Bamboo

by William Boyd

  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 high
ly 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

  Michael Andrews

  An A–Z

  A. Ayers Rock

  In the biggest of the Ayers Rock paintings, The Cathedral, the North East Face the blue of the sky is so intense that the rock itself appears to stand out against it almost as a trompe l’oeil 3-D effect. It is most disconcerting. This effect is achieved because of the contrast between the sky (painted absolutely flat, the cirrus clouds that speckle it so hazily, filmily rendered that they look miles up) and the shadow-edged fissures and irregularities of the crags and cliff faces. Solidity, mass and eroded frangibility set against infinite depth.

  B. Blur

  There is an effect of blurriness often present in much of Andrews’s painting. In some Ayers Rock paintings the rock seems almost to swim and deliquesce, to soften into quasi-fleshy contours. One thinks also of the folds of the hills in the background of the deer-stalking series. Perhaps this ability to capture evanescence explains the uncanny ability he has of painting—in whatever medium—that most elusive and shifting of substances, water.

  C. Contemporaries

  Freud, Auerbach, Bacon, Hockney. Add Michael Andrews to that list (and he has every right to be up there in the pantheon beside them) then post-war British painting begins to seem, as time remorselessly passes, almost a nonpareil. To think of the quality and integrity of the work—of the painting—that this congregation of British artists has produced in the second half of the twentieth century makes one wonder when we will see their like again. All, it’s worth reiterating, are to be found situated here and there within the generous and capacious tradition of figuration.

  Funnily enough, one catches glimpses of these and other artists in An-drews’s own work: Freud in Portrait of Tim Behrens; Peter Blake in All Night Long; Euan Uglow in The Family in the Garden; Bacon in the small portrait sketches (Study of a Head with Green Turban, for example); Hockney in the middle panel of Good and Bad at Games.

  D. Dogma

  At the Slade in the early 1950s Andrews came heavily under the influence of William Coldstream and the almost dogmatic faith Coldstream possessed in “the criterion of figurative quality.” Andrews was, owing to his clear talent, the perfect disciple, but much of his early work, one can now see, is an attempt to escape the anxiety of influence that Coldstream imposed. Hence the deliberate distortions of Four People Sunbathing and the heavy impasto and unfinished look of the Colony Room paintings and sketches. When Andrews found his own style, his abundant graphic gifts returned with fresh confidence. Lawrence Gowing’s introduction to the 1980 Hayward Gallery retrospective is particularly good on the Coldstream effect, as is Colin St John Wilson’s The Artist at Work, a fascinating study of the working methods of both Coldstream and Andrews.

  E. Early Work

  Andrews was acclaimed as a student. The two paintings August for the People and A Man who Suddenly Fell Over were hailed as evidence of his tremendous promise. I don’t think they really prepare you for the later work (which is another way of saying I don’t like them that much). So which painting marked the turning point? The huge Late Evening on a Summer Day (1957)? Possibly, but it seems unresolved—the parts greater than the whole. I think it must be the equally large (2×3 metres) The Family in the Garden (1960–2), an ostensibly run-of-the-mill subject but on this scale a formidably ambitious undertaking for a young painter. You see here a fusion of the Slade, Coldstream-inspired “criterion of figurative quality” but—because of the size of the canvas—many of the preoccupations of the later work are in evidence: the cohesiveness (or not) of the social group, the precise delineation of atmosphere, the quiddity of the moment. It goes without saying that it is exceptionally well painted, but there’s a compositional audacity that makes the grouping so memorable (the fact that this is the artist’s family is irrelevant: this painting is not fundamentally about portraiture). What is it about the position of the woman’s legs in the centre that is so arresting? Anyone looking at this painting would not be surprised that the same artist could go on to paint “Lights,” “School,” or the Ayers Rock and deerstalking series. In this painting Michael Andrews sets his stall out.

  F. Fish

  The “School” series. These (and the studies for them) are perhaps the most simply hedonistic of Andrews’s paintings. They are limpid, luminescent works and they show off his skills as a colourist to an almost Hodgkinian degree. There is a level of interpretation that one can impose on them—ideas of social order, of uniformity, of predator and prey—but my feeling is that such an attempt at reading these beautiful paintings is burdensome.

