MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award:
As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART
I’ve also included a short documentary on John Hoyland to accompany the essay from Beyond The Crisis In Art because of Peter’s memorable performance during the introduction.
Beyond The Crisis: John Hoyland
by Peter Fuller
I should say it straight away: there were some works in this exhibition that I had not seen before which impressed me deeply. I am referring especially to a group of paintings Hoyland made around 1970, and I have in mind one in particular: No. 13 in the catalogue, named in the artist’s irritating manner, 26.5.71.
26.5.71 — I suppose we must continue to call it that — is not just a good painting: it is also one of the few significant paintings which I have seen produced in Britain in the last ten years. Had I known this work before, I would not have published some of the views about Hoyland which I have in the past, at least not without qualification. I will make further self-criticism in a moment. First, I want to state one thing clearly: this work demonstrated to me that Hoyland does not always produce ‘paintings about paintings’; here, he reveals himself as closer to artists like Rothko, the early De Kooning, or, more recently, Diebenkorn and Natkin — ail painters who have consciously used abstraction to speak primarily of experience beyond the experience of art itself.
Before I say more about what I mean by this, I want to describe the formal mechanics of this painting. 26.5.71 presents you with a paradox: it seems to offer a taut ‘all-over’ surface, a skin of paint, and a limitless, billowing, illusionary vista within the same picture. (In this respect, despite the differences in the way they handle their materials, it is very like certain Natkin paintings which I have described and analysed elsewhere.) There are two main compositional elements: an opaque rectangle of thick, sensuous impasto in the lower right hand area of the canvas, and a delicate, predominantly blue background, reminiscent of English water-colours, especially the ‘skying’ sketches of Constable and Cozens.
26.5.71 draws you, the viewer, into its ambivalences. You can never be sure: should you ‘read’ the paint as being stretched tight over ‘the picture plane’ (to use the now debased jargon), or should you, as it were, allow yourself to be drawn in, behind the surface, and to float with the impasto rectangle which suddenly seems to be cut loose and to be drifting in the vastness of uncontained space.
26.5.71 is a work of nuance and complexity. In the ‘foreground’, on what is (accordingly to one reading at least) that flat ‘picture plane’, are laid a number of thickly painted elements which are clearly related to the impasto rectangle. If I said that these suggested splattered flesh, I would be introducing an element of horror which is not present in the experience of the work itself, although, for all its sweetness and prettiness, it does arouse a sense of fear and apprehension — even of tragedy: there is that about it which jostles deep and usually submerged affects in the receptive viewer. Nonetheless, the paint on the surface undeniably evokes flesh, palpable though diffused, ‘dislimned and indistinct as water is in water’, a mere presence, pinkish, melting, peachlike, milky, yet still as specific and enticing as a bosom issuing from a blouse, a siren, sucking you towards the recessive illusions of that ‘background’, an ambiguous skyscape filled with pale and insubstantial forms, whispering shadows, thin washes, castles in the clouds, and soft floating wisps and streams of colour, like gentle rains, lost in that engulfing and suffusing vastness. And then suddenly, it is all quite safe and ‘flat’: the rectangle snaps into place, and you fall back outside the painting again. You are almost relieved to hear some pedant standing next to you muttering something about ‘only marks on the canvas’.
In describing my experience of 26.5.71, I have touched upon some of its illusions and allusions and hinted at the ways in which its forms and colours draw out certain emotions in the viewer. Later, I will be specific about the nature of those emotions and how they are aroused. Now I want to say that one of the strengths of 26.5.71 is that its ‘background’ has clearly been derived from the perception of nature. I was not at all surprised to read in the catalogue that this picture (and others like it) had been painted soon after Hoyland had moved his studio out to the Wiltshire countryside. There is a freshness about the space in this painting which is a long way from the derivative effects, the stuffy, second-hand ‘art space’ of so many of Hoyland’s works in the 1960s, when he seemed content to copy the conventions and techniques of American abstractionists. Now I am not saying that 26.5.71 is a closet landscape, that you should admire it for its verisimilitude to the Wiltshire sky, nor any nonsense of that sort. With its fleshly foreground which on one reading can and on another reading cannot be separated out from that elusive skyscape it is clearly touching upon intimate areas of psychological (rather than purely perceptual) experience.
