John Hoyland

Foreword

When one is young and has experienced a good deal of rejection, you want to show everyone how tough you are. Later, you want to show how clever you are. Later still, you want to see how far you can push yourself. And finally, you don’t give a fuck about anything, you just want to howl at the moon.

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The paintings John Hoyland (1934–2011) made in the last eight or nine years of his life have a simplicity arrived at through a process of concentration, of complexity mastered. ‘The image’, he once remarked, ‘was everything’, and in his final years Hoyland created images that say what they have to say with a daring starkness, and with the power that comes from the containment of richness within minimal means.1 Similar things could be said about his paintings of the late 1960s, made as he established his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, although there we encounter rigorously controlled architectures rather than amorphous fluidity. Yet Hoyland’s last paintings could only be those of an artist with half a century’s experience of painting and of life, and a consciousness that both were soon to come to a close.

The four essays in this book are all concerned with this process of concentration, with the interplay between the content Hoyland sought to express and the intensely material images he created to do so. This territory has been surveyed before, in Andrew Lambirth’s Scatter the Devils (2009). Here we attempt to mirror the range and depth of Hoyland’s concerns with four very different voices. Three have not written about Hoyland before, while Mel Gooding’s account follows his monograph of 2006, so that his treatment of Hoyland covers the full range of his output. A posthumous publication can take account of the paintings Hoyland made in his last two years, including his important final series, the ‘Mysteries’. Being able to complete the story is especially important with a body of work so aware of its own end.

Hoyland’s later years were marked by his own increasing ill health and the deaths of many close friends. He had major heart surgery in 2008 and never fully recovered. The jagged line of his surgical scar became a motif in his paintings (p.119), and a group of ‘heart’ paintings also followed (p.117). He painted ‘Elegies’ to departed friends and what he called ‘Letters’ to the great modernist artists of the past. The first elegised friend was the curator Bryan Robertson, a lifelong supporter of Hoyland’s work (pp.68 and 73). Robertson was followed by the artists Terry Frost (p.76), Piero Dorazio (p.111), Patrick Caulfield (p.93) and Denis Bowen, and finally Clifford Pugh (p.113), a portrait draughtsman and neighbour of Hoyland’s. Hoyland’s ‘Letters’ were addressed to Henri Matisse, Chaïm Soutine (p.101) and, above all, Vincent van Gogh (p.99), a hero from his student days in Sheffield, when he wandered the streets with childhood friend Brian Fielding seeing ‘Starry Night at every corner’.2

Hoyland may have had in mind the Elegies to the Spanish Republic (1948–67) painted by his friend Robert Motherwell. Yet with the exception of a quartet of paintings made in response to war in Lebanon (fig.1), and one registering horror at suffering in Gaza (fig.59, p.207), Hoyland’s concerns were personal rather than political, and even the Lebanon images he would come to see as foreshadowing his heart paintings.3 A more direct exemplar is Hans Hofmann’s Memoria in Aeternum (1962), dedicated to five painters who died young, among them Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock.4 Memoria in Aeternum foreshadows aspects of both Hoyland’s early and late paintings. More strikingly, it shows the

centrality of death in the mythology of Abstract Expressionism, and sets a clear precedent for the memorialisation of comrades-in-art within images that are both tragic and full of vitality.

The public aspect of Hoyland’s ‘Elegies’ and ‘Letters’, and his late works as a whole, is found in their defiant celebration of the continuing power of the modernist tradition in the opening years of the twenty-first century, and as statements of the ongoing possibility of an art valuing feeling above all else. His final images, concerned with directness, materiality and the mastery of chance, echo with memories – induced by a lifetime of study and deep selfidentification – of more than a hundred years of modern painting. For all their consciousness of loss, imminent and realised, personal and cultural, these paintings are celebrations. In interviews Hoyland faced frailty, diminishing potency and the increasing presence of death with characteristic humour. Leaving hospital after his heart surgery, he felt ‘a distinct sharpening of the senses’.5 Even at their darkest or most lacerating his paintings are more about life than death, or at least never death without life. Traces of the world coexist

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1 Hoyland in conversation with Gary Wragg, late 1970s. Sam Cornish (ed), Constant Within the Change: Gary Wragg: Five Decades of Paintings, A Comprehensive Catalogue, Sansom & Co. Ltd, Bristol, 2014, vol.1, p.63.

2 John Hoyland, ‘Brian Fielding Obituary’, The Independent, 30 May 1986. ‘Elegies’ include: Master Weaver (Homage to Bryan Robertson) (2002, p.68); Elegy (for Bryan Robertson) (2003, p.73); Elegy (for Terry Frost) (2003, p.76); Poem for Piero (2007, p.111); Souvenir (for Patrick C) (2006, p.93), and also perhaps inspired by Caulfield’s death, Love and Grief (2006, fig.9); dedicated to Denis Bowen, Blue Moon (2006); to Clifford Pugh, Eyes That Dream (Clifford Dies) (2008) and Goodbye (2008, p.113). ‘Letters’ include: Letter to Henri (1995); Letter to Vincent (2006, p.99); Letter to Chaim (2006, p.101). For more about the paintings dedicated to Vincent van Gogh see pp.40–49. There were two further ‘Letters’, neither elegiac: Letter to Sam (2006), to the collector of Hoyland’s paintings Sam Lurie, and Letter to RM (2006), likely dedicated to Renate Motherwell, the wife of Robert Motherwell.

