Howard Hodgkin's Rainbow

Mary Elizabeth Kimbrough

Dr. Denise Carvalho

Independent Study

November 25, 2008

 

 

    
 

 

Howard Hodgkin's Rainbow

 

    Howard Hodgkin is a painter who transforms his experience into images that are not easily read. He describes his paintings as "representational pictures of emotional situations." Hodgkin makes beautiful images of emotional truth. In doing this he really does make art "the organ of philosophy."

    In this paper I will explain how Hodgkin's paintings echo many of the tenets of western philosophy. Hodgkin creates his pictures from memory and is recreating the time and space continuum over and over. He is examining emotional situations, most of which involve Hodgkin and his circle, with a Freudian gaze. He is constantly creating and destroying and then recreating scenarios in an almost cubist sense. The transformation of his experiences, which are presented to the viewer in an objectified way, is his subject. Hodgkin is a modernist painter who exists during post modernism. He owes a debt to the Romantic painters as well. His vision is, however, relentlessly contemporary. This paper will examine Hodgkin's dissection of emotional experience, as well as interpret his work in Freudian terms. I will conclude the paper by dealing with Hodgkin's transformation of emotion and experience into the beautiful and the sublime. Humans seek wholeness through philosophy and psychology. Hodgkin pursues wholeness through art making. His pictures go through changes that allow the figure to ultimately mesh with its surroundings, whether they are other humans, nature or art. This merging of space and time with the figure is a picture of the achievement of unity. The figure can even be seen to become a rainbow. A rainbow- like image is found in many of Hodgkin's works. Rainbow, made in 1987, is proof that Hodgkin does think in terms of this symbolic and universal concept. I will therefore conclude the paper by analyzing Rainbow.

    Hodgkin's early works demonstrate a fascination with the human body in social settings, usually interiors, but sometimes gardens. Early paintings feature recognizable, although not realistic, imagery, and include patterns and sparkling color. Eventually the figures and the interiors become less defined and morph into painterly swirls and gestures. Patterns, especially a dot pattern, become recognizable motifs as Hodgkin abandons line for color and shape. He begins to paint on wood and frames the picture before it is painted. This allows him to paint the frame along with the picture, making them one. The separation that generally occurs when a painting is framed is negated. The picture becomes much more of an object than a picture. That is the first quality of Hodgkin's work that will be addressed.

 

The Subject is the Object is the Subject

 

An artist, no matter what idea she is working with, must first examine and define the physical space that a work will occupy. Decisions regarding size and shape must come before any actual image making is begun. Hodgkin began working fairly conventionally. A painting like Memoir from 1949
is a rectangle, with recognizable imagery occupying the surface. The viewer interprets the picture solely on its pictorial content. There is a voyeuristic feeling here, one of a private conversation or moment between two people. The look that the viewer casts on the two is somewhat furtive. This furtiveness is a theme that Hodgkin takes from Degas, an artist he admittedly owes a debt to. Hodgkin writes "Degas has always been one of my heroes-perhaps more than almost any other artist. We all live on wish fulfillment in this regard and Degas allows us to get closer to his art without ever for a moment allowing us past the classical wall of expressed feeling that he has built for us." This "wish fulfillment" is indicative of Hodgkin's desire to experience human interactions intensely but also with respect. Degas, in his so called keyhole nudes, framed his drawings of women bathers in a sort of secret yearning or "wish fulfillment" that comes close to fetish. Degas himself stated "We were created to look at one another, weren't we?" Robert Hughes responded to this comment in this way "… no passing remark could take you closer to the heart of 19^th century realism: the idea of the artist as an engine for looking, a being whose destiny was to study what Balzac, in a famous phrase that declared its rebellion from the theological order of Dante's Divine Comedy, called La Comedie Humaine." Hodgkin continues in this vein, as a follower of early European modernism, but adds to the mix the acceptance of self examination through the imagination of oneself and of others that Freud and psychoanalysis allowed. Hodgkin, however, is able to be more forthright about his observations. He is not a moralist who draws conclusions, but a viewer who looks on in wonder. Able to access emotions pictorially in a way that was unheard of in Degas' time, Hodgkin can play with abstraction and color freely. Ultimately his paintings become objects about desire and pleasure. The drives that motivate him are clearly Freudian, although Hodgkin himself says he has never read Freud.

