Arts

Looking for Hoyland

Bryan Robertson

Following his historic show last year at Waddington, the modest chronology of paintings by John Hoyland in the 'mixed' exhibition of groups of work by British artists at the Hayward Gallery (too big and broad with too many officially licensed dul- lards, as described by John McEwen in the Spectator of 18 May) clinches the fact that Hoyland today is the next best thing to Ben Nicholson.

This says a good deal. Think of Nichol- son's intransigently circumscribed pure white reliefs of the mid-'thirties; equally the abstract coloured paintings, at once chromatically sharp-keyed and mellow, also with squares and circles, of a slightly later period; the more figuratively abstract and radiant paintings of the 'forties and 'fifties with Italian and Greek references wholly digested and reinvented; and the tough brown, blue and green long phlegmatic lat- eral reliefs of the late 'sixties and 'seventies. It's hard to think of paintings by younger artists in recent years that can match the effortless formal assurance, unforced unstrident luminosity of colour and aris- tocratic handling of pigment in these paint- ings. Aristocratic? Yes, sensuously and intellectually at ease with the double but integrated privilege of life and art, exuding the unforced authority of genius secure within its alignments, as Ben's father, Wil- liam Nicholson, was — though more trapped by aesthetic convention and narrowly domestic locale than his son.

In fact, Hoyland superficially resembles Nicholson in one aspect of his painting and that is the way in which both artists keep up a joky, elegantly serious games spirit in their work, more jeux than games. Nichol- son is a good tennis player who's also a demon at ping-pong: he invents complex rules to suit himself—the ball has to ricochet back from a selected spot on a wall or pillar and bounce once before it's instantly slammed over the net (try it, it's hell) — and an alarming snooker player. All this shows clearly through the cavalier way in which Nicholson bends purely roundhead lines to his purpose in painted reliefs or, in others, places three white circles in descending and diminishing sequence as if they were trans- mutations of a single billiard ball trickling slowly down a staircase . . . Nude descend- ing a staircase?

So Hoyland, a funny, good-humoured but sharply accurate mimic on occasion, plays with huge style art games that are so concentrated and witty in reference that they bypass any conceivable plagiarism from Louis, Hofmann, Olitski, Poons et al. and end up established in their own right as Hoyland's own game. Think of Masaccio, then of Pontormo. Without Pontormo, our understanding of Masaccio would be incomplete. In another sense of games, Hoyland produces groups of paintings, almost invariably en se rie with seemingly the same guileful accuracy, effortless speed and resilience as the practice match of a crack tennis player.

The analogy might once have been stretched to a more negative terrain where the whizz-bang shots of intensive and unedited production could be seen as part of another game: machismo, or the equ- ation of health and well-being with an easy flow of creation (it's very American this, and I suspect it comes'from what Thurber called Blessed Regularity, a US household god according to him, together with Motherhood and Personal Daintiness). It perhaps applies to Caro's work when he assembled thirty-seven sculptures in November 1974 at the York Steel Co, Toronto, after visiting there in the previous June-July. (Maybe it was economy, an equally weak alibi. How many sculptures did Donatello make?) But Hoyland has too rueful a sense of the absurd and is far too serious about art to permit such indulgently crossed lines bet- ween energy, numbers and the creative force. Apropos pace of work and this num- bers question, Gary Wragg, one of our most gifted young painters, told Hoyland recently that John Edwards painted about sixtypictures last year in order to get a little out of a lot — Wragg admires Edwards's work, and was impressed. Deliberately working more slowly and frugally these days, Hoyland said instantly that, for his part, he wanted to get a lot out of a little.

Numbers can 'justify anything, as they frequently do nowadays when invoked as big attendance figures for silly shows in museums, or as an excuse for pandering to public taste, which of course doesn't exist though it can be moulded, benignly or nega- ' tively. I resist numbers, Nero could invoke numbers when he threw Christians to the lions, the most popular form of outdoor entertainment in its time. When an artist makes two hundred and thirty paintings through a long hot summer, as quoted to me by a famous painter, I only want to know if there was a good one. Turner made 1,500 drawings and watercolours in Rome in three months, but he's a hard act to follow.

Hoyland habitually uses acrylic paint as a medium, and the image, the colour field or whatever, seems sometimes more beautiful than the execution — there's something in acrylic pigment which allows a sensitive sur- face to thinly washed or stained pigment, as in watercolour technique, but restricts a thicker impasto to the textural character of shop-cake cream filling or icing, and Hoy- land sometimes likes to use a palette knife. It doesn't seem to matter. The presence of the best paintings is so strong through col- our and design that they haunt me long after their physical removal. It's as if Hoyland composes mentally in English or Anglo- American but puts it down in some deper- sonalised, asexual, and rootless dialect. As with the present split between reason and emotion, it's like the time when men thought in Italian but wrote in Latin. Acry- lic paint, internationally a perpetuating fal- sifier and leveller, has much to answer for.

What does matter is Hoyland's authority which, resisting easy plausibility, has the awkward edge and acerbity of Schonberg in relation to his contemporaries, who later said much the same thing as the innovator but with far more tactful eloquence. Hoy- land also seems often to be achieving one thing when aiming at another, though he paints with the 'force, lucidity and ease' that Edmund Wilson so shatteringly recom- mended as the correct use of language for written expression. At once sophisticated in utterance and innocent of eye, Hoyland paints with the same absolute and unfathomable calm authority as the way in which the great Joseph Needham, biochem- ist and author of the quintessential Biochemistry and Morphogenesis, writes when he adds another volume to his monu- ment. to Science and Civilisation in China (where's the Nobel prize?) — an authority that has an extra and peculiar dimension because it is existential and a by-product, almost, of other knowledge. If Needham, a Christian Marxist, brings the imaginative warmth of an artist to the intellectual rigour and probity of scientific history, Hoyland's highly mannered and formal painting, whose dramatic planes and eruptions of action seem to work inside an invisible proscenium, has also its own breath of life, its own fresh air.

