Art 150

This David Hockney article is courtesy of Los Angeles Times, January 30, 2005.

DAVID HOCKNEY stands in the filtered gray daylight of the train station platform, a stork-like figure whose cane and upthrust chin set him apart as he’s scanning the arriving passengers. He’s wearing a stylish fedora, dark greatcoat and a suit that will prove to be cashmere, a sensible outfit for a December drive in the English countryside with the window halfway down. Hockney, who at 67 has let his onceperoxided hair go comfortably pewter, smiles at the visitor and extends his hand with an intriguing mixture of warmth and reserve. “Not many people go to Bridlington,” he almost immediately says with a conspiratorial savor. “If AVID HOCKNEY stands in the filtered gray daylight of the train station platform, a stork-like figure whose cane and upthrust chin set him apart as he’s scanning the arriving passengers. He’s wearing a
stylish fedora, dark greatcoat and a suit that will prove to be cashmere, a sensible outfit for a December drive in the English countryside with the window halfway down. Hockney, who at 67 has let his onceperoxided hair go comfortably pewter, smiles at the visitor and extends his hand with an intriguing mixture of warmth and reserve. “Not many people go to Bridlington,” he almost immediately says with a conspiratorial savor. “If AVID HOCKNEY stands in the filtered gray daylight of the train station platform, a stork-like figure whose cane and upthrust chin set him apart as he’s scanning the arriving passengers. He’s wearing a stylish fedora, dark greatcoat and a suit that will prove to be cashmere, a sensible outfit for a December drive in the English countryside with the window halfway down. Hockney, who at 67 has let his onceperoxided hair go comfortably pewter, smiles at the visitor and extends his hand with an intriguing mixture of warmth and reserve.
“Not many people go to Bridlington,” he almost immediately says with a conspiratorial savor. “If you tell someone in London you’ve been to Bridlington, they won’t know where it is.” York is only a two-hour train journey from London, and Bridlington is an hour’s drive beyond that, but it’s a drive into a seemingly unchanged world. Bridlington is still in part a fishing village, in part the seaside resort Hockney’s family visited in the ’40s and ’50s, where he bought and furnished a comfortable home overlooking the North Sea for his mother (who died in 1999 at age 99) and his sister, Margaret Hockney, who lives there still. “It was built by a Bridlington trawler owner for his ugly daughter,” says Hockney, who made a point of not removing the number plates that once guided patrons during the house’s latter days as a bed and breakfast. Hockney, strolling toward his car in a way that shows the cane to be more accessory than necessity, wants to know how the journey from London was. As a seasoned trencherman, he seems pleased that his visitor enjoyed a full English breakfast en route. Our mission today is to drive via back roads through East Yorkshire — not to be confused with the Yorkshire Dales, the more famously picturesque terrain to the west where Turner painted landscapes — and look at some of the locales that inspired the 55 watercolors in Hockney’s upcoming (Feb. 26 through April 2) show at LA Louver gallery in Venice, Calif. It’s titled “Hand Eye Heart,” after the Chinese formulation describing what painting draws upon. The show’s mostly roadside vistas share a roughhewn beauty that’s rich in mossy greens, lavender-gray skies and stark, winter-stripped trees and hedgerows. One grouping is of 36 smaller paintings, hung four scenes high by nine scenes long, composing a pastorale in lush green and rich yellow hues.
For all its pleasures, it’s a show that could induce in Los Angeles art lovers a feeling of suspense and even poignancy, for these works were inspired by and executed in Hockney’s native country and mark the culmination of three years largely spent away from his L.A. home and studio off Mulholland Drive. Although he won’t state outright that he’s away from America indefinitely — he’ll casually say things such as, “I’m a claustrophobe, that’s why I live in L.A.” — he also gives no timetable for his return.
Blame a great deal of his urge to roam on his newly discovered medium of watercolors. What began as a few portraits in the late ’90s flowered into a group of works done in Spain, then bravura Norwegian and Icelandic landscapes. Hockney learned the craft quickly and came to love loading up his brush for the kind of strokes that require real commitment. “A painting is an artist’s account of looking at the world,” he says on this day, a credo he’s stated before. The world he’s seen
recently is revealed (though sometimes barely, as with one fogshrouded
row of trees in the new show’s untitled signature work),
largely under northern light. His studio in the Bridlington home’s
converted attic lets in the same faint glow, and the L.A. show’s
“Bridlington. Garden and Rooftops III” invites you to make what
you will of the sedate view north from it.
Hockney’s friend, writer and cultural critic Lawrence Weschler,
has written an essay for LA Louver’s catalog, and he finds
“a return to origins” in Hockney’s autumn- and winterscapes:
“the sense of returning in winter, perhaps, to one’s own springtime.”
C O N T I N U I T Y , N O T C H A N G E HOCKNEY leads the way to his tan Lexus,
which he chose as the quietest ride this side
of a Bentley. He immediately rolls down his
window and lights a smoke, which he does at
a rate of slightly more than a pack a day when
he’s talking a lot. (He points out that Eisenhower
has been unjustly criticized for smoking
80 cigarettes on D-day — “I should think he would have
smoked 200.”) Between conscientious tour guide business —
glances at the remains of York’s ancient wall and the landmark
tower the York Minster — he continues to kvetch eloquently
about the antismoking forces in England and America. It’s
a theme he returns to often, but his summation relies on a
countryman’s words and is aimed straight at his sometime
home: “Tom Stoppard says people in L.A. think the choice is between smoking and immortality.”
As we motor through small villages and down verdant ravines
that, as Hockney points out, were carved by glaciers rather than
rivers, we pass occasional flocks of sheep and Highland cattle,
and fields that the government has decreed will be forever reserved
for cultivating oats, wheat and barley.
