Howard's End

I ordinarily wouldn't report on an exhibition that has just closed, but it wasn't until last Friday, its final day, that I was able to get up to New Haven to see the show at the Yale Center for British Art of Howard Hodgkin's work since 1992. It was predictably captivating, and I can't resist putting out a few thoughts. (And if you happen to be in the U.K. later this year, it will be migrating shortly to the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.)

Torso/Howard Hodgkin, 2000 -- The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Purchase, the Drier Fund for Acquisitions in Memory of Robert Cafritz--

Hodgkin is everybody's favorite voluptuary, their exemplar of the pleasure principle in pigment. More than any other contemporary artist, even a color field painter like Ellsworth Kelly, he built upon the working idea of Matisse, that color can operate in a painting not just as sensation, but as meaning and even form. Then from Vuillard and Bonnard (and from Indian painted miniatures) he took the idea of the canvas as a bristling, enclosed world. The sense of feeling under pressure in Vuillard's flickering scenes of domestic life, or in Bonnard's radioactive afternoons at home, were forebears of Hodgkin's passions recollected within a frame while spilling over the edges.

But there's another crucial forebear, the flagrant brush work of the Abstract Expressionists. What I was reminded of by the Yale show is how much the success of Hodgkin's work depends on the way he manages to get his semi-abstract brushwork to linger just so at the threshold of representation. Those big turbulent strokes, like the arching green and blue-black flourishes in Torso, signify as both anatomical forms — not just as torsos in that one but maybe also as tongues and other body parts too — and as explosions of direct feeling, with color and brushwork fused to the same purpose. Of course this is what AbEx painters did all the time, launched pigment in bravura ejaculations, but they didn't generally also get — or want — their brushwork to suggest clear equivalents in the visible world, to be a flourish that was also a curtain or a stem or a table or a tree.

You will never "decipher" a Hodgkin. There's only so far you can go, or should want to go, in finding the table or the tree. (If it's there at all, or as anything more than the faintest residue of a remembered form.) But those bright compartments of feeling under pressure speak for themselves. You don't need to decipher them to get them. Or for them to get you.