Artists looking at art, part 2

Last week I mentioned a recent trip to New York in which my friend Linda DeMars and I crammed as much art-viewing and museum-going as possible.  At the Met we saw the exhibit of David Hockney's work.  It was especially fun to see his earlier work, before the swimming pool paintings he became famous for.

Many of us artists cite Nature as our chief inspiration, overlooking sometimes the perhaps subconscious ways in which all the art we've seen also influences how we see and what we do.  I enjoy encountering artists whose work frankly acknowledges the art they've seen.  One of my own goals as an artist is simply to make my own small contribution to the wider conversation, over time and space, that artists are having with each other.  It's enlightening to eavesdrop on other artists' conversations too.

David Hockney, California Art Collector, 1964, acrylic on canvas

I love the interplay in this painting between the two sculptured forms and the collector, still as a statue herself.  Hockney was at this time hugely influenced by Picasso's cubist approach to depicting space from multiple points at once.  And this may be a stretch, but the chair's upholstery calls to my mind Matisse's penchant for including patterned fabrics in his paintings. It's clear from the skewed and multiple perspectives, not to mention the cartoonish rainbow, that strict realism is not Hockney's goal here. There's a delightfully (to me, anyway) confusing interplay between inside and outside here that keeps me looking.

The open-air portico space in the foreground, with the oasis/swimming pool in the background, recalls to my eye the kind of structure in which Mary received a visit from the angel Gabriel in Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation.  (I was afraid this was just my own Mary obsession showing up again, and then I read in an article that Hockney was influenced as a young artist by Fra Angelico's Annunciation.  The catalog of the Met's show cites Piero della Francesca's Nativity as the source for the space in California Art Collector.)

Fra Angelico, Annunciation, fresco, 1437-46

Piero della Francesca, Nativity, 1470-75. 

Either way, with Hockney's work, one is apt to detour back into art history with some regularity.  Here's another painting in which Hockney is explicitly playing with art-historical ideas and references, and with the ever-present problem of how we perceive reality.

David Hockney, Kerby (After Hogarth) Useful Knowledge, 1975, oil on canvas

The wall text for this piece informs us that Hockney regularly researched other artists' techniques.  He discovered a book on perspective by painter Joshua Kirby, written in the mid-18th century, that included a satirical engraving by Hogarth which showed the results of ignoring the laws of perspective.  Hockney here presents his own version of an illogical pictorial space in which such laws are ignored, and yet in the flatness of the picture plane it also makes a kind of visual sense that the woman leaning out of the window can light the pipe of the man on the distant hilltop.  To my eyes this also looks like Hockney's contribution to a conversation with 20th century Surrealists such as Dali and de Chirico.

This is starting to sound very inside-baseball, isn't it, with all these arcane art historical references, like something only an art history major could love.  And yet there is much in Hockney's work that is directly appealing.  Throughout his career Hockney has been interested in human perception--how  we actually see things, and how we can represent our actual seeing in time and space in a static and defined two-dimensional space such as a painting.  He played with these ideas in photocollages, in which he assembled Polaroids into an overall mosaic-like image.  This was one of my favorites:

David Hockney, Gregory Swimming Los Angeles March 31st 1982

Here 120 photos are arranged to make an overall pattern that captures the swimmer's movement over time and through space.  The wall text says:

"Gregory's figure repeats in square after square.  The collective effect--achieved through the gridded structure created by the Polaroids' white borders and the continuous elements of water, light and the surface of the pool--is one of motion and direction, but not of sequence.  There is no clear start or end to Gregory's progress across the pool; rather, the eye wanders freely, registering the individual prints while cohering them into a whole."  

Of course this is exactly the sort of thing we textile artists respond to, right?  Pattern repeated across a surface. Our eyes keep moving, almost immersed themselves in the moving water of the pool.

Here's one last image.  Apologies for the intrusion of museum goers on the left (a Hockney-esque touch, perhaps!). 

David Hockney, Hollywood Hills House, 1982-82.  Oil paint, charcoal, collage on 3 canvases. 

The bright colors, bold lines and patterns, and playful perspective are immediately appealing.  If you're an art history fan, you might see this as a version of Matisse's Red Studio.

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911.  Oil on canvas.
71 1/4" x 7' 2 1/4"

Hockney has juxtaposed, as he so often does, the interior space with the expansive plant life and sky outside.  This is definitely California.  And when you look closer at Hockney's work, you discover that two of the paintings (Laurel and Hardy and the large portrait of a man) on the far wall of the left hand space are actually glued-on photographs.

detail, David Hockney, Hollywood Hills House, 1981-82. 
Oil paint, charcoal, collage on 3 canvases. 

I have just begun reading the catalog of this show and it's already sparking lots of ideas for me.  In the first chapter writer Chris Stephens comments that art critics and historians have had a hard time categorizing Hockney's work into this or that art-historical style or movement. For me, it's exciting and encouraging to see an artist who has followed his muse and been unafraid to experiment with different styles, taboo subjects, and various media.  There's a lovely video on the Met website, under 2 minutes, of his work.  Treat yourself and go there.