by William Boyd
Franz Kline was a modestly talented American artist, born in Pennsylvania in 1910, who up until the late 1940s was painting figuratively in a style of sombre neo-Impressionism. There is some dispute about the source of the influence that caused him to turn so dramatically to abstract painting (possibly de Kooning’s black and white abstracts of 1948, possibly Arshile Gorky’s work), but whatever it was the change in artistic direction was marked and memorable. The first indications of the new style occur in the late forties in a series of small ink on paper sketches, clearly done almost spontaneously, in a manner of slashed doodling, sometimes one or two strokes of the brush, sometimes more squiggly and cursive. The key word often employed here is “gestural,” and it is by and large apt, suggesting as it does the vague arm movements one might make in conversation, the way one might render visually with one’s hands the random geometry of a car crash. Kline’s early black and white sketches reproduce this sparse but effective vocabulary. If a spread palm-down hand juddering through the air delineates succinctly the idea of a car skidding to a halt, then the smear and spotting of ink on paper also has a stylistic validity: one is conjuring up, suggesting, implying—in the same way as a raised fist implies a more complicated act of violence.
But—and there is always a “but” with Kline, as there is with all the Abstract Expressionists—Kline’s work is both enhanced and betrayed by reproduction. On the page an 11 × 8 inch sketch such as Study for Buried Reds can assume the massive gravitas of Four Square, which is 6½ × 4½ feet. In the museum, however, a collection of sketches known as the “Telephone Page Series” turns out to be less than nugatory. Loose watery bands of black ink on torn out, yellowing pages of Manhattan’s telephone directory, they are nothing more than a tribute to the framer’s art. They are certainly beautifully framed.
Kline’s work needs the large scale in order for it to function in its singular, solid, charged way. Even medium-sized canvases such as Third Avenue don’t deliver the visual impact that the big pictures do, even though the ingredients and the manner of their execution are virtually identical. I don’t want to suggest that Kline’s work only succeeds by virtue of what one might term the skyscraper effect (a skyscraper is the same shape as an upended match box—which is the more impressive?), as there are other forces operating in addition to sheer size and graphic shock value, but I think that the disappointment, the banality, of the smaller work is due to the fact that the brushstroking is too evident. Too evident and too simple. The aleatoric dominates: one begins to think of the arrangement of volumes, of the painting’s design, as merely serendipitous rather than consciously artistic. In a huge painting like Wanamaker Block, although the effect is of, let’s say, a dozen great slashes on the canvas with a loaded housepainter’s brush, there must in fact have been carefully considered dozens more. The big canvases are more worked, in other words, the black derives its density from more thoughtful application than a simple backhand sweep or haphazard doodle. And so is the white, too. One of the pleasant revelations of the Kline show is to observe how different the whites can be: sometimes a thick impasto, or sometimes a watery shading with the canvas showing through. There is a distinct textural quality to a successful Kline that reproduction again does not convey.
One is searching for instances of the painterly in work that seems deliberately to shun such values. But it is significant that the black and white pictures are not simply a stark contrasting of opposites. The painterliness is again more evident when Kline begins to introduce small notes of colour. In pictures such as To Win or Lehigh V Span, the note of purply maroon in the former and small streaks of blue and pistachio green in the latter function ideally with the dominant black and white—minor chords that set off the major themes. Curiously—or perhaps significantly—the less monochrome the pictures become, the more Kline’s palette enlarges, the less memorable and effective they are. Kline’s large colour pictures—exactly as “gestural” and fervid as the black and white—seem mere angry discordancies. Pictures such as Yellow, Orange and Purple or Head for Saturn seem strangely un-Klinean, routine Abstract Expressionism exploiting some vague idea of energy or rage. Kline is a victim of his own success, a fate that often befalls abstract painters. Once your style is established and recognized (better still: if it can be recognized at fifty yards), then it is very hard to make a change. Kline’s black and white paintings are as much a signature of the New York School as Pollock’s luminous dribblings. Kline is not about colour in the same way that Pollock is not about draughtsmanship. To put it cruelly, they had both found their “gimmick” and that was what the world wanted of them.
Kline died in 1962, aged fifty-one, of a heart attack, having wilfully, perhaps deliberately, ignored doctors’ warnings to cut down his potent appetite for nicotine and alcohol. He was concentrating on colour in the last year or so of his life, wanting colour, as he phrased it, to behave structurally like black and white. It was a new direction, but, on the evidence of the works left behind, it might not have proved a fecund one. It is a measure of Kline’s gift, his singular talent, that with such a reduced vocabulary—black and white, the ragged brushstroke, and the limits these factors impose on form and composition—he was able to produce abstract paintings that are so memorable. (I was about to say “haunt,” but I feel that is a misnomer: let us say that some of Kline’s big simple paintings stay doggedly in the mind.) I think particularly of Thorpe, Yellow Square, Lehigh V Span, Wanamaker Block, Accent Grave and, to my mind his best painting, Hazelton.
