THE ENGLISH PAINTER HOWARD Hodgkin, whose work is on show at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art through Jan. 28 (and will open at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, on March 31) is not for those art-world puritans who would rather have their art difficult than enjoyable. If anyone painting today believes in the pleasure principle, it is Hodgkin, and if you think that optical sensuous delight for its own sake has somehow become unkosher since Matisse, and that ideas are mainly what count in art, don't go.
Hodgkin's paintings are not about ideas. They are feelings declared in color--feelings triggered by places (Venice, Naples, Morocco, India, or rooms in London) or by memories of encounters (sociable or sexual), all embedded in pigment of quite shameless lushness. They are intelligent not in the way argument can be but in the way painting is--though, in most cutting-edge art, actually isn't.
Hodgkin, whose good-luck god is the French intimiste Edouard Vuillard (he of the dots, of the closely tuned interior scenes that vibrate with a sense of life amply lived and yet separate from public events), is a connoisseur and collector as well as an artist. The two don't necessarily go together. Good taste never made a new picture yet. There is, and ought to be, something immoderate and crazy about painting that goes beyond acts of taste and comparison. Hodgkin's failures may be the outcome of too much taste, not too little, but he is a glutton through and through, and his expertise about such areas of art as Indian miniature painting doesn't mean that his own paintings end up imitating the objects of his affection.
His paintings carry stories, but only in their titles. The blue lintel and green tongue of paint in Gossip, 1994-95, are not going to tell you what the gossip was about. Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, 1984-88, commemorates a meal prepared at an art dealer's lodgings during the Venice Biennale 12 years ago, but Hodgkin's cadmium red extravaganza, with its broad serpentine shapes buttressed by planks of green, does not offer the slightest clue about the food, the company or the room.
The paintings tend to be objects: thick wooden boards, never canvas, and heavily framed. The paint is constantly reworked--not fiddled with, but glazed and obliterated over the years by successive coats. Each is a palimpsest, one improvisation partly burying another but leaving hints of it behind. Pigment covers the frame as well as the board, wanting to overrun the confines of surface. Even when Hodgkin's paintings are on the wall, you think of picking them up, the small ones especially, and hefting them in your hand. Dense, resistant lumps of color, real things in the real world--a status reflected by one of Hodgkin's wittier titles, A Small Thing but My Own, 1983-85. Distantly, they are related to medieval gold-ground paintings; more recently, to Cubist collage objects--except that there is no collage, only paint.