"La Comedie Humanine," literally the human comedy is the subject and object of both western philosophy and Freudian theory. Hodgkin, in his visual studies of human intimacy, takes this as his subject and object. His paintings are autobiographical in nature, often portraying his own experience in a specific time and place. References are made to events and locations with titles. But the constant is the body. The body is Freud's terrain also. He sought to understand and assign meaning to our bodily experiences. The body is both the source of pleasure and pain, the sight of our most intimate moments. Becoming fully human requires that we hone our ability to accept and interact with other humans. Freud's 'talking cure' is really about intimate and honest exchange with another human. Prior to his work, psychoanalysis did not exist. Still philosophers hashed out the ennui of human relationships with others. This communication must have been useful as Freud saw it as the way to enlightenment. Our bodies are our subjects and our objects. Hodgkin makes this clear. 114 Sinclair Road, 1957-58, shows an interior with three figures. One figure is reclining, another sitting at what looks like a desk, and the third sits to the left facing the other two. The composition is triangular. The image of analysis, one person reclining on a couch, with others looking on and possibly conversing, is strong. It could also just be friends, together in an interior, talking to each other in an intimate way. Hodgkin puts the viewer in the position of either a voyeur, who looks in on their interaction, or as a participant in the action itself. Nevertheless we are reminded of the necessity of connection through human language as well as the importance of physical closeness. The bodies in the picture carry this message. Freud's lesson regarding the body however is that "the body is never quite at home in language, will never quite recover from its traumatic insertion into it, escaping whole and entire from the mark of the signifier. Culture and the body meet only to conflict…" Eagleton states that the Freudian analyst "must try to educate the patient's desire away from its regressive subjection to parental authority, releasing it for more egalitarian relationships." Hodgkin, who came of age in the post war period, saw the changes of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Like others of his generation, he must have been aware of the shortcomings of a life lived conventionally. His collection of Indian miniatures is well documented. As an influence on his work, the vibrant colors of the miniatures are often sited. The intimate, sexual love that is shown in Hindu religious art is also an influence. Hodgkin is not a political artist but one cannot help but be aware of the relationship between his home country of Britain and India. The colonial period had a profound effect on British culture and history. The domination of one country or culture over another can be seen as a metaphor for the domination of one generation over another. Hodgkin's paintings attest to the life he has led, to his own desire for physical intimacy, and to the beauty that comes from fulfilling human relationships.

The drives of eros and thanatos are described by Freud as connected. The well documented ideas of sex and death are presented quite clearly by Hodgkin. As in the Kantian sublime, the idea of the giving up of oneself, in Hodgkin's case, to another human, requires the loss of self consciousness, or a willingness to forgo self control. Like an encounter with the sublime, this love drive, eros, is countered by the surrender, the death or thanatos drive. The sublime is represented by Hodgkin with color. Susan Sontag writes "…the pictures offer the most earnest, emphatic tribute to the world outside, its treasurable objects and beauties and opportunities. Indeed, the sublimity of the color in Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude- for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents."

Hodgkin begins his career painting scenes of human interaction such as conversation and dance, fairly chaste activities, but nonetheless activities that can and will lead to sexual encounters. Hodgkin, who married and had a family as a young man, was in fact homosexual. His desires had to be suppressed in order to live in the conventional world of the 1950s. His pictures demonstrate his progress. Intimacy is achieved and glorified in paintings such as In
Bed in Venice, 1984-1988. Hodgkin, finally free to love whom he chooses, elevates his own loss of self and self consciousness in In
Bed in Venice. Freud states that "…man's discovery that sexual (genital) love afforded him the strongest experiences of satisfaction, and in fact provided him with the prototype of all happiness, must have suggested to him that he should continue to seek the satisfaction of happiness in his life along the path of sexual relations and that he should make genital eroticism the central point of his life. We went on to say that in doing so he made himself dependent in a most dangerous way on a portion of the external world, namely, his chosen love – object, and exposed himself to extreme suffering if he should be rejected by that object or should lose it through unfaithfulness or death" The little death of the self that occurs when we surrender wholly to another is made worthwhile by the sexual gratification, that can sometimes be sublime, that results from the sexual encounter,

