ARTS Love and friendship
PAUL GRINKE
Throughout April the Whitechapel Gallery will be saturated with a retrospective exhibi- tion of the paintings, drawings and prints of David Hockney. The show is in fact so big that it has overflowed into the foyer and back into previously unrevealed side cham- bers. The gargantuan feast is an impressive recognition of what Hockney has already achieved at the age of thirty-three; it is also a timely look over the shoulder at one, albeit narrow, aspect of British art in the 'sixties, crystallised in the work of a single artist.
What has always disconcerted Hockney's critics is his disarming ingenuousness. Artisti- cally, he looks on life with the unabashed visual delight of Harry Hayseed eyeing Self ridge's window at Christmas, which seems strangely out of tune with a per- sonality evidently at once intelligent, acutely aware and 'sharp' in the sense of the tradi- tional home counties' distrust of the canny Northerner. His own obvious pleasure in this paradox, and his enormous enjoyment of the pundits' confusion, are accentuated by the apparently evergreen dyed blond hair —blonds have more fun in life—and the owlish specs which I feel sure mask twenty- twenty vision. The gold lame jacket was jettisoned years ago, along with the asser- tiveness of his early Royal College work, the back-to-the-wall stance of his Diploma paint- ings and the ferocious yah-boo tactics of paintings like 'Teeth cleaning, W11'.
The wit was there right from the start— usually over-interpreted as either a conces- sion to the Pop juggernaut or as a kind of dinner table repartee, when it was more likely a natural sense of humour sharpened by the inevitable depression of any last year art student faced with the entrenched art estab- lishment. Fortunately a handful of critics and his present dealer, Kasmin, recognised a natural talent early on, and Hockney has never lacked afficionados since. What was, I suspect, originally an almost eighteenth cen- tury delight in the public appearance of a 'wild man', an artist whose work was as often as not an affront to the 'art-lover's' sensibili- ties and whose genial personality had all the public appeal of a particularly good turn at the London Palladium, rapidly turned into a general acclaim for a figurative painter— rare enough in the 'sixties—of real ability.
Ten years later, the span of the present exhibition, we are presented with an artist whose work is both confident and relaxed, with a clearly defined area of interest and an unhurried, deft, approach to it. With figurative painting it is always tempting to look for a painterly approach to the subject, as if it were obligatory to mark the applica- tion of brush strokes on a kind of point system as a sculptural process whereby the image is built up in obvious layers of paint, and to decry any flat image as an illusionistic cheat. Hockney's handling of paint as a medium (in contrast to his drawings and etchings, which reveal an obvious mastery of line) is almost derisory in its self-efface- ment. His concern is chiefly with the subject matter and its presentation, though invari- ably novel and infused with his own stamp, is as bland as good photography.
Hockney has an evident love for the arti- ficial; the subjects of his choice are the apparatus of urban living—cool interiors, swimming pools, still lives of consumer goods, gas stations and commercial build- ings. You cannot envisage him painting straight landscapes or seascapes (though there is a marvellously purple patch seascape in this show) and, when he paints palm trees, they -invariably look like cardboard stage props. His watershed as a painter, and a confirmation of all his observant sympathy with the plastic excrescences of contem- porary life, came on his first trip to Cali- fornia in 1963/64. With the discovery of a sunny Shangri-La of swimming pools, new friends and enthusiastic collectors, he drop- ped the overtly literary references of much of his previous work and, as he said, 'began to paint the physical look of the place'.
The new painting reflected a whole new world of implied sensation. Los Angeles looked at through Hockney's eyes is a personal world of swimming pools, friends bathing and sunning themselves in a smogless euphoria of golden bodies and rippling water. There is barely a hint of the violence and commercial cupidity which form the other side of the coin, and when Hockney draws Pershing Square, that legen- dary hang-out of local male hustlers, it looks completely innocuous, if somewhat seedy. In California, Hockney began painting what he saw and liked, abandoning the conscious labelling of sensations and received opinions, neatly annotated and aggressively packaged, which seemed to be obligatory in so much pop art of the time.
But he is far from unaware of the work of his contemporaries, and he has also an acute eye for the faintly ludicrous in art history. The curiously artificial patterns of water in chlorinated swimming pools begin to look like the Cohen brothers' paintings with their convoluted swirls, and his Savings and Loan Building could easily be a Robyn Denny print if it were not rudely interrupted by a characteristic Hockney palm tree: A series of paintings which place the characters in front of a curtain or backdrop have their origin in a strange Domenichino painting of tapestry with a dwarf in the foreground. Similarly, his 1963 painting of Seated woman drinking tea, being served by standing com- panion is taken from Muybridge's photo- graph of the same subject, placed in a domestic setting but with the original title (which Hockney retained becanse he liked the fact that there was no mention of the figures being nude). But the game of point- ing out art historical references can be taken too far, and Hockney certainly had the last laugh with The Room, Tarzana: a painting of a half-clothed boy on a bed in a hotel room which was widely interpreted as a straight reference to Boucher's famous Miss O'Murphy but was, in fact, a simple addition to a photograph in a Mary's catalogue.
One of the most interesting aspects of his work is probably the portraits, an area in which Hockney works with great feeling, largely because he almost invariably paints personal friends and likes to portray them with their own friends or lovers, which is a good way of putting his sitters at ease and also gives us a more than usually intimate glimpse of their personalities. Of the recent
portraits, the 1968 painting of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy in an austerley vedantic apartment with two symbolic piles of books and a still life of fruit is a most accomplished work. Rather more tongue in cheek is his American Colleeiors, 1958: -a Beverly Hills couple standing proudly in front of their Henry Moore, with an Indian totem pole in the background, and looking very much as if they were caught en deshabille on the way to a bankers' conven- tion. His latest painting, seen here for the first time, is an enormous canvas of a park scene in Vichy with two figures seated with their backs to the audience and an empty chair by their side (which had presumably just housed the artist). The park with its formal avenue of trees and grass is pure Magritte, and the whole composition has a definitely surreal magic,
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