ARTE

DAVID HOCKNEYUna visión más amplia

• Este libro recoge un relevante estudio sobre la obra de David Hockney, y ofrece una nueva definición del artista como un destacado paisajista, presentando por primera vez su trabajo más reciente: pinturas, dibujos a carboncillo, dibujos con iPad y fotogramas de piezas videográficas, muchos de ellos inéditos.

• Esta publicación aspira a convertirse en un punto de referencia ineludible y confirma la posición de Hockney como uno de los artistas más importantes de su generación.

David Hockney. Una visión más amplia recoge el trabajo que el artista ha desarrollado en los últimos diez años que ha residido en Yorkshire, rodeado de los recuerdos de su infancia. Las obras que ha creado en este periodo, expresan el drama y el esplendor de la naturaleza, un tema que Hockney ha sabido abordar con una visión moderna y vital, y que a menudo evidencia su interés por la fotografía y la tecnología digital; en este libro se analizan algunas obras espectaculares realizadas con ayuda de estas técnicas.

Los ensayos que acompañan a esta publicación, examinan esta nueva vertiente del artista y la sitúan en el contexto de los sesenta años de carrera artística de Hockney, explorando el lugar del pintor dentro de la tradición paisajística y el papel de las nuevas tecnologías en su obra. Además, se recogen reflexiones del propio artista sobre sus creaciones más recientes.

EnsayosTim Barringer, Edith Devaney,

Margaret Drabble, Martin Gayford, Marco Livingstone y Xavier F.

Salomon

Páginas304

Formato 30 x 28 cm

Nº imágenes336

Encuadernacióncartoné

ISBN 978-84-7506-999-9

PVP45 euros

55$ USD

TURNERRafael Calvo 42, 2º 28010 MadridEspaña

T +34 91 3083336 F +34 91 3193930turner@turnerlibros.comwww.turnerlibros.com

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landscapes again in oils, to revisit a spot as celebrated as Gordale Scar (famously painted by James Ward in around 1812–14 on a massive canvas on permanent display at Tate Britain) and to make his own interpretation of a much-recorded place. He might one day still do so. But his hunch was to take the road less travelled and to celebrate an unspoilt and essentially unchanged area of East Yorkshire whose slightly remote location and grade-1 agricultural land had together saved it from development.

At the back of Hockney’s mind, but only as a conscious point of reference later on, were the intense landscapes painted and drawn by one of his favourite artists, Vincent van Gogh, in the last few years of his life at Arles and St-Rémy in the south of France. Hockney’s admiration for Van Gogh’s endlessly inventive repertoire of elegant marks, to convey the physical distinctness and textures of the subject, was a powerful impetus on his own inventions. Just as the scenery of Provence now seems so vividly manifested in the Dutchman’s pictures that we are unable to separate one from the other, so too Hockney seems to have been charged by the prospect of making a definitive visual record of a beloved part of England to which no artist had previously given attention. Working at first on small canvases and then gradually expanding the scale to accommodate his vision and to submerge the spectator in an intensely physical experience of place, Hockney has magnificently succeeded in his ambition. In the process, the once enfant terrible of ‘gay propaganda’ pictures and Californian swimming pools has transformed himself into one of our great landscape painters, heir to a tradition in which one might reasonably think he had previously displayed little interest.

The art-historical precedents for Hockney’s Yorkshire landscapes reveal the breadth of a lifetime of looking that combines a deferential acceptance of his debts to a wide variety of artists

with an absolute confidence in his own ability to build on various traditions and to take his own place within that history. As Tim Barringer examines these in more detail on pages 42–55, I will touch only briefly here on some of the most significant of these points of reference. Rembrandt’s landscape drawings in pen, ink and wash – which Hockney studied very intently in the catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt’s drawings,12 and which are among the first independent landscapes – were a particular source of inspiration. Although he had no wish to imitate them, the great English landscape painters, above all Constable and Turner, were another reference. Hockney studied with intense interest the ‘six-footers’ begun by Constable around 1818–19 and shown together for the first time in Tate Britain’s Constable exhibition in 2006, preferring the looseness of the first sketchy versions to the more polished finish of the versions meant for public exhibition.13 Realising that it would not have been possible for an artist at that time to paint from the motif on such a large scale strengthened his resolve to find a way of painting out of doors on ever more expansive canvases.

