DELIGHT FOR ITS OWN SAKE

By ROBERT HUGHES

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.

Having set up these constrictions of size and solidity, Hodgkin then pushes against them as hard as he can, and the tension that results can be magic: small panels with huge brushstrokes, subtle and fleeting effects of glaze and scumble contrasting with the rigidity of their support, and frames (with frames of paint inside, as well) that squeeze speckled, color-saturated vistas into distant postcards. The window effect isn't just a mannerism. It speaks of a certain anxiety, the desire to guard memory in the act of revealing it: "The more evanescent the emotion I want to convey," Hodgkin once remarked, "the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing, the more elaborate the border, so that this delicate thing will remain protected and intact."

Since the late 1960s, Hodgkin's images have had a pronounced architectural character, influenced by Fernand Leger's "tubism" as well as by Vuillard. Grantchester Road, 1975, is an interior with a fireplace, and the indoor plants are of the same pictorial species as the green spreading palms in Hodgkin's Indian paintings. The separation of room and gaze gives Hodgkin's work its basic trope, that of peeping and peering--from culture (the room) into nature (everything else) and back again. It's not about seeing here and now but about the memory of having seen; not complete and ordered possession of a sight but the turbulence of memory, inflected with a sense of loss at its elusiveness.

Hodgkin's complete originality is in his color, which, as art historian Michael Auping says in the catalog, "has a strange quality of simultaneously seeming totally invented, yet completely natural." Its reds and lemon yellows, its blackened viridians and fiercely luminous blues, its swoony Whistlerian grays are like no other color in modern painting. They give his work a perverse to-and-fro between the intimate and the operatic--Aida done in a marionette theater. Such color isn't just showy. It can be extremely tender, intelligently seductive, in the way that art has every right to be. It also insists on distinction--the need to feel one thing at a time, and to remember not what it looked like but what it felt like. Hodgkin's shapes may be nebulous, but his feelings, or so the paintings persuade you, seldom are.