    Hodgkin then takes situations that he identifies with and makes them both his subject and his object. Hodgkin speaks to this here: "For me, as I have often said, the subject and object must become one thing. If this doesn't happen then for me there is nothing- the picture doesn't exist." By making his own experiences the stuff of his paintings, Hodgkin gains objectivity over himself. Eagleton, speaking of Kantian objectification states "…if we cannot, strictly speaking, know the subject, then at least – so we can console ourselves – we can know the object." Hodgkin gains self knowledge by making himself and his own situations the object. The continual mirroring and examining of oneself is a constant for humans. Often Hodgkin will choose a disembodied object, such as a pile of clothing or an empty bed, to represent the body. The body is still central, and to make it even more evident to the viewer, Hodgkin chooses to frame his works very specifically. I do not mean this literally but figuratively. The "thingness" of Hodgkin's work is our next topic.

 

Through the Window, Through the Frame

    Framing a picture changes it. An unframed work, with naked edges somehow seems more contemporary than a framed one. A Brice Marden for example is gorgeously seductive with a beautifully crafted stretcher and sensuously applied paint that travels down the taut surface in gorgeous drips and whorls. It is satisfying to see its naked edges reinforcing its pure form and its existence as a flat picture. Hodgkin, unlike Marden, goes to great lengths to find the correct frame for a picture. He does this before the picture is made. This accomplishes two things: (1) it makes the frame a physical part of the painting, and (2) it makes Hodgkin deal with the frame as a painting. The shape and size of the painting then is determined by the frame and is therefore much more important than a frame chosen after the picture is completed. A frame can denote many things. It can function as an entry way into a picture or a world. It can serve to set something apart, as in a shop window. It can be the place for the voyeur to peep through into a forbidden world. Because Hodgkin's work deals so much with intimacy, I assert that his frames serve all the above mentioned functions. Finally I believe that Hodgkin's frames are there to reference the past. Hodgkin's reverence for the history of art is evident in his works. He frames his pictures in the grand manner of the 19^th century to create a connection between his pictures and the pictures of artists he reveres. He sets his paintings apart however by painting on the frames.

    Back to Freud and the body, Hodgkin makes this comment on his frames:"The picture is conceived as if it were a kind of a body: vulnerable at its boundaries, close up and palpable, vigorously and variedly textured, and a kind of container like a body. The picture is a wooden slab but it is painted as if open to inside – unlocked to be open to inside. That benign forgetting of the body in the absorption of making a picture makes a picture that is metaphoric of the body in the foregoing ways." So the frame is like body armor for Hodgkin. Body armor is something that can be figurative or literal. I think that Hodgkin means that his frames function as armor in both ways. The subject matter of human intimacy allows for the viewer to look in on something that is private and sacred. The painting then becomes an object of desire. The desire that humans have to merge with one another, which we often resist due to fear of losing our very selves, is on display here. Hodgkin invites us in to the world of beauty and sensation, while simultaneously dissecting and memorializing his own experiences. The viewers can get a somewhat voyeuristic feeling, especially in a picture such as Mrs. Nicholas Monroe, 1966-69, in which the figure is seen as a silhouette of patterns obscured by white paint. The white areas are in the shape of something mechanical, reminiscent of the keyhole views of Degas.

