Art
Momentum
John McEwen
There are very few purely 'abstract' painters in England but anyone who doubts that John Hoyland is the best of them should visit his present show at Waddington (till 30 October). The paintings on view all date from 1966-68 and are a synthesis of the work of certain key American post-war painters: the control of Rothko, the texture of Newman and the contrast of Hans Hofmann are acknowledged but subordinated. The scale is large but deftly balanced, the colour narrow in range—vegetable greens and cadmium reds predominating—but strong and harmonious. Controlled flows of acrylic stain the canvases but thicker paint has been applied here and there with roller, brush and palette-knife. In one image they achieve a look of premeditated design and spontaneous application, of being slightly worked but essentially one-shot. If they exhibit a particular feeling it is of assurance. In fact, given their own pre-requisites, it is difficult to see how they could have been more successfully accomplished.
Since then Hoyland has progressively coarsened his style. It is easy to see why. In these earlier paintings he reached the end of a road. Basic design was all the rage in the English art schools of the early 'sixties, and Hoyland had to teach it like everyone else. He even used it as a basis for his first abstract pictures. Basic design continues to be a blight on English art, allowing nothing but the fruition of 'systems': the pursuit of optical effects, sequences, and G-plans. The self-righteous puritanism at the heart of it was only matched at the time by the vapid hedonism which had overtaken colour-field painting in New York. By the late 'sixties a whole school of painters had arisen who sprayed and touched up the edges of their paintings to the limits of chi-chi good taste. Hoyland's '66-68' paintings hold both these factors in abeyance. They are designed and they are colour-field but nothing has yet been lost to either. If he had gone on he could not have avoided becoming overselfconscious and the victim of his own expertise. Characteristically he began to paint differently. He started to rough up the delicacy, moving inexorably towards a more emotional, worked-over, even uglier type of painting which continues to strive to accommodate an ever wider and more difficult range of colour. A new show of these will be exhibited next year. Meanwhile in the present exhibition the first signs of the process can be seen in the first picture on the left as you enter the gallery: the top part of the canvas is lessclearly defined and two thick masked slicks of dark blue paint divide the forms. The serene achievement of the other pieces, particularly of '4.10.66' opposite. is being
left behind. It does not matter. They have not dated at all, which is the indubitable proof of the quality of any work of art.
People who like looking at paintings should also visit the Larry Rivers exhibition (Gimpel Fils till 30 October), a small retrospective of work done in the early 'sixties. Rivers is fifty-three and by his own reckoning only became a 'neat artist' three years ago. The work here belies such modesty. His skill as a draughtsman, his Jewish scepticism and humour, his sensual pleasure in smudges, expressionist brushwork, graffiti and stencilled lettering, above all his 'embarrassment with seriousness' make him the most charming of the New York painters. The way out of abstract-expressionism for Rivers, as for so many of his contemporaries, was indicated by de Kooning, but his slaphappiness cannot disguise a certain unease when he paints on the heroic abstractexpressionist scale. Retrospectives classif), and on this display Rivers has not the creative force of Rauschenberg, nor the graphic and painterly skills of Johns and Twombly, nor even the gifts of Jim Dine. whom he most resembles and undoubtedly influenced, but it is with them that he must be compared. He is an alley-cat of an artist. There is no equivalent in our coupleculture. He would have been neutered here.
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