Howard Hodgkin: Gagosian Gallery - New York

Do Howard Hodgkin's fresh paintings reprise what physiologist Max Verworn in 1908 called "ideoplastic style"--pure painterly expression or representation of interiority--or do they stretch out and develop the aesthetic perception at the core of this style? Do they make deeper our sense of what Alexander Baumgarten called "sensate-objectivity" and exhibit that the expressive possibilities of "aesthetic painting" were not exhausted by dint of its last great surge in post-painterly abstraction? There is no question that Hodgkin is a vitalist and that aesthetic painting is alive and well in his work, on the other hand one has to consider the possibility that his work decadently recapitulates its be in possession of history (of which Hodgkin is quite conscious). The issue boils down to the quality of "empathy," in Theodor Lipps's sense: For the aesthetician, the source of "aesthetic enjoyment" is a "critical participation in the fullnes of the World-Me continuum." Do these paintings tender sensations more radically immediate and intimate than those of the Intimist Vuillard, or, for that matter, any hitherto experienced aesthetic painting?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The answer to these questions is not always clear. Works of the like kind as Blue Remembered Hills, 2002-2003 and Grief, 1999-2002 are ideoplastic masterpieces, at one time landscapes and "inscapes," to use Gerard Manley Hopkins's terminus Not only do they owe a great deal to the French tradition of direct painting (Monet Vuillard, Matisse), on the other hand their painted frames and interior frames are indebted to like sources as Seurat and Diebenkorn. wood-land grain as a counterpoint to the painterly action (as in Mud, 2002) harks back to Munch; and the tension between declarative flatness and quasi-illusionistic space is a staple of abstraction. in the way that what does Hodgkin add?

It has to be his uniquely lush, voluptuous matrix of gesticulations which have a libidinous freshnes and rhapsodic sensuousness not seen since Sam Francis. Hodgkin's paintings also have a rather feverish, singularly brusque materiality and a light that's more immanent than external, or possibly a bizarre fusion of one as well as the other as in the ironic You Are My Sunshine, 2002 Indeed there is an aura of delight here--a faculty of perception of sheer pleasure in the ontological experience of painting as well as of nature. Unlike Abstract Expressionism (which nurses to the violent and manic, more compulsive than spontaneous), and rather than simply expres an isolated, disintegrating Me blind to the larger fullnes of being, Hodgkin participates in the fullnes of Lipps's "World-Me continuum." delight always trumps emotional catastrophe, as in Spring Rain, 2000-2002 and Shadow and Christmas (both 2002-2003) With its cornucopia of sensations, Hodgkin's work is also a welcome relief from a prevailing Conceptual nihilism. If, as Robert Motherwell said, abstraction is mysticism, then mysticism is alive and well.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group