    The keyhole shape that Hodgkin uses to draw our attention to the figure in Mrs. Nicholas Monroe becomes a full fledged frame for later pictures. The use of wood supports along with the large frames give the pictures a much more solid feeling than a canvas painting. Sculpture is suggested although three dimensionality is only hinted at. This is the "thingness" that Sontag discusses "…usually modest in size by current standards, they seem boxy, blunt, even heavy sometimes because of the form, if not the scale, of a window, displaying a ballet of plump shapes which either are enclosed with thickly emphatic brush strokes that frame (or shield) or are painted out to the edge of the raised frame." A store window is a place where merchants display goods. The viewer or in this case the consumer is lured to the object visually. The object then becomes an object of desire. This desired object can be seen by consumers as something that will transform their lives in a positive way. Hodgkin's scenes function in a similar way. The viewer is lured by the beauty of the painting. It is not the object itself that is desired however, but the communion that occurs between the figures in the painting that creates desire for the viewer. It is a connection that is beyond language. It is a meeting of sensations of color and expression. Clearly Hodgkin is referring to the sublime. Even losing oneself in an artist's vision is a form of losing control. The viewer may choose to give up his everyday existence and pursue art like Gauguin. Another viewer may choose to throw herself into dangerous encounters that provide extremely sensational experiences. Either way the viewer is lured out of polite society and into a more sensual and dangerous world. After all look what happened to Alice when she went through the looking glass.

    Humans though want to go through the looking glass. Degas said humans were made to be looked at. He left out the part about humans liking to look as well. A frame is a guide to where one should look. Hodgkin invites the viewer into his world as a participant. He invites the gaze, as all visual artists do, but it is a personal experience he wants the viewer to see. By
painting the frame and making it a part of the art work rather than just a complement to the artwork, he says come in. My world of this painting and your world of looking in are one and the same. He welcomes participation in his very personal and sensual world.

    Why is it possible that the viewer can look upon a picture of intense sexuality and not feel like a voyeur? It is because Hodgkin is memorializing the human connection. Like the Hindu artists whose work he has collected, he views human relationships as sacred. A Hindu may have a sensual encounter with a god and it is displayed in the temple for all to see. This merging of the spiritual, the religious, the sacred, and the sexual is at the heart of the Hindu religion and at the center of Hodgkin's work. It is right for us to look upon this sublime occurrence. Sontag says "each picture is, ideally, a maximum seduction."

 

Memory and the Pleasure Principle

    Hodgkin's pictures encourage a life of pleasure. His titles alone, In the Bay of Naples, Still Life
in a Restaurant, Afternoon Flowers suggest a life of leisure. The artist, who lives in London, works in an expansive studio in Bloomsbury, right across from the British Museum. He has travelled extensively and often references place in his titles. Hodgkin has also made pictures that demonstrate his admiration for other artists, such as After Vuillard, 1996-2002.    Although there are a few images about war in his oeuvre, they are predominately about art, food, love, and travel, all recognized as part and parcel of the good life.

"The painting, for Hodgkin, is an embodiment of memory," writes Elderfield. Hodgkin himself states that "my entire life is in my paintings." How does Hodgkin distill his memories into pictures? Taking in his retrospective at the Tate in 2006, I kept thinking how happy his life must be. The paintings are so vibrant and confident that I concluded Hodgkin must be very happy indeed. Later, thinking about the heaviness of the supports and frames for the pictures, the happy vision was marred. The physical heaviness indicates a psychic heaviness. He shows the viewer mostly good things but the weight of life and work are reflected in the paintings' physicality. It is also easy to dismiss the labor of painting when seeing these pictures. They look to have been made quite exuberantly. Again a second look is necessary. Hodgkin spends years on a picture. They are dated from their start to finish. It takes a great deal of time and effort to make these paintings. That is another component of the heaviness of the pictures. The artist must make the work look joyful and effortless, but anyone who has made paintings seriously know that it is hard work, mentally and physically. Add to that the burden of basing your pictures on memory, and you have a person who is constantly reliving his life over and over while trying to make sense of his surroundings. The fact that Hodgkin's pictures look so effortless and, yes, beautiful are a testament to his work ethic.

    Hodgkin has described his paintings as being to him like bodies. Like our bodies Hodgkin's paintings must absorb all the pleasure and pain that life gives us. Like Hodgkin's pictures, we must dwell on the good parts of life, love, food, travel, and art, in order to survive the modern world. Getting pulled into the abyss of misery is easy. It is survival that is hard.

    The act of painting itself is in line with the sublime. It is an activity that is wholly absorbing and wholly removed from the rational world. Doing it successfully requires another little death, or surrender, this time to the imagination. Rilke states "more and more (and to my joy) I am living the existence of the seed in the fruit which disposes everything it has round about it and outward from itself in the darkness of its working." A painter who is making real art is taken over by his activity. The body is forgotten as the imagination takes over. The body becomes the servant to the imagination.