Hockney paid heed also to the example of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, welcoming the frank and unapologetic prettiness of their paintings and their celebration of the beauty of nature, and to the vivid colours employed by the Fauve painters in the early years of the twentieth century.14 Within this realm of French painting, Monet proved a towering example, not only in the immediacy of his technique in working out of doors, but also in his use of serial imagery – returning in different weather conditions and at different times of day to the same motifs – and in the enveloping scale of his late panoramic paintings of the water lilies in the ponds at his home at Giverny. Hockney’s visit to the recently renovated rooms of Monet’s Nymphéas at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, soon after embarking on his own Yorkshire paintings, was a decisive encounter.15

When Hockney’s paintings of the East Riding of Yorkshire were first brought together in greater numbers in ‘David Hockney: Nur Natur/Just Nature’, an exhibition that served as a kind of trial run for the Royal Academy show, the decision was made by the artist and his colleague Gregory Evans to arrange the paintings by motif.16 The majestic Woldgate Woods pictures, the paintings of an avenue of trees that Hockney and his assistants label the ‘tunnel’, canvases representing felled timber and totemic tree trunks, the paintings of hawthorn blossoms and the vistas of Three Trees near Thixendale in each of the four seasons were each displayed in isolation from the other groups, intensifying the visitor’s sensation of being placed right inside each unique landscape. In curating the much larger exhibition for the Royal Academy, we decided to follow this example and to use a number of the galleries to take the audience on a journey through specific sites in the Wolds so that each is experienced as intensely by the audience looking at the pictures as it was by the artist when he pounced on distinct motifs and made the works. Through such confrontations, one can sense powerfully what the artist gained in returning repeatedly to certain places, to favoured roads and vistas and to trees that he had come to know like old friends. The four paintings in panoramic format of the Three Trees near Thixendale, for example, convey with an eloquent clarity and concision the artist’s delight in the changing seasons, in the different qualities of light and atmosphere and in the consequent transformations of trees from the fullness of summer to

Fig. 3Hockney painting on the Wolds, 10 September 2009. Photograph by Marco Livingstone

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that it was through friendship, devotion to family and a sense of loss that Hockney came to paint Yorkshire and, through this prolonged love letter to his native land, to understand the depths of his feeling for his country and explicitly for the north of England, where his roots are as deep and firm as those of the trees on which he has expended such affectionate and respectful attention.

One of Hockney’s most treasured friends in England was Jonathan Silver, an entrepreneur and devotee of the artist who had purchased the abandoned Salts Mill, in the town of Saltaire outside Bradford, and brought it back to life as a vibrant hub of the community, encompassing various businesses, a thriving restaurant and an extensive exhibition space, the 1853 Gallery, hung floor to ceiling with Hockney’s work. Hockney had known Saltaire as a child, going for long walks through the town and out into the countryside, and was understandably thrilled to have his art on permanent display so close to his birthplace; he was happy to add a large number of long-term loans from his own collection to the ever-changing exhibition based on Silver’s collection of his work. Silver had long pleaded with the artist to make paintings of Yorkshire, but it was only as his friend succumbed to the final stages of cancer that Hockney responded to that suggestion, producing a small but remarkable group of paintings condensed from memories of his daily drives across the Wolds from Bridlington to Silver’s bedside in Wetherby, just west of York. The first of these pictures – The Road to York through Sledmere (cat. 14), The Road across the Wolds (cat. 16), North Yorkshire (cat. 15) and, more unusually, a panoramic vista of Salts Mill itself (cat. 19) – were made over a period of months in the summer of 1997 in the attic studio at the Bridlington house. Two others followed in 1998, painted from more distant recollections on his return to L.A.: Garrowby Hill (cat. 17) and Double East Yorkshire

(cat. 18), a painting which in its large dimensions (nearly four metres wide) and division across two canvases anticipates the pictures Hockney was to make in the Wolds nearly a decade later.

Those first Yorkshire landscapes of the late 1990s, which form a preamble to the post-2004 work that is the subject of the present exhibition, were first seen in the ‘Espace/Paysage’ exhibition in Paris alongside the Grand Canyon paintings that he made immediately afterwards. They might have remained a sidetrack in Hockney’s art had he not started spending more time at the Bridlington house after the death of his mother, gravitating there as a way of remembering her and of feeling close to her spirit. Margaret was then still living in the house after the death of her partner Ken, though she was soon to relocate to a smaller house when her brother’s ever more frequent and prolonged stays began to disturb the tranquillity of her own solitary routine. Hockney’s habit of throwing himself into new projects or unfamiliar mediums had been manifested on many previous occasions, as with his large-scale drawn and lithographic portraits in a naturalistic style of the mid-1970s, his fertile experiments with photocollage from 1982 to 1986 (see fig. 2),9 and most recently with the several hundred pencil portraits made in 1999 and 2000 with the aid of a camera lucida.10 Now it was watercolour, a medium in which he had previously only dabbled but of which he was now determined to take command, that took a grip on him. It was not lost on Hockney, of course, that it was in this medium that some of the greatest English art, notably in the form of landscapes, had been produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by such masters as Turner,11 Cotman and Varley. He was, however, conscious of the fact that none of these great predecessors had ventured into the agricultural district of the Wolds, just to the west of Bridlington, which he had grown to love for its subtle and unspoiled beauty. Artists before him had headed to the much more spectacular scenery of West Yorkshire, which Hockney also knew well. The idea did cross his mind, once he had started painting

