imagination — and, in many respects, his entire oeuvre is a sustained meditation of this unique power and how it reshapes, irradiates and adds value to the world of appearance. Stevens’s poetry is a combination of a highly seductive word-mongering and manipulation (“the aesthetic thrill”) coupled with this basic concern, this serious contemplation of the faculty that lies behind all art and, as Stevens would have it, all meaningful human existence.

There is a short, not very well known Stevens poem called “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight” (it is one of many that could be chosen) which analyses the emotional charge that comes with seeing something beautiful, that tries to establish “what exactly is going on” in that moment (his “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” if you like). Taking the sunlit vision of the roses as its starting point it begins:

Say that it is a crude effect, blacks, reds,

Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are

To be anything else in the sunlight of the room …

And yet this effect is a consequence of the way

We feel and, therefore, is not real except

In our sense of it, our sense of the fertilest red,

Of yellow as first colour and of white,

In which the sense lies still…

I can’t think of a better description of the effect of looking at a Howard Hodgkin painting — one can almost imagine the Hodgkin version of “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight”—but what lifts the poem beyond mere apt description is the awareness of the defining interaction of the human mind. And of course the very experience itself has in turn been distilled and reconstructed in a work of art. Life, Stevens says — to put it very straightforwardly — is not truly real “except in our sense of it.” And this is what great art both understands and acknowledges when it tries to make sense of our sense of life. A similar process to the one that Stevens elucidates — a highly conscious one, it seems to me — is going on in Howard Hodgkin’s work: an attempt to fix the quiddity of an event — or a view or a moment or an emotion — rendered significant by “a consequence of the way we feel” through the manipulation of pigment upon a flat ground. (The move, as Klee describes it, from “impression to representation.”) The finished result, when it works, provides an elemental and intense pleasure but is also, as Stevens says later in the poem,

Like a flow of meanings with no speech

And of as many meanings as of men …

… this is what makes them seem

So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch.

At the risk of sounding like a rhetorician I would claim that Hodgkin’s paintings are, in their own way, a contemplation of what it is to be human — a celebration of all the complexities accruing in the act of being alive, sentient and conscious. Of course these are ancient — not to say timeless — concerns of all serious artists, but art that can do this is exceptionally rare: it deserves to be richly celebrated.

1996