“It’s the food bin of England,” Peter Goulds, LA Louver founder
and director, says of Hockney’s native Yorkshire, noting that
the artist spent most of his childhood in the sooty city of Bradford
in West Yorkshire. Goulds, who first sold works by Hockney
in the late 1970s, sees more continuity than change in this hanging:
“It’s all part of what you could call David’s journey to light.”
Goulds helped Hockney mount a September 1998 show at the
gallery titled “looking at landscape/being in landscape” in which
massive studies of American sites (including “A Bigger Grand
Canyon,” which sold to the National Gallery of Australia for
$3 million) were hung near a series of Yorkshire scenes. The latter,
though done in oils, Hockney’s most familiar medium, covered
territory similar to the recent watercolors. Goulds sees the
watercolor spate as almost inevitable for the “intellectually curious
and technically proficient” painter. “It was a medium he’d
largely avoided; finally he had to take it on.”
The 1998 show derived much of its inspiration from drives
Hockney made between Bridlington and the town of Wetherby,
where his great friend Jonathan Silver lay dying of pancreatic AN L.A. PERSPECTIVE: Hockney in his studio in 1990
with an unfinished canvas of the Santa Monica Mountains. cancer. (The same disease had claimed his confrere, curator
Henry Geldzahler, in 1994.) “You might as well live,” was Hockney’s
way of summing up his determination not to despair despite
those deaths and a series of others — from AIDS, age and
other causes—among his oldest friends. Legendarily devoted to
his dachshunds, he was further dismayed by the death of his frequent
portrait subject Stanley (Hockney is a great fan of Laurel
and Hardy). That latter loss did create a kind of liberation — he
was no longer constrained by dog quarantine regulations that
had kept Stanley from joining him on visits to England. As the departure
of friends joined with his severe hearing loss to leave him
increasingly isolated in his canyon, the logic of spending time in
England grew.
L . A . I N S P I R A T I O N S MOST of Hockney’s London days, in the
three years since he’s been once again
based there, are spent in his apartment
and studio at the edge of Holland Park,
where he walks most mornings while
fetching the newspapers. (“I’m not really
a reader of the Guardian,” he’ll sniff,
showing little interest in their putting a loaned sketch of his on
the front page this very Saturday as part of a neighborhood campaign
to save what turns out to be his old post office.)
He has a brother living near Margaret in Bridlington and two
more in business in Australia, but he dotes on the chirpingly delightful
Margaret, a former nurse who has such an array of computers
supporting her digital photography (much of it linked to
her second career as a herbalist) that the BBC recently visited to
film her at work. As a young nurse, she went to Zambia for a year
but stayed three because the need was so great: “My sister has an
innocence about her,” he says lovingly. “She’s seen life much more
harsh than you or I. She’s never earned any money in her life.” He
pauses for a wry look: “You have to be a big crook to get money.”
The artist is able to be of and apart from the London arts community;
a 2002 arrangement to trade portraits, each of the other,
with Lucian Freud resulted in many walks across Holland Park
(where, significantly, “I saw my first Northern European springtime
in 22 years”). Hockney willingly sat for 129 hours; the older
artist gave him but three to capture the forbidding Freud visage.
Both men are “academicians,” as the elite members of the Royal
Academy of Arts are called, and are said to be privately unhappy
that an architect was selected to head that group rather than
Hockney’s longtime painter colleague (they were at the Royal College of Art with director Ridley Scott in the early ’60s), Allan
Jones.
Hockney was the toast of swinging London before he characteristically
removed himself from it. His arrival in Los Angeles in
the mid-1960s (after a brief spell testing the water in New York)
was vivifying: “I was so taken with the space, the beauty of it. It
was . . . January 1964. You could drive anywhere; it hardly seemed
to have a rush hour — you’d drive from Santa Monica to Pasadena
at 6 o’clock, and it’d take you half an hour . . . move around
the city with the greatest of ease in your private space.”
He had arrived bearing the proceeds from his first large show
in England: “I traveled with a letter of credit, took with me about
three or four thousand dollars. I felt I was rich, very rich.”
Hockney spent $900 on the Ford Falcon that would take him
through 50,000 miles of exploration. “One day a week I used to
drive around L.A., go anywhere, find out where I was from the
Thomas Guide and then drive back. It was amazing, actually. I’d
never felt freer, sexually free, everything.”
If his paintings were not the first proclamation that L.A.’s
swimming pools and palm trees were iconic, they were among the
more powerful. And though he doesn’t dwell on the impact of
globally familiar images such as the almost audibly evocative
snapshot-in-acrylics called “A Bigger Splash” (“I painted that in
Berkeley actually — probably from a photograph — while I was
teaching there for a semester.”), he was and is pleased to claim
his territory: “One of the great things about L.A. for me when I
first went there was nobody had painted it. Paris had been painted
by great artists, Italy, London — but in L.A., you didn’t even
know what famous building was there.”
Still, he refused to put down immobilizing roots, despite the
happiness he found there from 1964 through 1977. He was 28 and a
growingly famous La Cienega boulevardier (his usual uniform
was “a T-shirt”) when he met 18-year-old art student Peter Schlesinger.
The new love was enough to uproot Hockney, as he describes
in his easy, if telegraphic style: “A very L.A. person, very goodlooking
and very bright, full of curiosity. He actually made
me come back to Europe — he wanted to live in London. I moved
back to London just because of Peter, and when we broke up
I went to live in Paris. And after that I felt I’d rather be in
L.A., that’s the place, that’s where I can work. I had to get a green
card again, but I found L.A. a stimulant. I wasn’t quite tempted
to just lie on a beach; I might have painted a kind of hedonism,
but the artists themselves can’t be hedonists. Artists are workers.”

