Grand Old Darling - not GOD

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Since late June, 13 paintings by Howard Hodgkin have been hanging in Dulwich Picture Gallery. They are not confined to a single room, there to be venerated in a cataleptic trance; they are instead scattered among the distinguished pictures in the permanent collection, rubbing shoulders with Poussin, Ricci and Guercino, keeping company with Claude, Rubens and Rembrandt, illuminating all - or so we are told, the juxtaposition leading to our greater understanding of the present and the past, Hodgkin and his wonderful precursors speaking the same language.

That is the official way of perceiving this chalk-and-cheese display. The sceptic might equally well suppose that the gallery, remote in Dulwich (where there is nothing else to do) and likely to be overlooked by even the most passionately dutiful members of the art world, feels compelled to try almost any antic to draw in the punters, and the universal formula of the fashionable moment is to mix the old with the outrageous new - of this, an extreme example is about to happen in Rotterdam where an important exhibition of paintings by Hieronymus-Bosch is to be larded with the videos of Bill Viola and the waxworks of the brothers Chapman. It seems that today's curators of old masters have lost confidence in their charges, believing that as they lack the bright hues of television and illustrate episodes from irrelevant-old stories of which we now know neither the beginning nor the end, they have no hold on the interest of the wider public and must, by almost any means, be jollied into the present empty-headed and illiterate century. "Look, look," they say, "in this 17th century picture of a church interior a dog is emptying its bowels behind the font; and here, to demonstrate the continuity of old and new, Chris Ofili offers us a clod of elephant dung and Gilbert and George a huge photograph of human defecation."

Galleries of old masters have no need to employ such deceits, no need to justify the old by conjoining it with the new as though the new is the superior, no need to prove the value of Rembrandt's flayed oxen by hanging them with Damien Hirst's halved cows and calves. Dulwich may, having received a vast Lottery grant to let Rick Mather build a hideous and shoddy restaurant and lavatory wing in its front garden, feel the need to increase its visitor numbers, but it does its permanent collection no service by peppering it with gaudy Hodgkins. It is, of course, just possible that Dulwich is being subtle, guileful and subversive, its intention quite the reverse of what at first it seems - that Dulwich is, in fact, demonstrating how fatuous and vacuous contemporary art can be by hanging a sloppy Hodgkin between a pair of Poussins, which we all know to be monuments of scrupulously-careful pictorial constructionthe contrast made deliberatelyto reassure the visitor who perceives the work of Hodgkin as pretentious trash.

Trash? How could one use this word in the context of Howard Hodgkin, famous man, knight of the realm, winner of the Turner Prize, known to the close many as HH and to the distant more as GOD, the Grand Old Darling of the English art world, a painter and panjandrum so eminent that one must speak of him only in the hushed tones of awe? Well, quite easily. Try saying shallow of his pictures instead of ruminating on their depth, substitute slick for painterly bravura, try vulgar, crude and overwrought; think of wild swipes with a housepainter's brush, of paint dabbed and splotched and swabbed with turpentine, of paint thin and thick, of paint fluid and sticky, tacky, blobby and resistant; think less of the painter's vision and more of his retreat into repeated and repeated and repeated formula.

These are paintings of such unmediated gestural habit that GOD could do them in the dark; they have no complexity of structure, no subtlety of tone - indeed, they depend for their shock effect on the dissonant palette of the Indian sari in bright light, exciting in the bazaar of Benares, but shrill and acid here, the pitch sharp enough to set the teeth on edge. There is, too, something of the dirty dinner plate about these pictures, of gravy smears, exotic chutneys, mustard and tomato sauce - Chez Max, a circular picture, resembles nothing so much as one tipped over the wastebin to discharge uneaten baked beans and mushy peas. Hodgkin's pictures have titles that suggest some autobiographical experience evoked by memories of bedrooms, lovers, restaurants and melancholy holidays in uncharitable weather, but the stories are half-told with the revelation and the gossip halted in mid-phrase; one senses that HH is himself such an artificial self-invention that he cannot, dare not, reveal an intimate truth and that every one of his abbreviated stories is a roman ? clef to which he will never make the key available. Was Chez Maxim indeed a ruined dinner in a restaurant? Was Afterwards tearful post-coital tristesse over some too rewarding boy? Was Out of the Window the way the condom went?

It hardly matters; these teasing disclosures HH deliberately obscures to prevent our discerning an underlying narrative, but if his pictures are to be recognised as more than gaudy decorative objects, he knows that he must allow us our measured glimpse into his sensitive soul, for then, as aesthetes, we will detect that his images are of his feelings rather than events.

Feelings? What feelings should we see in Out of the Window, from which dense swathes of yellow, orange, bright green and magenta lap onto a decent antique frame as though seeking to escape its oval bounds? Is this another tearful tantrum? If so, why stop at the frame? Why not extend the sloshes of bright pigment across the drab intervening wall and onto the distinguished neighbouring canvases - that would add violence to rage. What are we to make of Memories, a frame turned face to the wall, levelled with a sheet of timber and painted as an unframed landscape that is a distant echo of Ivon

Hitchens (who died in 1979), the honest painter whose influence converted GOD from a mindless muddler into the one-stringed fiddler that he is.

Over the past quarter of a century HH has painted more or less the same picture over and again; they have a certain hapless amateur charm on a very small scale (the therapy of the maiden aunt), but his larger variations on the inevitable theme dissolve into a flaccidity so weak that the spectator wonders at his letting them leave the studio. Both extremes are to be seen at Dulwich, where the hang is, to HH, so compellingly beautiful that he burst into tears when he saw the work complete - a bit like God sanctifying the seventh day. I vowed that I would not visit this exhibition, certain that GOD's work would be the mixture as before and that I should have nothing new to say of it, but it is August, the dry season for the art critic, and force majeure came into play. It is indeed the mixture as before, perhaps even feebler than five years ago, and I have no reason to revise my opinion of Hodgkin's extremely limited imagination and abilities - I need only express astonishment that the Grand Old Darling has grown so vain that he cannot see how much his daubs disrupt the serenity of the permanent collection. This embarrassing display lasts only two weekends more.

Dulwich Picture Gallery Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21.

Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm. Saturday-Sunday 11am-5pm. Closed Mondays. Admission £4 (free on Fridays). Ends 19 August.

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