Exhibitions
David Hockney: You Make the Picture (Manchester City Art Galleries, till 2 February 1997)
Retreat into a private world
Edward Lucie-Smith
Now Francis Bacon is dead, David Hockney is Britain's most celebrated artist. Unlike Bacon, he is a distinctly non- metropolitan figure. He lives in Los Ange- les, and the easiest way to see his more recent work is to go to Salts Mills in Brad- ford, which contains a kind of shrine to him. A new exhibition, David Hackney: You Make the Picture has just opened at Manch- ester City Art Galleries, but won't be com- ing to London. It demonstrates something which has, in fact, been evident for a long time: that Hockney has become what Gertrude Stein called a 'village explainer'. She applied the phrase to Ezra Pound, and added witheringly, 'All right if you are a vil- lage. If not, not.'
Hockney's obsession is the way in which space and form can be represented in two dimensions, and the alternatives to the tra- ditional one-point perspective system which Western art inherited from the Renaissance and more or less abandoned with the appearance of Cubism. The impact of Cubism, and of Picasso's work in particular, has been a constant theme in Hockney's art since the late 1970s. Hock- ney has pursued these explorations in a wide variety of media — through the pho- tographic 'joiners' made of numerous snap- shot photographs joined together, and more recently in prints — some made on an office copier, others sent via the fax, others still with an ink-jet printer — as well as in paintings, gouaches and various more traditional print-making techniques.
It is customary to praise Hockney's 'inventiveness' in using this battery of methods, and to note the trouble he has gone to in order to master their various special characteristics. In fact, this is much truer of the marginal ways of making images than it is of the ones one might think of as central. Hockney understands very well what a fax machine does to the images he puts through it. He seems to have a much less firm grasp of how to use paint on canvas.
The group of 'Very New Paintings' which form the core of the show are crudely han- dled, and often crude in colour as well. These characteristics, too, can perhaps be traced to Hockney's admiration for Picasso, since they are typical of much of Picasso's late work. However, Picasso's paintings of the 1960s and 1970s have a raw vitality which is missing here. Hockney, such an adept draughtsman when working on a smaller scale, here lets the lines go slack and tries to compensate with a multitude of fussy textures which seem to owe more to Picasso's large linocuts than they do to the paintings of the same period.
The discourse Hockney conducts about perspective, both in the work itself and more or less ad nauseam in every public pronouncement he makes (the exhibition is filled with the sound of his voice, droning on in a television interview with Melvyn Bragg — two blunt Northerners, each long- windedly trying to be blunter and more Northern than the other), has tended to distract attention from the actual subject matter of his newer work. Here his evolu- tion has been in some respects surprising. After the 'joiners', which are usually about travel, come a series of interiors of his stu- dios in London and in the Hollywood Hills, then another series inspired by the waves breaking on the beach in front of his new house in Malibu, and finally the 'Very New Paintings', which are really surrealistic beachscapes. It is easy, if also a little imper- tinent, to connect this sequence with what is known about Hockney's recent biogra- phy. He has, after all, always been a very autobiographical artist.
What one sees here, I would guess, is a gradual retreat into a more and more pri- vate world, under the pressures of increas- ing deafness, the loss of friends — many, like the curator Henry Geldzahler, to Aids — and the intrusiveness of Californian celebrity hunters. The studio interiors owe something to Bonnard as well as to Picasso. One shows the two dachshunds which have become the artist's substitute children, and which seem to be one of his main reasons for not returning to England. Hockney is not the only celebrated English expatriate to have been stranded in America by English quarantine regulations. One thinks of the ageing Mrs Patrick Campbell, held prisoner in New York by her dogs, and described as 'a sinking battleship firing on its rescuers'.
What seems to have made the grand, airy studio in Hollywood intolerable to Hock- hey was the clamour at its gates, from all sorts of people who felt they had a right to socialise with the famous artist. Hence the move to Malibu. The wave paintings, small in scale, remind one irresistibly of Courbet, who used the same image to convey both the fear of and the need for solitude. They strike me as being by far the best works in the exhibition. Hockney has always been interested in the various conventions avail- 'Second Detail Snail's Space' 1995 From Mantegna to Picasso: Drawings from the Thaw Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library is an exhibition of 100 drawings by artists including Mantegna, Altdorfer, Rubens, Canaletto, Goya, Matisse and Picasso. The collection has been assembled over the past 30 years by Eugene and Clare Thaw and is being shown in Europe for the first time at the Royal Academy (until 23 January). Above is Pierre Paul Prud'hon's 'The Park at Malmaison'.
able for representing shimmering, moving surfaces (think of the earlier series of 'Swimming Pools). These newer attempts, which date from the late 1980s, pursue this interest with a painterly verve which is alto- gether unusual in his work.
These, in turn, have evolved into the 'Very New Paintings'. Since Hackney clear- ly sets much store by these, I would like to like them more than I do. A label in the exhibition suggests, rather shrewdly, a com- parison with both the work of Henry Moore and that of Paul Nash — that is, we are invited to place them both in the con- text of surrealism and in that of the English romantic landscape tradition. That is a good way to approach them. They seem 'abstract' at first sight, but are in reality images of dream-like private worlds. Their strange spatial twists, their mysterious recesses, also suggest links to the remoter ancestors of many representations of this sort — Piranesi's etchings of 'Prisons', here translated into terms of the Pacific coast- line, and perhaps, too, the bizarre land- scapes which appear in some Pompeiian wall-paintings. Though I have called Hock- ney a 'village explainer' obsessed by Picas- so, that has been no bar to an eager curiosity about the general history of art.
What lets the recent work down is its actual execution, which seems not merely rather spiritless — often true of Hockney's paintings (as opposed to his graphics) from the late 1960s onwards — but ham-fisted in a way which aborts the artist's intentions. These ought to be magical images, and in fact they are not. Perhaps all the didacti- cism about the way in which we look and don't look at the world inhibits Hockney's touch. Perhaps, too, that didacticism is now a carapace which protects him from the things he doesn't want to look at in his own life.
Previous page