B A C K T O T H E L A N D YORK proper and its suburbs are soon behind
us as Hockney expertly pilots the sedan on the
old Roman road, which soon resembles a country
lane, rising 800 feet above sea level over the
chalk hills (“wolds”) between York and Bridlington.
We’re not far outside Stamford
Bridge, where a noted prelude to the Battle of
Hastings was fought, when he points out a pub that would look
perfectly at home in a film adaptation of a Thomas Hardy book.
As a 15-year-old schoolboy working an arduous summer job, “I’d
go down there and have drinks.” (This falls in line with his somewhat
defensive boast, “I never had a cigarette before I was 9.”) A
half-mile on we pass a farmhouse surrounded by cornfields,
where he’d stayed while he earned wages “stooking”: “You picked
up the sheaf of corn, tied it together with another and made it
into a stook, then stuck them in the stubble. It was a hard day’s
work actually — the only consolation was it was rather beautiful
looking out, on the shapes of the fields.”
It’s not the grandest manifesto an artist ever announced, but
as he spent more time in England over the last couple of years,
those fields called out to him. A number of the watercolors in the
upcoming show, notably “Woldgate With Flowers and Blossom,”
recapture those days, showing landscapes that, he notes, “haven’t
changed a bit in 50 years.” In addition to those and the almost
riotous flora in the “36-Part Work,” there are many wintry
scenes, such as “Trees & Puddles, East Yorkshire,” that use humble
means to pull your eye into something actually as complex as
one of Hockney’s beloved Mahler symphonies.
Although the show’s working title used the phrase “After the
Secret Knowledge,” these paintings clearly proceed beyond
Hockney’s recent studies of how the old masters used (and
achieved) perspective. Though he’s still involved in intellectual
scraps with scientists from Stanford and Scientific American,
the upshot of his research was a repudiation of photography’s
Cyclops eye, and a simple enough refutation of what the literal
rendering of nature can do: “It led me back to the land. I realized
you could [only] paint the landscape, because you can’t photograph
the landscape — you can’t get space in it.” So I thought,
‘Well my God, I should go paint Yorkshire again.’ ”
Our destination is Bridlington, where we’ll wander along the
strand and eat a hearty lunch, dinner and breakfast with his aide,
Gregory Evans, and the welcoming Margaret. (Hockney’s companion
of some years, John Fitzherbert, prepares a lunch, heavy
on pork, before taking to his bed to fight a cold.)

