Art
Winning
John McEwen There are several shows worth a visit at the moment but Howard Hodgkin is the man of the hour with a retrospective at the Serpentine (till 31 May), an exhibition of new and recent work at Waddington I (till 28 May) and second prize in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 10 at the Walker Art Gallery (till 8 August). The Serpentine show is a genuine retrospective. Not a display of virtuosity but of Hodgkin's perseverance over the last twentyfive years to achieve the maturity of style that has undoubtedly been his since about 1972. It has been quite a slog, though certainly not for want of talent. Few paintings here pre-date his thirties, but the earliest of 411, 'Memoirs' (1949), is a remarkable one for
boy of sixteen and remains a key to the understanding of all his subsequent work.
It is in the back gallery, a small gouache on board recalling days passed in the comPan), of an eccentric lady in America after the War. The distorted enormity of the female figure's hands, the jagged angularity of the drawing, the attention paid to the aura of those hours: the strangeness of her stories, the weird house. Such impressionable moments have been the inspiration of Hodgkin's art ever since, moments with friends usually in a particular room or Place, and his development as an artist has been achieved by his efforts to express those moments through an increasingly abstract
Use of paint. •
The progress of this development is most significantly revealed in two pictures, 'Gardening' (1963) and `RBK' (1969). 'Garden„infe is the last work to have an identifiable race in it. Hodgkin still has problems incorporating human figures into the scheme of his Paintings, but since 'Gardening' they have been reduced to their components or even auras in the overall composition, and some of his best paintings recently have dispensed With them altogether. `1113K' is even more significant. With it he finally adopted wood instead of canvas—often bits of wood of Predetermined shape further to emphasise the singularity of each work—and he Painted in a border for the first time. This cborder specifies the subject as the wood oes, but as a painted frame it also draws attention to the surface of the picture, to
the subtleties of the colour and in the later work to the variety of the brushstrokes.
This has resulted in a style of painting which makes a virtue of the density of its own references to other painting styles, a style too full of in-jokes and insights entirely appropriate to the intimacy of its subject matter but one which is overt and colourful as well, like the Rajput miniatures it consciously echoes. Such richness of substance makes Hodgkin's pictures an ideal counterpart of the charged moments they recall, even to the method of their completion through endless changes and over-paintings. Strong light, as at the Serpentine, makes this effort too noticeable and a couple of the paintings at the Waddington, 'Ellen Smart's India Slide Show' for instance, seem a bit hurried—but what the hell. At forty-four, Hodgkin in his present and recent form is already one of the best painters working anywhere today.
A pity therefore he did not win the John Moores though that was never very likely with his dealer as one of the judges. Not that anyone would have quibbled, especially as the first prize of £4000 went to John Walker with a worse though similar picture to the one that won him second two years ago. This was an unfair award with so many deserving artists still waiting their turn, but unfortunately it was only one bad decision of many. The donation of the third prize to . something called 'Nebeul Kasr' was inexplicable and the minor awards only make sense as calculated insults to the few genuine paintings on display. In fairness to the three judges most of this was the logical outcome of their initial decision to ingratiate themselves with youth at the expense of what they pleased to call, as usual, 'establishment' artists—a familiar way of making no real decisions at all. The resulting compromise is an exquisitely English inversion of the show's purpose: an exhibition of paintings to put down painters!
None of this however should detract from the importance of the competition itself. For a start it has nothing to do with the Arts Council, secondly it has good rich prizes and thirdly it rewards painters, and painting in this country deserves a competition because there are an exceptional number of good painters about. All Mr Moores needs to do is to stir up a better entry and to get a panel of judges who are unfashionable enough to go for quality. This year, Lord knows, they looked alright on paper but next time maybe he should try getting a painter along, a first-rate one like Ellsworth Kelly. Till next time then the likes of Kitaj, Smith, Hoyland and, notably in the current show, Buckley and Lawrie Preece, will have to wait in a lengthening queue of unrewarded merit.
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