Word: vuillards
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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...
Since the late 1960s, Hodgkin's images have had a pronounced architectural character, influenced by Fernand Leger's "tubism" as well as by Vuillard. Grantchester Road, 1975, is an interior with a fireplace, and the indoor plants are of the same pictorial species as the green spreading palms in Hodgkin's Indian paintings. The separation of room and gaze gives Hodgkin's work its basic trope, that of peeping and peering--from culture (the room) into nature (everything else) and back again. It's not about seeing here and now but about the memory of having seen; not complete...
...shaky. First his Rembrandt is replaced by a Durer: "Within a week, however, it too was gone, replaced by a Monet ... If someone were trying to send a message to me, they were being incredibly subtle. In fact they were. The next day, the Monet was gone and a Vuillard was in its place ... It was clear that all was not well." Wit at this level balances almost any degree of obsession, and yes, thanks, another cup-black, no sugar...
...favorite word. Nowhere does his work show a sign of the metaphysical yearnings of the New York school, still less its primitivism. Porter's was very much a modernist vision, but classically so; its main source was Paris, and its exemplars were the great Intimists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. From them, as Agee notes in his catalog essay, Porter learned to "paint what you know, what is given to you, what is in front of you, and let the painting speak for itself...
...clothed man -- shades of Manet's Dejeuner! -- glaring down at her. In L'Affaire de Camden Town, 1909, she seems to be alive but cowering from him; with its sexual frankness (disconcerting to taste in 1909), heavy claustrophobic patterning and leaden light, it is a sinister painting, like a Vuillard whose domestic narrative has gone wrong. It isn't surprising to learn that Sickert was interested in the story of Jack the Ripper. But the truly bizarre twist was the rumor that sprang up 20 years after Sickert's death -- that he actually was the Ripper himself. Alas, there...