This may seem self-evident to any sensitive viewer; nonetheless, the ‘reading’ of 26.5.71 which I have put forward (and will further elaborate later) could not be accepted by the critical ‘authorities’ on Hoyland’s art, nor, I suspect, would it be endorsed by the artist himself. For example, Bryan Robertson writes in the catalogue to this show of ‘the inviolability of abstractness’ manifested in Hoyland’s work; he maintains that the artist is intent only upon ‘refurbishing and extending the possibilities of pictorial principles’. One might well ask, what is Robertson afraid of?
The question as to how far Hoyland is a painter preoccupied with formal considerations for their own sake, and how far he is skilfully deploying such conventions to express experience beyond the experience of painting itself, is crucial. The attempt to answer it will enable us to isolate the central contradiction within this artist’s project; I therefore make no apologies about pursuing it in detail.
I want to go back to a text which Bryan Robertson wrote at the time of Hoyland’s Whitechapel show in 1967. Robertson was among those who brought Hoyland into prominence; in explaining his pictures, Robertson said that Hoyland was ‘affably entrenched in current formal terrain, resting content with an abstract vocabulary of colour, texture, surface, space and shape’. The colour, Robertson insisted, ‘is blankly itself and not indicative of psychological state or physical condition’. He insisted that ‘it stands for nothing except shades of artifice, without reference to anything else’. This all sounds straightforward enough, and if it were true, then Hoyland would be a non-painter, a real bum of an artist, for that is formalism pure and simple, unredeemed by any flicker of relationship to experience.
John Hoyland, 7.11.66
It is not just that I have seen more in Hoyland, and come to refuse this judgement. There are plenty of passages which indicate that Robertson is not really convinced by what he writes either. For example, at one point he observes that Hoyland’s work ‘seems always to come from strong psychological and emotional compulsion as well as from intellectual conception’. More significantly he writes that some of Hoyland’s paintings ‘embody a more vulnerable, certainly less impregnable condition’ than others. He even says that in the vulnerable works ‘this airless context of high artifice suggests frailty, impermanence, instability— tragedy even’. But having admitted this, Robertson hurries on to say that this is ‘almost certainly irrelevant’. Hoyland, he explains, ‘appears to be deliberately restricting himself to strictly formal disclosures’.
Here, it seems to me, Robertson is saying that the ways in which Hoyland composes his pictures — his ‘formal disclosures’ — are such that they do, in moments at least, signify (even to Robertson) experiences beyond the experience of art — and powerful experience, like the sense of ‘frailty’ and ‘tragedy’, at that. But Robertson recommends the viewer to ignore this, and to regard only the technical devices through which the expression is realized. He seems like the sort of person who might say, ‘Never mind your experience of the powerful emotions which that music evokes in you. That’s just irrelevant! Get hold of a copy of the score and work out how the composer did it! That’s the only thing that matters.’ I am not against formal or technical analyses: I am strongly against the view that they are the only responses which are relevant. I do not think, however, that this is just a weakness in Robertson’s critical method (although it is certainly that): it is a weakness which Robertson shares with Hoyland, and because he shares it, he condones it.
It is, of course, true that in many of Hoyland’s early works the ‘frailty, impermanence, instability — tragedy even’ was there very much as a secondary reference. Hoyland was borrowing so much, for example, from Rothko that it was almost inevitable that some of the latter’s deep sense of tragedy, his preoccupation with what he called ‘basic emotions’, should inevitably brush off on him together with the technical devices. But I would maintain that in 25.5.71 (whatever Hoyland may, or may not, have seen in De Kooning), the ‘frailty, impermanence, instability — tragedy even’ were his own, authentically experienced and represented, and that here the ‘formal disclosures’ were the means, or servants, of that expression.
But just as Robertson will only let us peep at the content of these paintings in his critical account of Hoyland, before hurrying us back to ‘the inviolability of abstractness’, so the artist himself seems reluctant to let us do more than glimpse in occasional works, like 26.5.71, or, more frequently, through ‘moments’ in otherwise formalist paintings, a world of imagery and emotion realized through the formal means. There is much denial especially in Hoyland’s work of the last seven years. He seems to have internalized Robertson’s attitude so thoroughly that the emotional authenticity realized in works like 26.5.71 has receded. It is almost as if Hoyland thought that he ought to be making works in which only the ‘formal disclosures’ were relevant.