But on the chatty, ambling ride to Bridlington, Hockney
seems content to pull over in key spots for reconsideration. He
sits alertly in the driver’s seat, looking like he’d prefer the passenger
seat, where he spent much time doing smaller paintings with
a board across his knees to make an easel. Peering into the fields
where the sun glowers but never quite breaks through, he seems
again to be following the skein of memory that led him down
these back roads. He’s well aware that despite inveighing against
establishments artistic and political, he’s been under the covers
with fame and wealth for more than three decades now. There’s
probably no more celebrated world-class artist, and the accessibility
of his vibrant, involving canvases has somehow not hurt
his standing among critics and curators. In disregarding fashion
and trend, he’s remained relentlessly fashionable.
His friend, Norman Rosenthal, the Royal Academy of Arts curator,
notes that the acclaim for Hockney’s work would not have
come if the artist weren’t “an amazingly competent man” but
sees his long-running success as more a function of being “constantly
inventive” and also because of “a great moral authority
that comes through in his art.”
One of the more striking works in the LA Louver show is “The
Road to Rudston,” executed in March of last year. Its barren trees
and hedgerows are rendered with almost manic brushstrokes,
much resembling those in Van Gogh’s Provence sketchbooks, under
darkly swelling rain clouds. The painting is also to be found in
a new hardcover collection called “Hockney’s Pictures: The Definitive
Retrospective,” where it sits above one of his epigrammatic
quotes. “I have always believed that art should be a deep
pleasure,” it reads, “ . . . the very fact that the art is made seems to
contradict despair.”
Rosenthal says Hockney “believes in life, and he believes in
freedom, and all those things he’s stood for all his life — and
whether that was as a young man or now as an older man, he
somehow hasn’t changed. He doesn’t dye his hair blond anymore
but that’s all the difference there is.”
Hockney will admit that recent world events can induce moments
of doubt, and that “one of my selfish thoughts was, ‘Well,
maybe you should be glad you’re not too young.’ ” He gazes across
the lane at the farmhouse where five decades ago he would sleep
rough, one of six laborers to a room. “When you’re young, the
world excites you no matter what. It’s when you’re old you actually
want the silk underwear.”
He reflects a moment. “You know what the Chinese say about
painting?” This he follows with a shrug that can only be described
as philosophical: “It is an old man’s art.”

The Art Set – An Artist Who Needs People – Charlie Scheips

Yesterday was the public opening of David Hockney: Portraits, a retrospective spanning over 50 years of the master Englishman’s work at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The show is an absolute pleasure to behold—the innovation and imagination that Hockney has brought to the genre ranges from the early fine-lined ink and pencil portraits from the late 1950s through the large-scale acrylic double-portraits of the 1960s (for which part of his early fame was based) to the cubist and photo-collage innovations of the 1980s right-up to the present large-scale water color and oil portraits he has made during the past several years.

Throughout Hockney’s artistic journey he has returned over and over again to subjects closest too him. His first major double portrait in the show is of his parents Kenneth and Laura Hockney—and although Kenneth died in 1978 he continued to paint his mother until her death at 99 seven years ago. Other regular subjects besides many members of his family included his early muse and friend designer Celia Birtwell (whose children and now grandchildren, are featured in the exhibition); Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood; art world personality Henry Geldzahler, as well as Hockney intimates, John Fitzherbert, Ann and David Graves, Elsa Duarte and family, Richard Schmidt, and Jean Pierre Goncalves de Lima; and Gregory Evans. Evans, who was a major force in the organization of this remarkable show worked on behalf of Hockney’s interests with the triumverate of curators Barbara Stern Shapiro (MFA), Stephanie Barron (LA County Museum) and Sarah Howgate (National Portrait Gallery, London.)

David Hockney: Portraits at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts

Along the way, Hockney managed to have a virtual who’s who of the literary and artistic circles of his time sit for him including many featured in the show: W.H. Auden, ballet critic Richard Buckle, Francesco Clemente, Divine, Lucien Freud, Richard Hamilton, R.B Kitaj, restaurateur Peter Langan, Jack Larson, heart-throb 1970s model Joe McDonald; J. B Priestly, Patrick Proctor, curator Norman Rosenthal, Peter Schlesinger, Stephen Spender, Andy Warhol, collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman, Lawrence Weschler, Billy Wilder and dealers such as the legendary Nick Wilder and Hockney’s dealer in Los Angeles, Peter Goulds, as well as this writer.

