Painting with joyful abandon, outside the box

Howard Hodgkin , who is 74 and Britain's most celebrated abstract painter, has made a career out of violating picture frames. Almost every piece he's created since the mid-'70s has been on a wooden panel inside an old frame, and in defiance of the conventional law of separation between the frame and the picture, he paints with joyful abandon both on and within the frame, creating sumptuously beautiful, psychologically charged dialogues between the container and the contained.

A gorgeous and poetically enchanting exhibition of 46 of Hodgkin's works from the past 15 years at the Yale Center for British Art shows what great mileage he has gotten out of an approach that would have been a mere gimmick in the hands of a lesser artist.

The exhibition was organized by Julia Marciari Alexander , an associate director at the Yale Center, and David E. Scrase , assistant director of collections and keeper of the department of paintings, drawings, and prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, England, where it will appear in a slightly altered version in May.

The first impression Hodgkin's works give is of the artist's unalloyed pleasure in the act of painting. Working on framed panels, ranging from about a foot square to 10 feet across, he makes broad, sweeping strokes of striated paint; thick, viscous blotches; fields of fuzzy daubs; and passages of agitated, skittery lines. Colors range from flaming reds and yellows to cool, neon-bright blues and aquas to dank greens and browns, and tonal contrasts create subtly variable effects of light and atmosphere.

Hodgkin's paintings may seem spontaneous, but they can take several years to complete. And though his gestures appear impetuous, his compositions are carefully constructed, with emphatic horizontals and verticals often creating a feeling of boxed-in compression. The look of recklessness is hard won.

The apparent abstraction is also deceptive. Hodgkin himself has always denied being an abstract painter. "I paint representational pictures of emotional situations," he famously once said. It's hard to say exactly what event may have inspired any given picture, but many are like moody landscapes. With its weathered, antique plaster frame and roiling paint describing a dramatic, dusky orange sunset within, "Old Sky" (1996-97) has the feeling of a private, elegiac memory.

Painted on an old, scratched and weathered board, "Mud" (2002) has no actual frame, but a wide border of dark green paint encloses a square of gray wood painted black in its lower half. It might be about an early morning walk on a foggy beach, and it conjures a lonesome, ruminative mood with wonderful economy.

Many of Hodgkin's paintings seem to be animated by pure hedonism. "Afternoon Flowers" (1989-95) has an oval frame 4 1/2 feet across painted bright orange in one great rotation of a 6-inch wide brush. Inside, broad strokes of orange and green suggest an explosive bouquet of exotic blossoms. "Heat" (2003-04), with its veils of burnt orange and avocado green, summons the fantasy of a steamy day in the tropics.

In "Grief" (2002), the aggressive application of dark blue over the frame and over turbulent layers of brighter colors in the inner panel suggests stormy, darker emotions. Usually, though, Hodgkin's mood is upbeat. "Torso" (2000), with its fuzzy black and red spots and brushy smears of red and green around a block of incandescent orange, gives me the impression of a hyperactive New Year's Eve party.

Whatever personal associations may have given rise to Hodgkin's paintings, they also evoke a feeling of tension between the old and the new. I imagine that the antique (or faux-antique) frames stand for the history and tradition of art -- for the museum and for Hodgkin's own institutionally certified progenitors from Titian and Rembrandt to Vuillard and Matisse. By extension, they represent enduring moral and social values of Western European culture.

Against the conservatism of the frame, Hodgkin's painting asserts an insouciant individualism. In the gestures of his brush, a viewer may vicariously feel the sensuous energy of the live body and an almost erotic impulsiveness that will not -- or cannot -- be contained by fusty old rules.

But while Hodgkin's exuberantly Expressionistic painting sides with a long line of pioneering innovators from Walt Whitman to Jackson Pollock, he is not a revolutionary. He doesn't reject tradition; he plays with it like a jazz musician doing variations on old standards.

Besides the personal storytelling and the dialogue of old and new, there is, it seems to me, a certain philosophical dimension in Hodgkin's art. When I look at one of his paintings, I find my attention flipping back and forth between the physical facts of the object -- the frame, the wooden panel, the raw paint -- and the nonmaterial dimensions of space, light, place, weather, and mood. That strangely thrilling leap between the physical and the intangible is one of the essential draws of modern painting; it mirrors the mysteriously paradoxical, fundamentally human experience of having a finite body and an infinite mind.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.