Exhibitions
David Hackney (Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Deri.ng Street, London W1 , till 19 July)
All change
Edward Lucie-Smith
David Hockney's twin shows at Annely Juda, Flowers and Spaces and Faces and Spaces, are, with the exception of the draw- ing retrospective seen at the RA, his first appearance on the London exhibition- scene for a long time. They follow close on the heels of his recent exhibition at Manch- ester City Art Galleries. The contrast is in some ways marked. The show in Manch- ester seemed to show Hockney dithering about, trying to find a new direction. Though some of the paintings were brightly coloured, colour wasn't a major theme. Some critics, indeed, were moved to remark, as many of them had remarked before, that Hockney really wasn't a born colourist — that his basic talent was as a draughtsman.
In the current exhibition he seems con- cerned to refute both these judgments. The two groups of paintings are tightly struc- tured. And they are done in brilliant, satu- rated hues, especially the flowers. The catalogue hints, in a brief third-person prefatory note, that the main inspiration for these flower paintings was the Vermeer exhibition of last year, in which Hockney spent many hours — 'Vermeer, who was able to capture light within his paintings and use it to finely delimit the spaces that his colour described.' Frankly, Vermeer is the last person most visitors will think of, that is if they have any experience of art. Though Hockney being Hockney, a world celebrity rather than just an artist, it is very likely some of them won't make compar- isons at all. The two painters whom specta- tors will turn to if they are in fact searching for points of reference are Van Gogh and Matisse. These are indeed quite good places to start. Van Gogh because of the brilliant hues, the broad vigorous handling and (most of all) because of the images of sunflowers. Matisse because of the adroit simplifications and the slight compression of space — the last legacy, no doubt, of Hockney's now waning romance with Cubism. The paintings have none of Ver- meer's calm, his magical stillness. They are noisy, excited, often a little rhetorical.
They are also not nearly as good as the work of the two masters they appear to challenge. The thing which makes Van Gogh exciting is not merely the colour, but the overall rhythm of the brushstrokes. If one looks at Van Gogh's drawings, done with a reed pen, the same rhythm appears 'Gladioli With Two Oranges' (1996) by David Hockney there, a dense network of lines, in which each separate mark is nevertheless vividly alive. Matisse, on the other hand, succeeds through his sophisticated mastery of inter- val, the way in which each shape rhymes with and serves to answer another. He is also very good at making the colour gamut seem like more than the sum of its parts. The whole surface of the picture seems to vibrate. Hockney sometimes manages to do this — an example is the Neo-Deco conia in a Green Vase' — but often the colour, though bright, is curiously flat. It looks like the hues of a child's colouring book.
Often, I suspect, these paintings are going to look better in reproduction than they do in real life. The same thing is true of a number of other very popular 20th- century artists. Georgia O'Keeffe is one example which immediately springs to mind. With many of O'Keeffe's most famous images — and this includes all of her paintings of flowers — a large coloured image on a poster delivers at least as much, and in some case more, than one could hope to get from the original.
In a way this defect — the lack of that extra something, only felt in the presence of the original — helps to explain Hock- ney's immense popularity. He democratises art, makes it accessible, far more thorough- ly and radically than his contemporary Andy Warhol. With Warhol, behind the Campbell's soup-tins and the equally forth- coming likeness of Marilyn, there lurked the beginnings of a sneer. Hockney does not sneer at his audience. Nor, I think, does he consciously compromise in order to give them what they want. Nevertheless, something gets lost in the process of democratisation.
Sir Ernst Gombrich, asked by an imperti- nent journalist (myself) to name a list of six favourite paintings, cited Chardin's cele- brated 'Vase of Flowers' in Edinburgh. His reason? That it demonstrated 'what only paint can do'. Looking at Hockney's flow- ers, you know that other media can do this sort of thing just as competently as the painted surface you happen to be looking at.
More than this, there's something nostal- gic about the whole enterprise. What the pictures seem to be saying is not 'look how excited I got when I saw these wonderful flowers', but 'wouldn't it be nice if Van Gogh and Matisse were still around to paint these? But, since they aren't, I'll do my best to demonstrate how they might conceivably have set about it.'
About the little portrait canvases in the smaller gallery, the less said the better. Hockney claims that a good portrait comes from intimacy: 'If you don't know them, you don't know enough about them to paint them.' These closely cropped heads have all the intimacy of the images pro- duced by your friendly neighbourhood pho- tobooth. And rather less compositional subtlety.
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