Albert Houthuesen has been described by Souren Melikian in the International Herald Tribune as a "virtually unknown master." Melikian wrote in the same article that he suspected that "Houthuesen will come to be seen as one of the great figures in post-World War II Western art." Jackie Wullschlager, Chief Art Critic at the Financial Times, wrote in a listing of the best books of 2008 that "Houthuesen was a Dutch-English modernist, whose life story forms one of the most sensational, offbeat, affecting artist's biographies I have encountered."
Melikian suggests that one of the reasons for the "deafening silence surrounding Houthuesen’s oeuvre" was that he "found his way to modernity in isolation, without ever trying to fall into line with any group." Although he met "Henry Moore, Edward Burra and other future luminaries on the contemporary scene" at the Royal College of Art, as a loner, "he did not keep in touch." Houthuesen expressed this sense in his view that the artist and the poet were inseparable in spirit from the clown, who he often portrayed as philosopher and saint.
A further reason for the wall of indifference towards his work may have been the visionary nature of the work. Melikian writes that Houthuesen, "transcribed visionary scenery, remote from material reality" where "movement is conveyed in masterly brushwork and color applied with a rare sense of harmony." "A kind of explosive exultation" comes out in some of these "mental landscapes" where his "sophisticated brushwork is as complex as are the harmonies."
In Rocks and Storm, for example, "a hurricane seems to be blowing apart primeval elements, disintegrating into colored shreds" while in Invocation, "a red hot sun disc shot through with yellow is framed in a swirl of black. The sky, too, is ablaze in shimmering red with faint yellow streaks. The sea could be a torrent of lava springing up from a volcano." His ambition was "to paint things which are so rich and intense that they will annihilate what has gone before."
Houthuesen "was a profoundly religious man" who once said, "Today, for many artists, it’s ‘out’ to be interested in these things." Yet, "going to the moon for instance – this incredible thing that has happened in our time – doesn’t make the Bible any less wonderful. If anything, it makes it more marvellous." He remarked to his biographer Richard Nathanson that, ‘We walk in mystery’ and Nathanson has written, in the introduction to Walk to the Moon, that Houthuesen introduced him to the notion of ‘an inner journey’; "that an enquiring, ‘seeing’ imaginative mind could, without travelling the globe, gain an understanding of the underlying, universal elements that link all living things and Nature, regardless of time or place."
Houthuesen said, "I used to like going to church. Most of it I didn’t understand but I always had this feeling that there was a great and profound mystery which had tremendous meaning. When you are a child and you read in the Bible of miracles, you wonder very much. Later all that changes and it becomes an amazingly imaginative idea of the world, based on truth, and written by great poets. Man, through this poetry, is trying to express about his life what is so terribly difficult to understand. He stands in mystery and through it he is trying all the time to understand. At certain times, one may begin to make drawings and paintings of biblical things. The Bible is full of these tremendously imaginative ideas. They are profound symbols. The richness of the Bible is terrific. It is the greatest stuff that has ever been written."
The secret, he thought, is that some men and women (like Christ) are born with an intense imagination; "this imaginative power gives their thinking great clarity" and "that is why their thoughts carry on and on and become a universal thing, of all time and for all time."
Wullschlager brings both the isolation and spirituality together by writing of Houthuesen's "isolated but luminous imaginative world" as seen in the painting Walk to the Moon which has "at once a lightness of being – art’s escape into interiority – and a sense of painting as a tragic language that never left Houthuesen." In Walk to the Moon:
"a strange, elongated figure in a tight-fitting white costume, legs twisted like a gauche ballerina, face like a mask, emerges from a translucent blue ground, bearing a single flower. It is a figure out of time, one who might have walked off the moon, yet carries long art-historical echoes: the heart-breaking pathos of Watteau’s white-robed “Pierrot”; almond-wide, still, sad Modigliani eyes; the religious intensity of George Rouault’s clowns."
Ultimately, Houthuesen said:
"One can only paint anything at all, whatever the subject, through knowing it. And one must love it and be moved more than one can say."
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Low - Witches.
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