Alexandre Hogue: An American Visionary--Paintings and Works on Paper

Introduction

lexandre Hogue was a passionate observer of life, and the act of painting directly from nature and experience informed his work throughout his career, which spanned from the early 1920s until his death in 1994. Nature, to Hogue, was the entire sensorial realm of experience, whether he worked from landscape or from the figure, from memory or imagination. Accordingly, he aimed to comprehend and express the tension and harmony he perceived between the self and the spiritual world, between the intellect and nature as he understood them. The Southwest— Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma—provided settings that allowed the artist to immerse himself in the wonder of the earth. For Hogue, that mystical essence of nature existed beneath the surface of what the eye sees, its power revealed in deserts, plains, mountains, and rivers. Hogue had more than an aptitude for recording the appearance of a subject; he had an ability to impart upon it a sense of place. This is no small compliment— Hogue remains among those rare artists capable of portraying timeless moments that capture not only the varied nature of a region, from the intimate to the expansive, but also the era in which the image was made. Though an ancient subject of art and literature, “place” carries a particularly acute charge today, due to the conditions of our globalized existence in the early twenty-first century. Hogue’s paintings are rigorous attempts to bring into physical and visual proximity the essences and cross-fertilizations of a day’s light, a place’s history, a place’s sky and earth. Significantly, Hogue’s works ask that we be accountable to “place,” no matter how geologically fluid and discontinuous over time. In doing so, they create a vivid connection to the everyday world and a truthfulness to ongoing human experience. A prevailing notion of landscape painting implies that the artist must capture some likeness of a certain geographic Introduction A 2 introduction tion with the natural world. Devoid of human presence while at the same time soliciting viewer engagement, they embody the Romantic vision of nature as a space that transcends everyday human concerns even as they invite us to regard ourselves as part of a larger whole. Evident throughout Hogue’s work is a generosity of spirit, a willingness to risk comprehension and failure, a desire to satisfy the artist’s curiosity and a commitment to communicate these discoveries to viewers. All of the works link the relationship of inner self to the physical world, to the landscape with which over the years he had become most intimate. Art of power and meaning continues to move us, continues to influence what comes after and illuminates what came before. Significantly, Hogue shows us how art can be about deep history as well as the highest style. He infused the works with a new American spirit that continues to teach us about ourselves and about the land on which we live. Hogue, at least early on and in his final years, had it all: skill, passion, focus, and imagination. In the way true visionaries do, he managed to get outside himself, beyond himself, and to record what he saw from that distant but intimate place. He was a remarkably learned man; self-taught for the most part, he read voraciously, and from what he had imbibed, developed the themes and ideas that informed his art. Like the work of fellow visionary artists, Hogue’s art was greatly influenced by early life experiences. His formative years spanned the golden epoch of the American railroad and the Model T Ford, as well as the decimation of lush prairie grasslands and subsequent black dust clouds that rolled over the plains. He was an eyewitness to both. He came of age at the dawn of the twentieth century, at a time when few Americans ventured far from the towns they were born in. With almost no formal education and meager financial resources, Hogue traveled as a teenager from Dallas to Minneapolis, then to New York in the early 1920s just as it was being transformed into a modern metropolis. It was an environment so complex and absorbing that many artists turned away from portraying the American landscape and toward the radical flux of cultures in the city. During these flourishing years of economy and industry, there also took place a tremendous flowering of experimentation. Artists of the Ashcan locale. To render a sense of place an artist should have a kind of primitive soil...