His later paintings get more and more like the 1812 overture. The special effects get louder and louder; they are cleverly done: the ‘sound’ is certainly impressive. But these are the compositions of a virtuoso, an out-and-out professional. The affective qualities of later Hoylands are often shallow: depth, tentativeness, and authenticity have been sacrificed. Ideology, in this case, fidelity to style and the criteria of modernism, is repeatedly preferred to the search for a truthful account of experience. The tragedy is not so much that Hoyland succumbs: he is hardly alone in that; it is that we know from his best work that he is capable of doing so much better.
Here I want to introduce what may seem like a digression, but it is not: it is central to the way I see Hoyland’s paintings. In the Renaissance, a theory of expression emerged based upon the empirical study of anatomy. Alberti, one of its earliest theorists, believed that a good painting functioned by evoking emotions in the viewer through the expressiveness of its subjects. The ‘scientific’, or material basis of painting thus included the study of physiognomy and musculature. These were not sufficient for good expression: a brilliant anatomical painter might fail to call forth the emotional response in his viewers. Nonetheless, within this tradition of expression, there was no way round anatomy: in general, it remains true that as Western artists moved away from the anatomical base, as they came to prefer style to the scalpel or at least a rigorous empiricism, painting fell into ‘Mannerism’ where the painter’s primary preoccupation seems to be with his own devices and conventions rather than with the representation of expression as learned from experience. Inevitably, ideology displaced the search for truth.
By the end of the 19th century, the old science of expression was beginning to break up, or, to be more accurate (with the exception of certain pockets and enclaves, such as the Slade in Britain) it had been annexed away from Fine Art and was being pursued by scientists, like Darwin, author of The Expression of The Emotion in Man and Animals. Artists were increasingly preoccupied with a new theory of expression (whose rudimentary ‘moment of becoming’ is, as a matter of fact, discernible even in High Renaissance anatomical expression). Expression came to refer more and more to what the artist expressed through his work, rather than to the expressiveness of his or her subjects. Indeed, the artist became in a new sense, the subject of all his paintings, and the relevance of the old, ‘objective’, anatomical science of expression withered.
However, like the old, the new theory of expression was also ultimately rooted in the body, though in this case, in the body of the artist himself. In Abstract Expressionism — and I am referring to not just the New York movement, but also its precursors and parallels elsewhere — the body of the artist is expressed through such phenomena as scale, rhythm, simulation of somatic process. (This is quite obviously true of a painter like Pollock.) But again, as in classical expression, physiological depiction was not pursued for its own sake — even when it was skilfully done. Rothko might not have been able to render to us the physiognomy of Moses, Venus, or Laocoon — but he could, through the new expression, vividly introduce us to the face of his own despair. (The association between certain colours and certain affective states was critical here.) But just as the Renaissance science of expression had tumbled into mannerism, so did the new abstract expression. Arguably, it was even more prone to do so because its guarantor was not so much the ‘objective’ discoveries of observation and the dissecting room, but rather the authenticity of the artist, his truth to his lived experience. My view is that although, in one sense, abstract expression is necessarily limited by solipsism, in another, it has opened up new areas of experience which were simply not available to artists working within the classical theory of expression. Those areas were, of course, revealed through ‘formal disclosures’ — new organizations of the picture space, of colour, and of form, which were capable of evoking emotions unreachable through physiognomic expression: but decadence and mannerism set in when the new areas of experience were defined as the sole legitimate territory for art (as in Bell, Fry and their successors) or, worse still, when (as in Robertson and Sylvester) pursuit of ‘formal disclosures’ was advocated for their own sakes, rather than for that of the emotions and experiences which could be revealed and evoked through them. This led to an art which was either concerned with optical sensation (i.e. decorative) or with the intellect in isolation from the world of feeling (i.e. much systems and all conceptual art). Above all, it led to decadent art for art’s sake.
I hope that you will now be beginning to see how I wish to ‘situate’ Hoyland. He is an artist who seems to me to stand on the very brink between being a genuine abstract expressionist, and an up-market interior decorator, albeit a rather good one. This is the contradiction at the centre of Hoyland’s project. It is one reason why, I think, Rothko was so important for him in those early years. You can see Rothko as either ‘The Father of Minimalism’ or the supreme painter of an unsuccessful struggle against depression and suicidal despair, the artist, par excellence, of the ‘basic emotions’ surrounding mourning, exile, absence, and loss. Hoyland cannot make up his mind, though; in the end, it is the wrong Rothko he opts for, a Rothko of ‘formal disclosures’, for whom the ‘tragedy’ is assumed to be irrelevant. That it why he so often seems content to offer us sub-Hoffmans souped up Louis, and Olitskis which are at least better than their ‘originals’.