    Being the servant to the imagination, it is the body's job to both remember its sensations and then reproduce them pictorially. This process requires an interaction with space and time that usually occurs only accidentally, as in the experience of déjà vu. Hodgkin admires the work of Degas, Turner, Sickert, and Seurat, to name a few of his heroes. None of these artists, however, worked from memory. Hodgkin must mine his own experiences for subject matter. The artists of the 19^th century were painting from life but suffusing the vision of reality with their psychological visions. Hodgkin is putting recorded memories down in a way more like the cubists. He recovers and paints pieces of time. Unlike the cubist though, he paints a very quick view of an occurrence, not a view that encompasses different perspectives. Freud could have been describing Picasso's Ma Jolie when he wrote that the content of dreams "…includes disconnected fragments of visual images, speeches, and even bits of unmodified thoughts." Hodgkin's works are dreamlike in the way that "they reproduce logical connection by approximating time and space." Freud goes on to describe the experience of displacement that occurs in dreams. This displacement is also present in Hodgkin's pictures. The world they represent is a world of memory, not reality. Goodbye to the Bay of
Naples, 1980-82 is an example of this displacement. The seascape is reduced to shimmering color and aggressive shapes. They give the viewer a quick sketch of the emotional feeling of leaving a place of beauty, sensuality, and leisure. Regardless of what Hodgkin did when he was in Naples, the name itself conjures up romantic visions of historical splendor. The frame is a golden hued orange with green swaths swept over it. It feels tropical and windy. It is a memorial to a time and a place that will never come again. In an interview with Ann Temkin, Hodgkin stated that "…there's no way, I think, that one can isolate the effect of time from the depiction of time."

     The pleasure principle, as defined by Freud, is the major theme for Hodgkin. Pleasure is both a physical and psychological sensation. Often we feel both types of pleasure simultaneously. Freud says that "what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle." He then goes on to discuss how everything in the world conspires against our living a life of pleasure. To live a pleasurable life then, one must turn away from the external world. Freud here suggests that a better way to deal with the world's disruption of our pleasure is to become a member of the human community. Hodgkin's pictures then, with their references to the history of western art and culture, to bodily sensations such as intimacy, sex, food, and beauty, are roadmaps to living a pleasurable life. By giving his viewers a glance into the life he has found worthwhile, he invites the viewer in, to participate in the party.

    The act of making pictures is ultimately a hopeful pursuit. Next we will move toward the sublime, the rainbow, and the transfiguration of the figure in Hodgkin's work.

 

Rainbow

    Humans are stuck in their earthly bodies. We must learn to live inside them, control them, and understand them. We are often held hostage by our desire for bodily sensations. Greek philosophy attempted to make sense of the physical world through geometry and logic. As civilization and art progressed, perspective was established so that humans could place themselves in space. This is the subject of Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form.

The body is much more than just a physical entity. Kant, with his emphasis on experience, is talking about physical, bodily experience. "To act morally for Kant," states Eagleton, "is to set aside all desire, interest and inclination, identifying one's rational will instead with a rule which one can propose to oneself as a universal law." Resistance to our physical desires is a way to become more reliant on morality and logic. Freud, on the other hand, understood that "human life is aesthetic…in so far as it is all about intense bodily sensations and baroque imaginings, inherently significatory and symbolic, inseparable from figure and fantasy." Kant wanted humans to follow the rules but he knew that this was an impossibility. The fight between reason and emotion would always be with us. The battleground was the body. Freud sought to unite the intellect and the body, thus freeing humans from the rules. He saw rules as repressive. "The Freudian drive lies somewhere on the frontier between the mental and the corporeal, representing the body to the mind; where we have a drive, there we have a demand placed on the mind by virtue of its connection with the body."

