Word: hodgkins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hodgkin's paintings are not about ideas. They are feelings declared in color--feelings triggered by places (Venice, Naples, Morocco, India, or rooms in London) or by memories of encounters (sociable or sexual), all embedded in pigment of quite shameless lushness. They are intelligent not in the way argument can be but in the way painting is--though, in most cutting-edge art, actually...
...Hodgkin, whose good-luck god is the French intimiste Edouard Vuillard (he of the dots, of the closely tuned interior scenes that vibrate with a sense of life amply lived and yet separate from public events), is a connoisseur and collector as well as an artist. The two don't necessarily go together. Good taste never made a new picture yet. There is, and ought to be, something immoderate and crazy about painting that goes beyond acts of taste and comparison. Hodgkin's failures may be the outcome of too much taste, not too little, but he is a glutton...
...their titles. The blue lintel and green tongue of paint in Gossip, 1994-95, are not going to tell you what the gossip was about. Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, 1984-88, commemorates a meal prepared at an art dealer's lodgings during the Venice Biennale 12 years ago, but Hodgkin's cadmium red extravaganza, with its broad serpentine shapes buttressed by planks of green, does not offer the slightest clue about the food, the company or the room...
...constantly reworked--not fiddled with, but glazed and obliterated over the years by successive coats. Each is a palimpsest, one improvisation partly burying another but leaving hints of it behind. Pigment covers the frame as well as the board, wanting to overrun the confines of surface. Even when Hodgkin's paintings are on the wall, you think of picking them up, the small ones especially, and hefting them in your hand. Dense, resistant lumps of color, real things in the real world--a status reflected by one of Hodgkin's wittier titles, A Small Thing...
Having set up these constrictions of size and solidity, Hodgkin then pushes against them as hard as he can, and the tension that results can be magic: small panels with huge brushstrokes, subtle and fleeting effects of glaze and scumble contrasting with the rigidity of their support, and frames (with frames of paint inside, as well) that squeeze speckled, color-saturated vistas into distant postcards. The window effect isn't just a mannerism. It speaks of a certain anxiety, the desire to guard memory in the act of revealing it: "The more evanescent the emotion I want to convey," Hodgkin...