A Likely Story

Frank Kermode

  • Howard Hodgkin: Paintings by Michael Auping, John Elderfield and Susan Sontag, edited by Maria Price
    Thames and Hudson, 216 pp, £28.00, October 1995, ISBN 0 500 09256 7
  • Howard Hodgkin by Andrew Graham-Dixon
    Thames and Hudson, 192 pp, £24.95, October 1994, ISBN 0 500 27769 9

Faced with such books as these it is hard not to regret the passing of an age when it seemed easy to write about painting and painters. The grapes of Zeuxis, as Pliny admiringly observed, were so real that birds came and pecked at them. Vasari, a painter himself, believed that in his day art had rediscovered those lost antique skills, built on them, and was now close to perfection. To make representations look deceptively real, and to remain untroubled by considerations of what ‘real’ could possibly mean, was the aim of the artist, and the function of the critic was simply to admire the technical accomplishments that made the illusion credible.

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[*] Chicago, 392 pp., £31.95, 1 November 1995, 0 226 34949 7.