Hockney’s pictures: an antidote to despair 

The brief introduction to Hockney’s Pictures (Thames & Hudson, with 522 beautiful illustrations) states, “This is a picture book.  Using his images and a few illuminating words of explanation, it tracks Hockney’s lifelong experiments in ways of looking and depicting.” 

The artist was born in 1937 in smoky Bradford.  T. S. Eliot had satirised the vulgar pretensions of the industrialists of that city, epitomised by an incongruous “silk hat on a Bradford millionaire”.  Hockney’s whole career has been an aesthetic escape from that ugly factory town (though he never lost his Yorkshire accent) to sexy and sunny southern California, and on to France, Spain, Norway, Iceland, Morocco, Egypt, Japan and China.

The essential qualities of his long artistic career are wit and intelligence, dazzling colors and joie de vivre, vibrant imagination and fluent lines, high-spirited exuberance and provocative bravado, humanity and gentleness.  He paints very still still lifes, and emphasises vision and perspective.  Challenging Cubism, “the destruction of a fixed way of looking,” he explains that “our eyes move constantly, and the only time they stop moving is when we’re dead.”  He has a wide range of techniques and constantly experiments with innovative tools, including the use of printing machines, composite polaroids and iPads.  He’s painted charming variations of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation , Cézanne’s Card Players , Monet’s Water Lily Pond , Matisse’s light, sensual and charming The Dance and the twisted features in Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar.  His deafness seems to have intensified his visual acuity. 

Hockney’s paintings fall into four general categories and move from portraits to interior settings, then outside to swimming pools and beyond to landscapes.  In 2018 Hockney portrayed John Richardson , the 94-year-old distinguished biographer of Picasso, sunk into a large, soft, light-green armchair.  He has wispy white receding hair, a formidable forehead, strong nose, lined cheeks and narrow mouth.  He wears an open white shirt and brown-striped jacket buttoned tightly at the waist, and rests the spread fingers of his large hands on his black trousers.  A year before his death Richardson seems deep in thought, contemplating his past achievements and his future fate.

In Hockney’s Self-Portrait of 2012 the bulky 75-year-old artist, close-up and filling the frame, is seated at a white striped table, holds a pen in his raised left hand, and faces the viewer.  He wears his trademark flat cap is yellow, crossed with black stripes, with red-rimmed spectacles over bright blue eyes, and matching red shirt beneath a heavy blue jacket.  The elderly dandy has a hearing aid, lined cheeks, downturned mouth, and a rather sad, anxious expression, as if the viewer had suddenly appeared and startled him.  

Self-Portrait II, 14 March 2012

In his Self-Portrait nine years later, his flat cap has morphed into a garish canary yellow suit heavily crossed, like a busy intersection, with black and pale brown stripes.  His cross-hatched flat cap is now bluish-grey, his outsized spectacles yellow, his long, thin blue tie decorated with little white squares.  He’s seated with his raised left arm pointing out of the frame and his right arm, with drooping hand, resting on the arm of a black office chair.  He has a large nose, double chin and bulging belly, and looks out at the viewer with a solemn expression.  Still going strong at 84, he remarked: “I don’t even take a nap in the afternoon, because I get a lot of energy from work, a lot of energy.  It’s gorgeous everywhere I look.”

In Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968) the famous English author (age 64) and his talented artist-lover (age 34) are seated in uncomfortable-looking tiger-striped brown chairs. They are placed in front of a greenish wall and closed blue shutters that emit a faint light.  The long low grey table in front of them has a bowl of yellow fruit and decorative ear of tasseled Indian corn between two unequal piles of thick anonymous books.  Bachardy, with long white hair and long pale face, is dressed in a green shirt and grey trousers, rests one arm on the chair and the other on his knee, and looks straight ahead.  Isherwood, with a thatch of short brown hair, high forehead, thick eyebrows and lined face, wears an open white shirt and red-trimmed white socks.  He crosses his leg and stares at Bachardy with an intense expression.  Though seated separately, with half-shadowed faces, they are connected emotionally by Isherwood’s adoration and Bachardy’s loving response.

Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-71), a masterpiece, portrays the influential fashion designer Ossie Clark and textile designer Celia Birtwell, both about 30, in their Notting Hill flat soon after their wedding.  Hockney explains, “The figures are nearly life-size; it’s difficult painting figures like that, and it was quite a struggle.  Ossie was painted many, many times.  I probably painted the head alone twelve times.  My main aim was to paint the relationship of these two people.”  

Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971)

Celia, right hand on her hip, stands next to open green shutters that reveal high trees behind a balcony with vase-shaped pillars.  She wears an elegant, velvety, floor-length, dark blue caftan trimmed with red, and has long curly blond hair, big blue eyes, soft lips and a pretty face.  Ossie, cigarette in hand, slouches in a hard cane-back chair with the statue-like white cat perched on his thigh and facing outside.  Percy’s coat is echoed in the white of the balcony, rug and telephone waiting on the floor.  The white lilies and yellow book on the white table wittily allude to Oscar Wilde.  A gold-framed self-portrait of Hockney hangs on the wall, a lamp decorated with a tasseled shade and fluttering plastic leaves rests on the floor.  