It is extraordinary that it has taken this long for an institution to mount an exhibition of Hockney’s portrait work. But perhaps it’s a blessing that we can have such a wide range of time and media to see with un-jaded eyes. Walking around the exhibition during the final installation I was struck by the feeling of intimacy that was almost palpable in the galleries. Hockney has only very rarely done anything close to a “commissioned” portrait choosing instead familiar faces and personalities whom he knows so that he doesn’t “worry about resemblance”—the dread of all portrait artists.

As readers of previous Art Set pieces know, I have had an almost quarter century’s involvement with Hockney. In fact, the exhibition features three recent oil portraits Hockney made of me last year. During the press conference at the Museum last week, many of the reporters asked me what we talked about during the various sittings. Besides the occasional “lets take a break” or “cup of tea and a cigarette” we generally did not speak at all. This is another reason for Hockney’s choice of close friends as sitters—there is none of the nervousness or self-consciousness that a stranger might bring to the occasion.

Since we are so accustomed to the photographic or photo-based portrait in our own time, Hockney’s portraits sometime elicit a response from casual viewers about the sitter looking either morose or bored. I frankly don’t think people look long enough at them to realize the subtle ways Hockney uses to conjure up his sitter’s persona from the blank page or canvas, And after all, a portrait is about two people—the one portrayed and the artist. Perhaps the artist’s own relationship plays into the creative dance which is portraiture.

The fact is that most of these things are made in a far longer time than the flash of a camera. Even Hockney’s photo-collages take longer as they are first shot and then assembled in his inimitable yet oft-copied fashion. No one can keep a smile for several minutes much less the several hours that most of the portraits have taken. Hockney has frequently railed against the dominance of photography in our world and these portraits stand as testament to his call for the return of art to the “eye, hand, and heart.” Or, in other words, they have depth, something very few photos ever have.

The first of us all arrived on Valentine’s Day to Boston’s Lenox Hotel that increasingly became a veritable Camp Hockney as the week progressed and more and more friends arrived—taking up about three floors of the hotel. Hockney was in the Judy Garland Suite which he laughed had no sign of her having stayed there. The wood paneled suite did feature two bad reproductions of 18th-century American portraits which Hockney renamed Fannie Abigail Garland and her husband Horatio. Thanks to a color copy of the real Judy Garland brought by Bing McGilvray, we managed to collage it atop of Fannie’s face. Judy lives!

The first night we had dinner in the hotel’s Azure restaurant with Gregory Evans, Peter Goulds, Sarah Howgate, Thomas Graf, Jean Pierre Goncalves de Lima, and Barbara and her husband Bernard Shapiro celebrating their 53rd wedding anniversary. After years in Boston, the Shapiro’s have re-located to Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The next night we arranged for a private dining room at the Atlantic Fish Company a block down on Boylston street which included the above mentioned guests and NPG director Sandy Nairne, sitting next to Hockney, Bing McGilvray, Sidney and Joni Felsen, Stephanie Barron, Elsa and David Duarte, George Mulder, Arthur Lambert.

By Friday, the day of the official press conference, lenders and sitters’ lunch and evening opening, the arrival of Hockney’s inner-circle reached critical mass. There were so many of Hockney’s sitters there that someone got the bright idea to have the sitters autograph pages of the catalog a la a high school yearbook—it caught on like wild fire, as they say.

And speaking of fire, one of the nicer things in Boston was the smoking lounge the museum installed in Hockney’s honor for the opening—complete with heating, ventilation and seating. If you didn’t want to be there—you didn’t have to. Bravo.

The exhibition remains at the MFA until May 14. It travels to the Los Angeles County Museum June 11-September 4 and then to London’s National Portrait Gallery 0ctober 12 until January 21, 2007. One of the reasons to also make it to the LA show is that Hockney’s fabulous Beverly Hills Housewife of the music patron and photographer Betty Freeman will be on view there. The London venue is a cornerstone of the NPG’s 150th anniversary. Alas, the show is not coming to smoke-free New York.

Meanwhile, Hockney has moved to other pastures—namely the landscape of East Yorkshire where he is spending the better part of the year doing plein aire large-scale landscapes of the changing seasons. During the hanging of the show in Boston, Hockney remarked to me, “if I don’t say so myself, the beginning and the ending are both good,” He also mentioned later that seeing the work together made him think he “hadn’t been wasting his time.”