But this, in a sense, is to be too critical of Hoyland, for, if he hovers on the brink, he never absolutely falls over it. Thus whereas it is possible for Hoyland to say, ‘as for scale, there is no mystique in what I do about the human scale, though a canvas is often as high or higher than a man, and longer than one can reach’, what he actually does seems to me always intimately linked to ‘the human scale’. (Thus when a brushstroke, or whatever, is longer than his reach, he will often constitute it, by contrivance, to the scale of that reach: his paintings ‘higher than a man’ are no more unrelated to human scale than is a colossus.) Similarly, whereas it is sometimes true, as Robertson observes, that Hoyland’s colour seems to be self-referential, equally often it is powerfully evocative of emotional experience.
This leads me to an important point about Hoyland’s expression: just as I indicated that abstract expression was present as a ‘moment of becoming’ within High Renaissance anatomical expression, so, it seems to me, High Renaissance anatomical expression is present as a critical residue within abstract expression. (It is prefectly possible to talk about the anatomy of De Kooning, the drawing of Newman, the physiognomy of Rothko.) Hoyland never quite tumbles out of abstract expression into decoration, or decadence, because he conserves so much of classical expression. In particular, unlike so many younger abstract artists, Hoyland can draw, and draw well. The sort of drawing on which so many of his paintings are based can only be learned through years of ‘objective’ study, through drawing directly from the model. In this respect the recent tendency to point out that Hoyland relates not only to American artists like Rothko, Hoffman, Louis, Olitski, etc. but also to de Stael and Bomberg — both of whom were consummate draughtsmen who straddled both traditions of expression — seems to me correct.
This observation enables me to explain something which I experienced acutely when I visited Hoyland’s show soon after reviewing the Stockwell exhibition — and that is the almost infinite superiority of Hoyland over such younger abstract artists as Abercrombie, Gouk, and MacLean. When one reads what these artists have written or said, they confirm what is abundantly evident from their paintings themselves: they are only interested in poking around at the signifiers of art. They have no theory or practice of expression, not even an ambivalent and confused one, as Hoyland has. For example, in an Artscribe interview MacLean (whose work is 100 per cent decorative, though good decoration unlike so many Stockwell artists) said of Hoyland, ‘he has got a good feeling for spread, tonal spread. He knows how to cross the paint surface,’ etc., etc. But he showed no glimmer of insight or interest in the experiences which the technical devices were being used to realize. Similarly, it is typical of Gouk (who cannot draw) that he should polemicize against drawing as ‘the bane of British painting’. Because those artists have jettisoned so much of the theory and practice of classical expression (far, far more than Hoyland) not even abstract expression is open to them. The best they can hope to be, under these circumstances, is good decorators: many of them have precious little chance of becoming even that.
But I said earlier that I would return to 26.5.71 and be specific about that area of experience and those emotions which, whether Hoyland is intellectually conscious of it or not, are expressed through the work. This is, contrary to Robertson’s view, not just a legitimate critical enterprise, but a necessary one if the critic is to be anything more than a technical journalist. Just as, within the classical theory of expression, the critic endeavoured to elucidate the physiognomy of the Mona Lisa, or whatever, so too critics within the modern theory of expression must look into the face of the painting itself, and relate what is seen and felt to the world beyond that of painting.
It is Hoyland himself who gives us a clue towards accurate verbalization: before he painted this picture, Hoyland was quoted as saying that he was interested in the idea of ‘unity- in-division’: ‘and if you have a rectangle it is interesting to add to it, to enrich and complicate the area by giving an independent life to shapes inside it and not allow them to be endlessly restricted by their unification with the over-all picture plane.’ He then said, ‘In trying to do this, it is possible to get both actions at once: a separate existence inside a totality.’
Here, I can only state an argument which I will substantiate at greater length, elsewhere. I believe that in 26.5.71, through his formal devices, Hoyland achieved a powerful visual equivalent for this desire ‘to get both actions at once: a separate existence inside a totality’: but that behind, or rather within, that formal intention was a highly specific emotional content. Through his forms he evokes in those viewers who find this work ‘good’, feelings belonging to an early stage in infancy — that when the infant is both positing, and denying, its separate existence from the mother and the world. At this time, the baby becomes dimly aware of the otherness of the mother, of the fact that he himself does not flow seamlessly into the world, or into her — but has a separate identity. This ‘otherness’ he simultaneously denies and explores during a vital, perhaps the vital, period of developmental growth: at this time, the baby necessarily posits the idea of ‘a potential space’, which David Winnicott, a psychoanalyst, once defined as ‘the hypothetical area that exists (but cannot exist) between the baby and the object (mother or part of mother) during the phase of the repudiation of the object as not me, that is at the end of being merged in with the object.’
