John Hoyland

This monograph on the work of British abstract painter, John Hoyland, takes a broadly chronological account of the artist’s career in the context of the various artistic milieux within which he has worked. In the first section the early determinants of Hoyland’s artistic personality are traced in his provincial background, childhood and youth at school and art college. The second deals with his early professional career from his training at the Royal Academy Schools through to his representation in the ‘Situation’ exhibitions (1961-63) and ‘New Generation’ (1964), to his retrospective at the Whitechapel (1967) and its creative and critical consequences in the late 1960s. The book goes on to consider analytically his creative interactions with American post-painterly abstraction, the impact of Hofmann, and the artistic implications of Hoyland’s return to England in the early 1970s.

The complex relations of Hoyland’s art with European and British antecedents, including Turner, and the admission into a previously ‘pure’ abstraction of visual aspects of the natural world are considered. The crucial issues of Hoyland’s delayed response to both Newman and Pollock is explored in the light of Harold Bloom’s ideas of ‘the anxiety of influence’, and Panofsky’s distinction between the ‘visual-painterly’ and the ‘tactile’ art of polychromatic division. The influence of Matisse, mediated through, and modified by, vital experiences of the phenomenal world, and an intensely painterly deployment of the dribbled line, is discussed in relation to Hoyland’s latest paintings. The account proceeds by creating the historical and theoretical contexts for close critical analysis of individual paintings. The purpose of the monograph is to establish an accurate and justly critical account of the many determinants - personal, historical, artistic, intellectual - that create individual style and thematic predilection in the work of a widely admired but still controversial artist.