Ridinghouse,2021

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