There is an excellent catalog for the exhibition with essays by Mark Glazebrook, Edmund White, and Marco Livingston. For more information on the exhibition and to order your catalog go to: www.mfa.org.

Article taken from Artdaily.com – LONDON, ENGLAND.- The National Portrait Gallery presents David Hockney: Portraits, on view through January 21, 2007. David Hockney Portraits is the most comprehensive survey of Hockney’s portraits ever created. Following hugely successful showings in Boston an Los Angeles, this exceptional exhibition opens at the National Portrait Gallery on October 12. Offering the opportunity to see many works together for the first time, David Hockney Portraits is a fascinating visual diary of the life, love and friendship of one of the greatest and most admired British artists of his generation.
The portraits provide insights into the artist’s intense observations of the people he has
charted over many years. These include his parents, fabric designer Celia Birtwell, art
dealer John Kasmin and some of the leading cultural figures of the twentieth century such
as Andy Warhol, Man Ray and W H Auden.
Hockney’s most personal and powerful works are included in the exhibition, starting with
the artist’s very early self portraits and studies of his father created during his student years at Bradford School of Art. Also brought together are the celebrated, almost life-size double
portraits of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), American Collectors (Mr and
Mrs Weisman) (1968) My Parents (1977) and the much-loved Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy
(1970-71) which returns to the National Portrait Gallery, where it was first exhibited in
1971.
Showcasing major examples of his work from his time in Britain and California – including
Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966) and Divine (1979) – David Hockney Portraits
concludes with the artist’s new work, marking his return to large-scale painted portraits. As
with his earlier paintings, Hockney reconsiders the conversation piece and the heroic,
single-standing figure, but this time he paints them directly from life.
The exhibition is remarkable in celebrating David Hockney’s many innovations in the art of
portraiture from his Cubist-influenced photographic collages of the 1980s to his recent
camera lucida drawings.
Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, says: “David Hockney’s
portraits offer the best view of his work and life – it is a great privilege to be able to bring so
many together in London.”
PUBLICATION
The definitive exhibition catalogue, fully illustrated with over 300 illustrations, by curators
Sarah Howgate and Barbara Stern Shapiro, with essays by Mark Glazebrook, Marco
Livingstone and Edmund White is published by the National Portrait Gallery price £35
hardback
The exhibition is organised by the National Portrait Gallery, London and Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston and in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
David Hockney Portraits coincides with David Hockney – A Year in Yorkshire: New
Paintings at Annely Juda Fine Art (15 September-28 October) and the revised paperback
edition of David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the
Old Masters published by Thames and Hudson (September 18).

Hockney is top of the pops – Virginia Blackburn on bagging works at a bargain – THE TIMES – October 07, 2006.

It is rare, in this country, to find a highly successful living artist who is also greatly loved. Damien Hirst may be raking it in, but spontaneous outbursts of affection when his name is mentioned tend to be few and far between. The exception, however, is David Hockney.

Works from the earliest days of the Yorkshireman’s career until the present are currently on sale at the Andipa Gallery in London, some at prices that even quite modest collectors will be able to afford. Limited edition prints and lithographs are in the sale, along with drawings and oils, at prices starting from as little as £1,500.

“The earliest work on display is very rare: an oil painting on board of Mount Street, Bradford, at £42,000,” says Acoris Andipa, the gallery director. “From there, the next body of work dates from 1969; a series of black-and-white etchings to illustrate Grimm’s fairy tales, starting at £1,500. After that comes the iconic swimming pool lithographs.”

Andipa is the first gallery to show all 12 swimming pool pictures together, providing a wonderful insight into Hockney’s creative processes as the works progressed. “You can see him defining the idea,” Mr Andipa says. “It starts with a single blue line on paper, and moves on through blue washes. He is fascinated by the reflection of light on water as the day progresses.”

The £25,000 swimming pool lithographs are selling out quickly but there are two more facets to the sale, each extremely attractive and indicative of another Hockney phase. The first is a series of lithographs of the Mexican Hotel Acatlán.

Hockney is an adventurous type of artist and was barely supporting himself through his art when he chose to go to America. In February 1984 he was travelling in Mexico when his car broke down. He took it to the local garage, which was unable to get the necessary parts for two weeks. Undaunted, Hockney booked into the nearest hotel, where he spent two weeks admiring the local colour. As soon as he returned home, he produced large, hot-coloured images of Mexican courtyards, now priced between £25,000 and £40,000.

Finally, there is a series of interiors, the most noteworthy of which is the Van Gogh Chair. The etching was first released in 1998 as a series of 35, but it is believed that Hockney had a change of heart about the print and only a few of the pre-sold images were ever released. The price is £22,000.