Ossie, dressed in a green sweater and trousers, half-buries his feet in the shaggy white rug.  He has long wavy dark hair parted in the middle, narrow face, long straight nose, cleft chin and rather disdainful expression.  Married but apart, the handsome, stylish, sophisticated, self-absorbed couple look away from each other and toward the viewer.  The atmosphere suggests languid superiority, cool tension and emotional aloofness from the world and even from each other.  Their marriage was not a happy one. Ossie, Hockney’s old lover and best man, continued to have affairs with both men and women, and the couple divorced in 1974.  He became a heroin addict, and in 1986 he was stabbed to death by a former lover.

Still Life with T.V. (1969) shows a square, highly polished vermillion table in front of a pale beige wall.  The table  displays and casts the shadows of a portable, blank-screen television, a thick Random House Dictionary of the English Language, a blue-and-white striped coffee cup holding 9 pencils and 2 pens, 10 coloured pencils lying flat on the table, a sheet of square white paper with a sausage-shaped cigar, labeled and bound with string.  The absent artist, undistracted by images, words or tobacco, has carefully arranged his materials and is ready to begin work in this austere setting.

Still Life with T.V. 1969

Beach House by Night (1990) is a red-hot picture.  Under a low yellow ceiling and inside three tall black windows, the interior—apart from five small yellow lamps, one black rocking chair and one soft blue chair with black swirls–-is all red: mantelpiece, two crammed bookcases, fireplace with two sharp points of flame, soft sofa and armchair, and wide decorated carpet extending to the bottom of the frame.  The nocturnal hothouse, with no sign of the nearby beach, suggests a stifling coziness.  

Hockney’s naked young men in showers and in bed place him with the homosexual artists from Leonardo and Michelangelo, through Caravaggio, to Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol.  Sunbather (1966) is quintessential and hedonistic Los Angeles.  A naked, tanned, dark-haired young man, with a strong nose, thin mouth and bulging pale buttocks, lies face down on a towel, his feet extending just over the edge.  The swimming pool has a white ledge above blue tiles, color fading from dark to light blue and swirling spaghetti-like ripples that reflect the curve of his bare bottom.  Cooling off after a hot night, the horizontal man contrasts to the curlicues in the pool and lies half-awake in a tranquil setting.

Hockney remarks that another major work, A Bigger Splash (1967), “is a balanced composition; it’s worked out that way very consciously.  It’s an inventive picture.  The architecture is very typical, southern California  architecture; you can probably find a building like it anywhere there.”  A low flat house with sliding glass doors, reflecting the setting behind the swimming pool but out of the picture, is placed below a tropical azure sky and two tall thin palm trees.  A single chair with white cloth and black frame sits outside.  An unseen swimmer has just jumped off the yellow diving board that extends above the blue pool, darker than the sky, and disappears beneath the water.  Hockney captures the cloudy wispy spray that shoots up from below the water and into the air.  The explosive splash reaches the far edge of the pool and contrasts to the still setting that awaits the pleasure-loving swimmers.

The artist began Nichols Canyon (1980) when he “took a large canvas and drew a wiggly line down the middle which is what the roads seemed to be.”  The long road in the Hollywood Hills snakes from the straight black street at the bottom of the picture to the cloudy Pacific Ocean at the top.  A lush, colorful, compressed landscape rises on both sides of the canyon, filled with tall trees, palms and cacti, spiky tropical plants, striped cultivated fields, and small Spanish-style houses with red roofs, white walls and green shutters.  The atmosphere is tropical and vertiginous.

Hockney writes of a major work, the photographic collage Pearblossom Highway (1986), that “multiple viewpoints create a far bigger space than can be achieved by one.  I moved about the landscape, slowly constructing it from different viewpoints.”  The picture shows a brown two-lane highway, divided by yellow stripes and with a white oblong “STOP AHEAD” stamped on its surface, which thrusts into the brown desert landscape.  The fragmented Cubist sky is blue and the distant mountains are too.  On the left side the arms of giant cacti reach into the sky, and the sandy ground beneath them is littered with empty beer cans and bottles.  The right side is dominated by five, huge, life-sized traffic signs on wooden or iron posts: the rectangular repeated “stop ahead” warning, the blank red hexagonal and thick black arrow within a tilted square, the blue oval “California 138” with arrows pointing in both directions at the next crossroad, the thin street sign indicating  “Pearblossom Hwy” and the shadowy six-sided red “STOP” sign at the corner.  The spooky empty road and large metal markers clash with the unnatural landscape and the hills beyond.  These signs, however instructive, do not impede or halt the progress of the unseen, often speeding and drunken drivers.  The highway near Palmdale, 62 miles north of Los Angeles, is notorious for its great number of fatal collisions.

Stressing visual perception, Hockney concludes: “It is difficult to say why I decided I wanted to be an artist.  Obviously, I had some facility, more than other people, but sometimes facility comes because one is more interested in looking at things,  examining them, and making a representation of them, more interested in the visual world, than other people are.”  Placing himself in opposition to pitiless tragic artists such as Edvard Munch or George Grosz, he adds, “I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure.  I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair.”

Jeffrey Meyers has published Painting and the Novel , The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis , Impressionist Quartet , Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real .

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