Fig. 2Grand Canyon from North Rim Lodge, Arizona, 1982. Photocollage, 57.2 × 76.8 cm. Collection

The Road Less Travelled

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Seeing with Memory: Hockney and the Masters Tim Barringer

David Hockney’s work abounds in paradoxes. His art is as remarkable for its embrace of tradition as for its restless innovation. Hockney is both deeply rooted and nomadic – a quintessential Yorkshireman much of whose adult life has been spent among the vibrant colours of the canyons of Los Angeles. His work is instantly recognisable both for its childlike simplicity and for its sophisticated range of art-historical reference and commentary. An avid visitor to museums and exhibitions, and an omnivorous reader, Hockney has responded to works from the full span of the history of art – Piero della Francesca, Claude Lorrain, Hogarth, Constable and Turner, Monet, Matisse and Picasso – most of them present in the chronological sweep of the ‘great wall’ of art history that he created in his studio (fig. 19).1 From the very beginning of his career, Hockney has employed strategies of homage, reference, quotation, distortion and fragmentation that speak of a deep and intelligent engagement with the history of art.

As this exhibition demonstrates, Hockney has always been a landscape painter, although until recent years this underlying preoccupation has often been obscured by other, more spectacular and widely reproduced aspects of his production: figure paintings, stage designs, portraits. But predictably, in landscape, as in every other aspect of his artistic work, Hockney’s output is replete with responses to art-historical tradition. ‘We see with memory,’ Hockney insists, and it is the accretion of things seen, felt and remembered, that marks out his work in the landscape genre.2 The memory to which Hockney refers is a multi-layered phenomenon. At the most obvious level, it is constituted by personal associations with particular places; beyond that lie the resonances of particular topography in local and national history. Just as important, however, is a deeply ingrained memory of artistic traditions, an ability to see the landscape refracted through the accumulated work of countless generations of earlier artists. Landscape painting is an especially powerful presence within British art, from the aristocratic estate portraits of the eighteenth century, through the idyllic works of Gainsborough and Richard Wilson, the golden age of Constable, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, and on into the twentieth century.

Whereas Hockney’s earlier landscapes are marked by formal exuberance and self-conscious strategies of artistic innovation, his later works have been conceived increasingly through the prism of memory. In one further characteristic paradox, his recent works in the medium, massive in size, range and ambition, carry an exuberant sense of creative rebirth, but also an unmistakable note of elegy.

Fundamentally a draughtsman and painter, Hockney has constantly stressed the importance of traditional media even when such views seemed reactionary amid the flux of contemporary art. Yet he has always been radical in his use of unexpected technologies in art-making, from the Polaroid camera through fax machines to the iPhone, iPad and high-definition DVR. It is consistent with these interests that he has devoted time and energy to researching the use artists of the past made of aids to drawing such as the camera obscura, detailed in his book Secret Knowledge.3

It is appropriate, then, that the student provocateur of the early 1960s, who courted controversy in the Chatterley Ban era with bleached-blonde hair and with the legibly homoerotic imagery of his work, should today be a Royal Academician and the author of a scholarly treatise; an old master for the postmodern era. In a deft balancing act, his art dances between past and present, sentiment and satire, and, with a smile, gingerly places one foot on either side of Greenberg’s Manichean binary of avant-garde and kitsch. The work is inscribed with the same dualities as the man himself – part Bradford, part Los Angeles, plain-spoken and artful, virtuoso practitioner and erudite theorist, reactionary and radical, populist and paladin.

Making a SplashDavid Hockney’s artistic affiliations are complex. His greatest hero, constantly referenced, is Pablo Picasso (fig. 20). Although they never met, in the virtuoso print Artist and Model, begun immediately after Picasso’s death in April 1973, Hockney stages an imagined encounter with the Spanish artist, whose legacy seemed, as Hockney put it, ‘too big [to] deal with’.4 Picasso, clothed, and depicted in washy strokes of aquatint, has just finished drawing the naked, vulnerable and much younger Hockney, whose form is conjured from etched lines, densely hatched. The ostensible message is one of subordination of the enraptured disciple for the

Fig. 19David Hockney’s ‘Great Wall’, 2000 (detail). Colour laser copies on eighteen panels, 243.8 × 2194.6 cm

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