Those are the highlights, but there is more: a little portrait of a male sitter, at £12,000; a drawing of the 1971 Glyndebourne production of The Rake’s Progress, at £20,000; and a set design for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1981 production of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, also at £22,000.

They are not cheap by most people’s standards, but it is Hockney. And even if you are not buying, the Andipa website has a beautiful selection of his pictures to admire.

Up there, Stravinsky – Will David Hockney’s sets and W.H. Auden’s libretto lure the punters to The Rake’s Progress? John Bailey talks to Melbourne-born tenor John Heuzenroeder about Opera Australia’s forthcoming production. – THE AGE – April 2, 2006

If singing were sport, opera would be the bodybuilding of vocal expression. We mortals have long been dumbstruck by the heavyweight titans of song, the muscular flex of a diva’s diaphragm or eye-bulging strain of a note held longer than would seem possible.

But unlike Australia’s obsession for all things sporting, opera is the least attended art form in the country. And though we might be able to name-drop celebrity pop-op stars such as Il Divo or Andrea Bocelli, we’re far more likely to recognise classic opera tunes as “the song from that pasta ad”.

But like an old warhorse, opera has fought relentlessly to maintain a local presence. Legal disputes and heated debate over the renewed need for a specifically Victorian opera company saw an inquiry into the state of the art last year, which resulted in a $7.6 million pledge from the Victorian Government to be put towards “grassroots” opera in the next half-decade.

Will this support be matched by a corresponding increase in audiences willing to listen? And what can opera offer contemporary audiences for whom the height of vocal talent is decided by Australian Idol?

John Heuzenroeder plays the lead in the latest Opera Australia outing, The Rake’s Progress, and sees the work’s humour and quickfire pace (as well as its English lyrics) as an accessible introduction for opera neophytes. At the same time, he is cautious of suggesting that The Rake’s Progress should be seen as an archetypal kind of experience, an “Opera for Dummies”.

“It isn’t a typical opera,” he insists, “but then what is? There’s Italian, there’s French, it’s such a varied world and then for every opera, there’s how many productions of it? It’s really like saying ’should I eat?’ Eat pasta and you don’t know what rice tastes like.”

The Rake’s Progress, inspired by William Hogarth’s engravings of 18th-century degeneracy, traces the pact between gullible everyman Tom Rakewell and Lucifer-like Nick Shadow. For a year, country boy Rakewell enjoys the seedy thrills of the city offered up by Shadow, but soon finds himself in the hell that is debauchery’s reward.

While the music is that of celebrated 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky, the libretto was penned by English poet W. H. Auden and works on multiple levels to address its audience: “It’s interesting ideas at play, and people that are well-read find all kinds of references in it, but at the same time at a base level it’s a presentable story,” says Heuzenroeder.

This is the first time Heuzenroeder has played Rakewell, a surprise considering his level of experience. After graduating from Melbourne’s VCA, he received a Masters degree from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and has gone on to work with companies from London to Japan. Much of the past five years have been spent yoyo-ing between Australia and his new home of Berlin, working with a range of companies in each country.

Where Australian audiences may be hesitant towards opera, it’s a different story in Germany: “It hasn’t got this elitist tag at all, at least in my experience. I’ve got a step-daughter who’s German, and when she goes to the opera, she calls it a theatre piece. She did this the other day, she heard an ABC broadcast on the internet over there and she said she loved the ‘theatre piece’, that’s what she called it. And a lot of German towns will have a theatre in them, so it’s something that children, particularly, see as quite normal, to go to the theatre, and the opera is just part of that.”

It only took a quick scan of the names involved in The Rake’s Progress to lure Heuzenroeder back to our shores, however: this production was originally presented in 1975 under the direction of opera legend John Cox, with a set designed by British artist David Hockney. Hockney’s sets, based on Hogarth’s etchings, have been preserved in their meticulous detail and Cox himself has travelled Down Under to oversee this latest production.

For Heuzenroeder, working with Cox was illuminating; after three decades of touring the piece, the director was still amenable to improvements. Building on the strengths of individual performers and local tastes, many details were altered for the Australian tour. At the same time, Cox’s experience meant that “he knew what worked”, insists Heuzenroeder.

“There’s one scene where I sing completely with my back to the audience and I was hesitant, but he was like: ‘Well, I’ve done it like this all over the world, so this is what it’s going to be.’ Some things he knew would work out.”

