ARTS
In depth
John McEwen
The Artist's Eye (National Gallery till 31 August) is the last of the present series of these shows, in which five of our best known artists have been asked to select an exhibition from their favourite pictures in the National Gallery collection. The final choice has fallen to David Hockney and he keeps the public more in mind than any of his predecessors, using the occasion to present a short dissertation on the beneficial role played by the humble and often despised reproduction in the art of 'Looking at Pictures'. His presentation is didactic and he makes the catalogue almost as big a feature as the installation itself — a pocket size and a sleeved back-cover filled with a pre-packed group of postcards specially selected to illustrate the show turning it into more of a kit than a book. Armed with this art-pak one is encouraged to broach the exhibition in much the same mood as one boards a plane, comforted by the knowledge that one is being well looked after. Hockney's assertion is that illustrations, though they can never match the real thing, nevertheless invariably convey the essence of a picture's magic. To illustrate the point he takes as his text some lines of George Herbert: 'A man that looks on glasse/On it may stay his eye/Or if he pleaseth, through it pass/And then the heav'n espie'. The reproduction, because it cannot fully register the surface, inevitably draws the viewer's attention to profounder, if not necessarily more delightful, things. It takes us through the glass.
The show illustrates this idea with customary Hockney wit. It is dominated by a large painting done by him in 1977 of a friend looking at some reproductions of famous National Gallery masterpieces stuck up on a screen. The rest of the exhibition is then devoted to making a reality, in two stages, of the subject of the painting: first, we have the actual screen with its stuck on reproductions of the four masterpieces; then, along a third wall, the actual masterpieces. Illuminating comparisons between reproduction and original can thus be made. The most obvious physical difference is that of size. The reproductions are all basically the same size, the pictures all different — in the case of the Piero, markedly so. Funnily enough Hockney does not comment on this (which can of course be far more of a distortion than it is here), and compounds the omission by failing to mention it in connection with the inclusion, also, of his own favourite postcard: a reproduction of a postcard-size oil sketch by Vuillard of Lautrec. To him the picture retains the 'magic' of the original to an uncommon degree, and accordingly he presents it for our delectation framed and set up as a 'picture'. The reason, however, for the undoubted intensity of this postcard is surely that, for once, its size is almost in accordance with what it is reproducing.
Hockney's chatty common sense blinds the reader to his prejudices just as successfully. In his pre(r)amble he is both ludicrous and pompous on the stibject of photography. It seems an inherent danger for Yorkshiremen all to end up J. B. Priestleys. Certainly Hockney is a masterly entrepreneur. It is not until one has left that one realises that the whole show has been at the service of his own picture, and not a very good one at that. But the more selfish an artist probably the better. Everything Hockney does speaks Hockney to a remarkably unfettered degree, this show along with everything else. It makes it the most unified, the most widely helpful, 'artist's eye' of the series. These exhibitions have been fun, instructive and, in the case of Howard Hodgkin's, have permanently improved the subsequent display of certain pictures in the collection. It must be hoped therefore that a new series will soon be launched, with artist selectors as before.
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