It is just such an affective, ‘hypothetical space’ as this that Hoyland, using all his considerable technical skills and abilities as a proficient, trained adult artist — is able to recreate. The viewer is the subject of the work; he floats within the fleshliness of the breast-like contents of the ‘picture plane’ in the vastness of the whole world, that ‘skyscape beyond’. Everything — self, mother’s breast, and sustaining environment — is fused together on one reading; sharply separated out, on another, or, as Hoyland puts it, one has both actions at once — ‘the overall picture plane’ and ‘a separate existence inside a totality’. It is not just the fact of a relationship to this area of bodily experience which makes 26.5.71 a good painting (any more than the attempt to draw a beautiful woman’s face necessarily results in a beautiful drawing); it is the quality, depth, and authenticity of the relationship that are decisive: here Hoyland is successful. We experience a sense of ‘goodness’, or we deny our experience.
In my view, explorations of this kind are in no sense regressive: they constitute the real reason for valuing the products of abstract expression. Certainly, here painting enters a terrain where no theoretical or linguistic statement, by its very nature, can begin to be as effective. (One only has to compare the achievement of 26.5.71 with the obsessive, aesthetically dead, forensic ramblings of Mary Kelly in her Post-Partum Document which touches more consciously, but much less convincingly on the same subject matter, to appreciate that.) These are issues which deserve more thorough elucidation — and I explore them further in a forthcoming monograph on the painter, Robert Natkin, and also in my book, Art and Psychoanalysis.
I made some reference earlier to the need for me to make self-criticism concerning certain aspects of my utterances on Hoyland. I have already indicated that I had not seen enough of his work, and what I had seen I had not looked at hard enough, to justify my earlier view that he — like say Gouk and Abercrombie — was an unmitigated formalist. Foolishly, I allowed myself to be influenced by the brigade of critics — from Robertson to Maloon — who have insisted that Hoyland’s ‘formal disclosures’ are what count. They may have advanced his career, but they are ultimately the artist’s worst enemies.
Despite this, I am not inclined to be too apologetic about what I have said in the past: there is, I repeat, a contradiction within the artist himself. I was emphasizing one side of that whereas I said nothing about the other. I relied too much on Hoyland’s post-1973 work in which the denial of his discoveries in 1970/1971 is often made explicit through the flattening out of his space, his apparent loss of touch and nuance, and his frequent application of a deadening, stifling ‘all-over’ impasto to the whole picture-plane.
This contradiction, though manifest within the works, also comes out in Hoyland’s confused attitudes towards his own practice. Once, at a public meeting in the Hayward Gallery, I saw Hoyland take the microphone and turn upon a poor, unfortunate woman who had been so foolish as to expect to walk into a gallery and see something on the walls that she could enjoy and appreciate. Hoyland shouted at her that modern art was difficult, that one could not expect to understand it without knowing a lot about it: without, as it were, putting in a great deal of homework, and acquiring a deal of specialist knowledge.
On the other hand, in this catalogue, Hoyland says, ‘One discovers a painting as one might discover a forest with snow falling, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, come upon an open glade with sunlight penetrating the falling snow, simultaneously. Paintings are not to be reasoned with, they are not to be understood, they are to be recognized. They are an equivalent to nature, not an illustration of it; their test is in the depth of the artist’s imagination.’
These views on what painting is are incompatible; but the truth is that at its best it is neither a hermetic and self- evolving process for a circle of knowledgeable intellectual initiates and professionals, nor is it, like ‘an open glade with sunlight penetrating the falling snow’, natural, and transparent in what it has to offer. As long as he oscillates between these two options, between, as it were Robertson’s formal stupidities and his own .instinctual anti-intellectualism in his work, and his thinking about his work, Hoyland will remain ensnared. If he comes to realize — as he seemed to in 1970/71 — that painting is the necessarily artificial constitution of experience, through certain definite pictorial skills, with their roots in the human body and its potentialities, then he may yet become a major painter.