His best paintings have in addition the same relaxed but taut economy of behaviour as a sailor on shore leave — if this sounds a bit cute, it's because I want to stress formal and tactile dichotomies, dif- fering substances of source, like behaviour on land and conditioned by life in the water, and the fact that the resonance of the paint- ings is both frontal and oblique. Hoyland's paintings seem also like the artefacts of some unknown country, made by an artist in exile to a different land. Studiedly divisive alienation, in European and American cul- tural terms, has never been more potent.

All this personal stuff is aimed squarely at the work, but phrased in this way because I believe with Robert Motherwell (who also warmly admires Hoyland's work) that the rationale, the logos of art is essentially and crucially a matter of identity — imaginative identity, of course. This needs stressing today because we keep on hearing about 'crises of identity', right? So who knows what's what or who's which. To narrow it down, if art is a big house with many rooms

and Rauschenberg's peculiar charm is the way in which he continually leaves all the doors and windows open (whereas Rothko or Pollock, in their absolutism, left no options open for other artists), then Hoy- land is some sort of gardener prowling around indoors.

As landscape is often the surrogate of intense personal feeling, so Hoyland's abs- tract paintings — far distant as they are from landscape, like the pastoral memories of a city dweller — are also glowing tokens of an individual response to life as well as to art, or place and time. Clement Greenberg said that English landscape was so 'neat' (I'd like to take him over the Wharfedale country near Otley in a February storm) and that, ergo, our art was so neat. None of Hoy- land's painting is dishevelled, but the most recent work is about as neat as Bangkok, the Venice of Indochina and a city that's also elaborately divisive, like Hoyland's sense of placement.

Hoyland often carves out space in his paintings, disposing it to the left or the right or above and below like orders and decrees from the grant vizier at court — again the sense of a theatrical tableau within a pre- scribed space, arena or proscenium. Again paradoxically, the placement has, as well, the authoritative disposition of quantity surveyance.

If Kierkegaard was right when he said that life is a dream lived backward, art is perhaps an attempt to re-enter Paradise, the enclosed garden, from which Plato's republic had driven artists when its ideal nature ruled out the need for their exis- tence. Hoyland would certainly prefer the sophisticated Paradise of an enclosed gar- den to the more innocent if wilder Garden of Eden, but he tends to loiter round the gate — while Bernard Cohen, another painter exhibitor at the Hayward, gets caught scrumping. Cohen is an intelligent and likeable mannerist performer and there should be a didactic art movie called A Bigger Dot.

I write at such length and so warmly because Hoyland is a terrific artist and peo- ple don't seem to know what's authentic and what isn't right now or the difference between what's academic and what adds an authentic inch or two to a great tradition, as the American painter Morris Louis did with his translucent painted veils and neuras- thenic drift of speed and movement, and as Hoyland's work, very differently, does now — only he goes much further. Hoyland is not only a far bigger artist than Louis, he's of quite a different order. It is the simple truth that Hoyland began where de Stael ended. The American attitudes were digested long ago. What Hoyland is really painting now is Hoyland.

After the frugalities of simple forms and near-anonymous or at least perfunctory sur- faces — the colour has never been simple, but always highly specific, charged, and

loaded so that red and green not only enjoy encounters but are granted reunions — he occasionally sports a banquet, a firework

display or a festival. Prospero's cell? Hoy- land is the most generous painter in Eng- land; and like our most radical sculptor, Phillip King, he has never lacked the cour- age (it's not nerve) to risk making an ass of himself in public through showing awkward work, possibly disruptive to his reputation, on the wing. Young artists love him.

How clearly is he seen by others, in times of lost standards? It's apt for this confused decade that anyone should have taken the usually brilliant Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word seriously, with its inaccurate sur- mises, half truths and easy exits. The art world is much funnier and less wicked than Wolfe too respectfully imagines. If God's a comedian with a captive audience that's too frightened to laugh, the art world's where he shows his reruns, old silent movies — and Duchamp's selling tickets, readymades. Wolfe mistakes the art world for art.

His book collapses under the delicate, steely fact that during the period covered by his text a handful of men and women were painting masterpieces, as alwaysdespite soc- iety — and its maybe manipulative critics, operator-dealers or artful collectors (I only know some hard-working, rather admirable people and a few poseurs, some simpletons) — and not because of it. Of such a company were Pollock, Tobey, Rothko, Louis, Kline, Gottlieb, Cornell, Baziotes, Gorky, Smith and Lanyon, Evans, Burra and Hepworth. Motherwell, Still, Noguchi, de Kooning, Guston, Frankenthaler, Nevelson, Krasner, Kelly, Bell, Johns and Rauschenberg are still with us and there's Moore, Bacon, King, Hoyland, Caro, Hall, Scott, Huxley, Riley and others among those here. If they're all writing the book, Stella and Noland can maybe rustle up the music. It's not a bad lot and it's a fractional part of the reason why this is the best time for art that I've ever known.