3 ‘John Hoyland in Conversation with Peter Dickinson’, Turps Banana, Winter 2010, p.24.

4 The other two were Arthur B. Carles and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Memoria in Aeternum is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Hoyland would very likely have known the painting from his time living in New York and from curating a show of Hofmann’s late work at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1988.

5 ‘Happy Birthday’, The Times, 12 October 2009.

6 Sometimes these signs are joined by coded messages, an idea the younger Hoyland would probably have rejected. His Letter to Chaim (p.101) contains a thin green line that references a stray thread in Soutine’s Carcass of Beef (1925).

7 Lucien Stryk, The Awakened Self: Encounters with Zen, Kodansha USA Inc., New York, 1995. Ian Ritchie in John Hoyland: Mysteries, exhibition catalogue, Beaux Arts, London, 2011, pp.43–44, noted Hoyland’s highlighted phrases from Stryk’s book.

with more abstract structures, with no clear distinction, much less a hierarchy between the two. Suns, moons, rivers or waterfalls of colour, occasionally schematic signs for birds or people, are the echoes of a much more pervasive abstract-figuration he had explored from the mid-1990s to just past the millennium.6 Hoyland’s last paintings are vigorous and exuberant, filled with flashes of light and colour, stylish, sometimes provocatively lurid; at their best they are exhilarating.

Moon in the Water (fig.2 and p.197) was the last of the ‘Mysteries’, painted in March 2011, four months before his death. Its title was taken from a death-poem by the nineteenth-century Japanese Zen master Gizan, published in a book Hoyland owned by Lucien Stryk, a poet and promoter of Zen.7

Coming and going, life and death: A thousand hamlets, a million houses.  Don’t you get the point?

Moon in the water, blossom in the sky.

Such poems were written by Zen masters to guide their disciples after their deaths. The attraction for an artist confronting mortality is clear, even if Hoyland did not have an extensive philosophical engagement with Zen. We can imagine he dipped into the text in search of a resonant image or idea, taking what he needed for his own purposes, extending his feelings for the mysteries of life and its end, and finding phrases that would vibrate alongside his paintings.

Moon in the Water is sombre and meditative without lapsing into melancholy. As clarified as it is tenebrous, its darkness is the setting for a radiance that is both generally spread across its surface and specifically concentrated in sparks of yellow and a glowing red orb. It encompasses a vast, potentially infinite expanse but renders this with immediacy, even intimacy. There is a readily appreciable if ultimately unfathomable connection between Gizan’s words and Hoyland’s image. Yet the succeeding phrase – ‘blossom in the sky’ – has the potential for an even more direct link with Hoyland’s late works, well describing their garlands of multicoloured marks dancing against intergalactic voids. The shining quiet of Hoyland’s last painting leaves these final words of Gizan’s poem poignantly unsaid.

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bursting and bleeding, surrounded by white star spots. This night sky (see pp.62–63) is presented to us as a zone of pictorial creation, whose independent life is manifested in the streaks, blobs, washes, spirals, splats and smudges of colour that mingle, explode and traverse the pictorial field, while seemingly ‘unknowing’ gestures, brushmarks and tube-squeezings of paint metamorphose into semi-figurative but indecipherable signs of life.

Symbolism

Bouquet for Vincent is a symbolist abstraction that plays with a flux of associations between the two aspects of its title – the bunch of flowers and nature, and the memories that have accrued to an emblematic artist from the past – through shifting colours, equivocal forms and spatial ambiances that suggest depths in and beyond the opaque ground and parameters of the canvas.13 The evocation of mystery, the provocation of heightened states of consciousness and the experimental quest for forms suitable to the representation of an indivisible world are the foundational features of the largely marginalised artistic tradition of Symbolist modernism. In fin-de-siècle France, Van Gogh was viewed as a leading representative of this new aesthetic, alongside Gauguin and another important, hitherto unnoticed, predecessor for Hoyland, the revered Symbolist artist Odilon Redon. Bouquet for Vincent summons up the otherworldly, hybrid cell/star/eye/flower apparitions that populate Redon’s charcoal drawings as well as the chromatic pleasure of his many floral bouquets in pastel and oil paint (fig.34). Among Hoyland’s notebook jottings, we find a quote from Redon on ‘the logic of the visible in service of the invisible’, suggesting Hoyland’s sympathy for the Symbolist master’s radiant colourism and his evocative merger between naturalism and visual metaphors of spiritual transcendence.14