What is it about Hazelton that makes it worthy of this distinction? It is large (41 × 78 inches) and the characteristic beamy slabs of black are painted with unusual confidence. There is less blurriness on the edges, less evidence of second thoughts or soft options, the black and white contrast is more austere, denser. It is also weighted heavily towards the right side, the volumes of black congregating in one half of the picture. One automatically scans a picture left to right, as one reads a book, the eye instinctively moves rightwards, and the massiness of the swathes of black in the right-hand segment seems gravid and packed, in powerful opposition to the two big white planes of the left-hand side, which are marred only by three or four tiny flecks. The flecks inevitably give a sense of scale, albeit arbitrary, small and scratchy beside the huge horizontal bar and the great tapered columnar vertical that almost divides the painting in half. There is an inevitable sense, too, of a horizon—a feeling that the top left rectangle of the picture recedes, is unpenned by the edge of the canvas.
Further comment becomes more subjective. The title of the painting suggests a place, the idea of a place implies a landscape, and one starts to imbue this dispersal of black and white pigment with attributes from our human world. Factors like “winter,” “woods,” “snowfields,” “sky” intrude, possibly all quite wrongly, as Kline claimed only to add his titles after the picture was painted as a means of identifying them, of distinguishing them from the mass of Untitleds that confuse critics and perplex curators. I feel this explanation is somewhat disingenuous as there is no doubt that calling a picture Wotan rather than Untitled 1957 inevitably adds something to the totality of response to that picture. Like it or not, one’s reaction to an abstract painting is always bound up with one’s human nature; it is virtually impossible (outside of an academic exercise) to confine it to the three essential judgements on colour, form and composition. People, human beings, who like art bring a whole complexity of sentiments—hard and soft, positive and negative—to the study of paint on canvas. By calling his picture Hazelton Kline slyly taps into that infinitely variegated richness, and thereby adds something to the picture’s greatness. It is naive, not to say dishonest, to pretend that it doesn’t matter.
I use the word “greatness,” but I use it advisedly. Much as I like and admire Franz Kline’s work, I would never use the word “masterpiece” about any of his paintings. Indeed I would never use the word about any purely abstract painting. This is what baffles and frustrates me about
abstract painting in general, and not just the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School. When I consider the abstract paintings that I possess (by William Scott, Keith Vaughan, Sandra Blow and John Hoyland) and consider the pleasure I derive from them, it is of exactly the same order as my response to Franz Kline’s best work. Yet for all the pleasure taken, there is something lacking, something fundamentally indifferent. Pure abstraction, in denying the human context, denies itself true greatness.
Two factors lead me towards this conclusion, and the presence of both of them is essential if a painting is to be deemed “great” or the artist acclaimed as a “master.” In 1928 Paul Valéry reviewed a book on Veronese’s frescoes, during which he bemoaned the quality and calibre of the art of his time (this in 1928! One wonders how he would have felt today). He further commented that it was taken for granted in Veronese’s time that there would be in any artist
a combination of ability and technique, that is currently extremely rare: it was assumed that any artist was in full command of the science of his art to a degree that it was second nature. The utmost virtuosity [in the practising of his art] was absolutely indispensable.
This is a working definition of an artist—an artist of stature—that seems to me to be timelessly valid. Would we rather require that an artist have only a partial knowledge of the science of his art and be fair to middling in the practice of it? Franz Kline could draw passably well, certainly considerably better than Jackson Pollock, or Mark Rothko, which is a plus, but the “utmost virtuosity” was probably far beyond his reach. It may be argued that by the different standards of Abstract Expressionism Kline was indeed in full command of the science of his art, but there is still the second factor to be considered before we crown him with laurels.
I want to borrow and somewhat adapt a theory put forward by Richard Wollheim in the conclusion to his wise and remarkable book Painting as an Art. There, he offers an evolutionary argument for the objective intelligibility of painting. He argues that painting is intelligible—that painting conveys meaning—simply and precisely because it has survived over the centuries as an art in human societies. If it did not “work,” in other words, it would not have survived in these societies—“societies in which a common human nature manifests itself.” In my opinion, an art of pure abstraction reduces our ability to see our common human nature in the work of art. (Wollheim would not agree with me: he considers, for example, some late, purely abstract de Koonings as masterpieces. We part company here.) I am not saying that our common human nature is absent or degraded, I am merely saying it is much reduced and severely simplified and, in so far as this is the case, purely abstract art cannot function as art of the highest level and greatest profundity. I feel this when I confront the work of Franz Kline, and it prompts me to ask the old question: why swim in a swimming pool when you can swim in the sea?
1994
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 co
me 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.