Romantic approaches

Spectator readers will know that Andrew Lambirth is a romantic, a force for the literary and poetic approach to art criticism, so he is an admirably empathetic guide to Hoyland:

In England the subversive underground Romantic spirit has never run dry, it consistently nourishes art in this country and erupts forth in strange and unexpected ways. The late work of John Hoyland is one such unpredictable manifestation.

Mel Gooding’s standard monograph covers Hoyland’s career to 2006, but such is the artist’s productivity that, despite serious heart surgery last year, many of the excellent colour plates — the majority in the case of the 46 full-page illustrations — are of new paintings.

There is only one spread of unadorned text in Nick Newton’s sympathetic design and things are brought to a suitable climax, with a last chapter which includes a run of five full-page plates of truly devil-scattering post-operation paintings; a magnificent and defiant riposte.

The book’s stated subject is Hoyland’s painting from the late 1990s to the present — he is also a fine printmaker but that, as Lambirth points out, deserves a volume of its own. It complements the monograph yet sketches in enough of the life and career to give an overall view.

The loosely chronological course, interrupted by boxed interventions emphasising influential artists/friends or some of Hoyland’s own writing, makes it more of a miscellany than a narrative. One box contains his 2005 eulogy to Patrick Caulfield. He contrasted their personalities, in life as in art, as ‘the dark stream’ and ‘the plundering river’. Some of Hoyland’s finest paintings are recent elegies to friends.

Lambirth makes generous use of Hoyland’s exceptional gift as a writer and talker. Specific chapters are devoted to an interview, the studio, his sketchbooks and love of travel, an important influence on his evolution from formalism to metaphysics. ‘Go and paint sunshine, boy,’ Henry Rushbury, Keeper of the RA, told the student Hoyland. Hoyland did. Today this son of Sheffield has apartments in Spain and Jamaica.

A few happy snaps are included — of Hoyland and Caulfield; of his beautiful Jamaican wife Beverley Heath-Hoyland; of Robert and Robyn Wilson, whose unique patronage (their famous City restaurant The Don is a Hoyland shrine) rightly receives a chapter.

The book offers a rounded portrait of Hoyland as a man of renowned wit and charm, as well as celebrating his artistic eminence.

As an artist, without a shadow of a doubt, you’ve provided for me the greatest and most acute — and often, very often, the most astonished, really surprised — pleasures,

the late great Bryan Robertson wrote to him in 2002; adding that the recent work was ‘the finest and most complex’ of a career which first blossomed into stardom in the 1960s. Lambirth calls for a full-scale, long overdue, retrospective at the Tate. This book is the next best thing: a delight for fans, a quarry for scholars.

An exhibition of John Hoyland’s recent work at the Beaux Arts, 22 Cork Street, London W1 ends on 7 November.