Although seen as a minor genre, flower painting supplied a motif rich with potential for chromatic investigations, experiments in textured brushwork, decorative form and emotive symbolism. Redon was ‘a painter of flowers as they are seen in dreams’.15 Van Gogh’s A Memory of the Garden (Etten and Nuenen) (1888) was eloquently described by the artist as an example of his attempt to move away from what ‘really exists’ and towards ‘the ideal as it might result from my abstract studies’ by the means of visionary memory and poetic arrangements of colour and meandering line.16 In January 1890 art critic and poet Albert Aurier published the first major study of Van Gogh and his paintings. Aurier described the artist as an ‘exalted believer, a devourer of beautiful utopias living on ideas and on dreams’, whose expressive manipulation of line, colour and form conjoined the ideal and the sacred to the real through the symbols of the sun and ‘that vegetal heavenly body, the sumptuous sunflower’.17

From 2006 onwards, Hoyland’s emotional testimony to everything ‘Vincent’ symbolised, and his heightened expression of time consciousness, are condensed into the motif of the primal circle or black sun, painted in wavering, dripping

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outlines onto multilayered veils of coloured space and surface. The circle was seen by Hoyland as a fundamental form of nature bearing within it migratory allusions to the sun, moon, face, target, eye or flower.18 In Venus of Arles (fig.37) the circle assumes an almost carnal flower form, with a blue core rimmed in turn by black, yellow, crimson and burgundy reds placed at the centre of a silvery pink veil upon a black ground. Letter to Vincent (p.99) features a wounded yellow sun weeping bloody rivulets of paint high above a circle formed of multicoloured rings sinking downwards into black space washed with pink. Three slender bars of green and blue block the flux of colour from flooding into the viewer’s space.

In For Vincent (fig.35 and p.125), the last of Hoyland’s homages, the sunflower symbol and the starry night merge into one, as an enlarged sun/sunflower/head form in bright lemony yellow bursts forward through a blue explosion on a black night-sky ground, its circle container leaking fluid and fragments of crimson, white and green paint matter.

Friendship

In summer 1887 Van Gogh painted two canvases, each displaying a pair of sunflower heads close-up: yellow and orange on blue in one; massed strokes of orange, yellow and brown in the other (fig.36). The two paintings were given to Gauguin on Theo’s suggestion, with Vincent receiving one of Gauguin’s Martinique canvases in exchange.19 Van Gogh intended his sunflower paintings to function as pictorial metaphors binding ideals of companionship and recompense to the stylisation of natural form and ‘certain qualities of colour’.20 In a long letter to Aurier, dated 10 February 1890, he explained that the two paintings of Sunflowers in a Vase currently being exhibited ‘express an idea symbolising gratitude’.21 The bouquet takes form simultaneously as a material manifestation in paint of the idea (that is, ‘gratitude’) and of the living petal flesh of the flower.

Van Gogh and Gauguin worked alongside each other during their nine-week cohabitation at the Yellow House in Arles from 23 October to 23 December 1888. It was a tumultuous and difficult experience for both artists, as what they (especially Van Gogh) had hoped would be a communal utopia disintegrated into a combative testing of creative principles and the assertion of divergent artistic paths. Nonetheless, the ideals of fellowship and shared artistic aims that underpinned the Yellow House sojourn remained untarnished. Van Gogh’s letter to Aurier encouraged the critic to look at his study of Gauguin’s room at the Yellow House, with its vacated armchair painted ‘entirely in broken tones of green and red’. With each thick brushstroke the complementary hues served as a reminder of Gauguin’s contribution to the renovation of art through the radiant deployment of colour. Van Gogh adds that he will put a study of cypress trees ‘in the corner of a wheatfield on a summer’s day when the mistral is blowing’ in his next consignment for Aurier as a ‘memento of your article’.22

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Published in 2021 by Ridinghouse

on the occasion of the exhibition: John Hoyland: The Last Paintings at the Millennium Gallery, Museums Sheffield, Summer 2021

Curated by Sam Cornish and Wiz Patterson Kelly

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All Hoyland works © Estate of John Hoyland. All rights reserved, DACS 2021

Texts © Natalie Adamson, David Anfam (Art Ex Ltd), Matthew Collings, Sam Cornish and Mel Gooding

For the book in this form © Ridinghouse

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-inPublication Data

A full catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

isbn 978 1 909932 62 3

Ridinghouse Publisher: Sophie Kullmann

Edited by Sam Cornish, Sophie Kullmann and Wiz Patterson Kelly

Copy-edited by Linda Schofield

Proofread by Aimee Selby

Designed by Mark Thomson Set in Signifier and Mānuka (Kris Sowersby)

Printed in Belgium by die Keure

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realised with the kind support of

The Hitchin Family

Ian and Jocelyne Ritchie

Susie Sainsbury

Pauline and Ray Treen

Front cover: Detail of When Time Began (Mysteries 11) 15.11.10 (see p.185)

Back cover: Detail of Souvenir (for Patrick C) 2.4.06 (see p.93)