    The place where Kant identified this fight was in the area of the sublime. He associated the sublime with a giving in of reason to emotion and sensation. This giving in meant abandoning the rules. "What the sublime does, then, is to remind us of the limitations of our sensuous relationship to nature and actually to give us aesthetic pleasure via the initial lack of pleasure generated by this reminder itself." We are at a loss when we realize how little control we have over our bodies. Simultaneously we are exalted by experience that is sublime. So we are caught in a never ending cycle of pleasure and sensation and loss and pain. Freud explains this through the drives of eros and thanatos. We want to possess what we love but we cannot enjoy it due to our fear that it will be taken from us. "It is when that object is removed or prohibited that it lays down the trace of desire, so that its secure possession will always move under the sign of loss." Hodgkin's pictures attempt to capture the lost moment, the moment when we realize the "trace of desire." This moment is followed by the fear that we will lose it and the knowledge that the moment has past and is already lost. This may account for the blocking techniques that Hodgkin uses in his later paintings. He will work on a picture for years, covering over his marks. A picture like Flowerpiece, 2004-5 is covered all over with spots. This could be an attempt to hide the sensation of the picture, or to express the multiplicity of the experience, or to capture it and hold it in the picture plane forever.

    Hodgkin's painted bodies, in his later works become disembodied. They seem to be able to transcend earthly moorings and float freely across the picture plane. This is the transubstantiation that allows the body to become the rainbow. The rainbow is itself a loaded image. "The natural beauty of the rainbow points to an infinity which is 'only colour, nothing in it is form'; it is 'the law itself no longer transposed into nature or space…no longer through forms derived from a canon, but the in itself beautiful, the harmony in which canon and work are the same'…it is also intimated in the memories of childhood, in which 'perception is itself scattered in colours' as well as in works of art." The rainbow is what Noah sees at the end of the flood. It is where we find the proverbial pot of gold. It is being described here by Walter Benjamin and Howard Caygill. Rainbows are often drawn ad infinitem by children. They have been used repeatedly as an image of happiness and consequently have become kitsch. They are really one of the most sublime images that nature has given to us. They show us color. They are a miraculous product of science but they inform art. Benjamin was aware of the kitsch nature of the rainbow but he was also aware of the transcendence that it offered.

    This transcendence is described linguistically in Wordsworth's poem, "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky." Seeing a rainbow is a sublime occurrence. It never gets old. Wordsworth's simple poem is extremely accurate. The elevation of the sublime is what is meant by "my heart leaps up." It is a physical, spiritual, and emotional sensation that never ceases to amaze. That is why Wordsworth must exclaim that this phenomenon is available to both the child and the man.

    Rainbow like images begin showing up in Hodgkin's pictures in the 1980s. Lovers, 1984-1992, Patrick Caulfield in Italy, 1987-92, Rain in Rutland Gate, 1992-94, Florida Garden, 1996-1997, and In Coconut Grove, 1996-1997, are but a few of the pictures that contain rainbows. A Rainbow, 2003-2004, frankly owns up to its title. This picture is rectangular. The rainbow is the central image. It seems to be floating or ascending upward. It is on a yellow and green dotted ground. It is a simple and lovely image. It is clearly based on the figure we saw earlier in In Bed in Venice. This figure has been transformed into an entirely happy entity, one that is not bound to the earth. It has the ability to transcend its body, like Christ, and ascend upward. It is as if Hodgkin has finally freed himself from the rules that kept him grounded to the earth. Benjamin associated the rainbow with the absolute. Caygill writes about Benjamin's philosophy that it "does not seek truth in completeness, but in the neglected detail and the small nuance. The speculative power of the excluded is episodic and unpredictable, and it is this frangibility, as of a rainbow, which makes it an occasion for hope, which is, after all, even if not for him and not for us, only another way of saying 'future.'"

    Hodgkin, like Benjamin, has realized that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is freedom. Benjamin wrote about freedom. Hodgkin paints it. Philosophers have found different methods of achieving freedom for humanity. Freud saw freedom as a state that was impossible to achieve. The rules sanctioned by society, through religion and custom, would forever hold an individual down, much in the way that the British Empire held India down. Hodgkin, who has painted pictures not only of emotional situations but of philosophical ones as well, has found a way to express freedom visually. It is a state that we all should aspire to. It may not be possible to reach it in life, but in art, and in the sublime, we can go there if only for a little while.

 

 

 

 

 

    
 

 

 

    
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

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