  G. Good and Bad at Games

  I borrowed this title for the first film I wrote. Which must date my initial acquaintance with Andrews’s work fairly precisely, I suppose. I wrote Good and Bad at Games in 1982. The first big Andrews retrospective had been at the Hayward in 1980, ending early in 1981. I didn’t go to the exhibition but I knew of Andrews’s work—but only the “Lights” series—which takes us back to the 70s. But Good and Bad at Games was when I first made my real connection with the man and the work. I liked the ring of the title and applied it literally to my story of hearty public schoolboys and their brutal persecution of an unsporty junior. Andrews’s “games,” however, are social—to do with the games people play at parties. (My film was shown on Channel 4 in 1983—I wonder if Michael Andrews ever saw it?) The gallery of distorted portraits that make up the painting—people squeezed thin or expanding according to the state of their social confidence—has a loose, coincidental connection with my fictional characters and their respective neuroses or swaggering self-assurance. Andrews was a shy man, by all accounts. Shy people often relish the anonymity that a large and noisy party provides.

  H. Heads

  Andrews’s small portrait heads—studies for uncompleted pictures—or more formal portraits are exemplary. Some of them look like miniature Bacons. Others (Portrait of June, Portrait of Colin St John Wilson) are as good as Graham Sutherland. You wouldn’t think of Andrews as a portraitist of the first rank: his reputation is to do with large-scale landscapes and series. Yet he is, and the portraits show the complete range of his formidable gifts, the full extent of his prodigious artistic arsenal.

  I. Impasto

  Andrews associated the use of impasto as an illustration of effort—of a layered, scored and thickly furrowed surface as being somehow an analogue of intensity and concentration. Impasto preserved the record of change in the painted surface. Yet he is criticized as a painter of flat surfaces. Indeed, perhaps this is the most serious criticism levelled at Andrews as a major artist. Namely that his use of the spray gun (the airbrush) and of stencils renders his work lifeless in some way—the surface “dead.” And it’s true, to a certain, minor extent. With some paintings (Lights V: The Pier Pavilion, say) you can have your eye two inches from the canvas surface and discover that the paint is applied as evenly and neutrally as household emulsion. But everything Andrews did with paint is highly deliberate, and
the use of the spray gun with its implication of industrial effortlessness was essential for the mood and ambience of certain paintings. The same is true for the argument over acrylic paint versus oil. Acrylic is made for the flat surface. But anyone who thinks Andrews avoided oil paint because it was too difficult to manipulate need only look at his little Scottish oil sketches (Mist Clearing, Glenartney, Glenartney, 19 October ’89, for example) to see his absolute, confident mastery of this medium: oil sketches with all the verve and freshness of a Constable. And later Andrews would use impasto to provide telling contrast: in the huge landscape, A View from Uamh Mhor (1990–91), for example, or the slightly smaller Oare, the Vale of Pewsey (1989–91), Here, in these technically superb oil paintings, the paint is often thinned to near-transparency and the unpainted canvas is allowed to show through. But they also illustrate the way a heavily loaded brush is used to brilliant effect in the details. A smear or thick squiggle of oil and, hey presto, you have a hawthorn hedge or a gorse-filled ravine, or a stream shining silver in a gulley.

  J. June

  Andrews’s wife, June Keeley, whom he met in 1963. She is present in the first Good and Bad at Games painting—the second ball-like figure on the left. In 1970 their daughter Melanie was born. The postcard reproduction of Andrews’s painting, Melanie and Me Swimming (1978–9), is reputedly the most purchased postcard in Tate Britain.

  K. Klee

  Paul Klee—not an artist one would instantly associate with Andrews—two different senses of scale, for a start. But they have a lot in common. Both men read widely and thought profoundly about their art, and Klee was an accomplished musician. Andrews was always writing his thoughts down and one wishes he had kept a diary as Klee did. One example. Klee, October 1901: “In the evening there were subdued and serious colour effects of a sombreness and subtlety that one would never believe possible in Italy … There is a moral strength in such colour. I see it just as much as others do. I too shall be able to create it one day. When?” I suspect this was similar to the Ayers Rock effect.