And work out they have, the just-completed Sydney leg of the tour attracting enviable reviews. With Cox, Hockney and Heuzenroeder, Opera Australia has brought out the heavyweights to prove that opera can be every bit as riveting as a widescreen simulcast sporting spectacular. All eyes will be monitoring their Progress closely.

An Isolde with ample soul and voice – SOPRANO BREWER GIVES DEFINITIVE PERFORMANCE AS S.F. OPERA MAKES WAGNER CLASSIC HYPNOTIC – By RICHARD SCHEININ -Mercury News – October 07, 2006

Stretched out on a royal bed aboard a storybook sailing ship, Christine Brewer sang out her first words as Isolde, the Irish princess, in San Francisco Opera’s gleaming production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” Whoosh! Her words took off like gusts of flushed fury, cutting through the storm of the orchestra at cavernous War Memorial Auditorium and pinning at least a few folks to the rear wall.

It was Brewer’s night, and the audience — which, weirdly for such a major opera event, didn’t even fill the hall — knew that a bit of history was in the offing at Thursday’s opening. For years, the soprano has worked toward the role, a killer, yet this was her first time singing it in a staged production. She was nothing but awesome, her potency unflagging during the nearly four-hour performance. A column of her breath would have kept half a dozen basketballs aloft.

This is an exceptional “Tristan,” with splendorous wonderland sets by David Hockney, drunken with color, just as princess Isolde and Tristan, her warrior-lover from Cornwall, are drunk with love, so much so that they mean to seal it in the “divine oblivion” of death.

The cast is mostly steely good, and the orchestra, conducted by Donald Runnicles, seemed only a little short of supernaturally inspired at Thursday’s opening. (The next performance is Tuesday and the production, on loan from Los Angeles Opera, runs through Oct. 27).

Say what you will about “Tristan”: It’s mere mytho-melodrama; it’s an exercise in controlled hysteria, unfolding in a narcotic haze; its characters don’t do much of anything, except ruminate and rehash and sing (in German) about the “vast realm of universal life.” And of course, it’s way too long.

But then there is the music: those opiated, blood-boiling themes; the hair-raising ascents, climaxing with the great Liebestod, the love-death aria, sung at the end by Isolde. It’s the music that keeps drawing us back. And during the very best moments Thursday, the voices and orchestra came together as a sheer pulsing membrane, ready to dissolve and vanish into the lovers’ divine nothingness.

Thor Steingraber, who has previously worked on Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at Lyric Opera of Chicago, directs this “Tristan” with a painstaking eye. When, after drinking their love potion, Tristan and Isolde gaze into each other’s eyes, that gaze and the ensuing embrace unfold in a sort of slow motion choreography. It is transfixing, this bit of acting, like the gaze itself.

The role of Tristan is sung by American tenor Thomas Moser, who last year performed opposite Brewer in Beethoven’s “Fidelio” at San Francisco Opera. They are so much more convincing as a couple in “Tristan.” The way they touch, grasp and coo at one another is so real, although Moser, in the end, is the least satisfying member of the core cast.

His opalescent voice has oceans of calm inside it, but it doesn’t change enough as the drama closes in on itself, as the stress levels keep rising. On Thursday, Moser just kept singing with a remote, almost cool, uniform beauty. And he lacked the heroic power necessary to survive on stage; often, he was swamped, made almost inaudible, by the orchestra.

This was the case during the first half of his long Act II love duet with Isolde. Yet when the orchestra quieted, when the mood shifted and the lovers sang of “rapture’s glorious weaving,” Moser and Brewer breathed inside Wagner’s exquisite, post-coital-like reveries.

An astonishing member of the cast is Icelandic bass Kristinn Sigmundsson as King Marke, who intends to marry Isolde until Tristan, his most loyal knight, betrays him. Sigmundsson’s portrayal of the emotionally broken king was heart-rending; it supplied the most purely human moments of the evening. And then there was his voice: lullaby-soft, yet birch-strong and supple.

As Brangane, Isolde’s lady-in-waiting, British mezzo-soprano Jane Irwin made her San Francisco opera debut and was worth the wait. Her voice sailed with a steady clarion beauty. In a similar debut, Israeli baritone Boaz Daniel, as Kurvenal, Tristan’s sidekick, out-popped Moser, his “boss”; Daniel is a ripping, exuberant singer.

So is tenor Sean Panikkar, a product of SFO’s Merola Opera Program, who sang the role of the shepherd, so loyal to Tristan, and yet, like everyone else in this excruciating story, unable to protect the knight from his chosen death.

David Hockney’s Portraits Come to Boston’s MFA – By BILL VAN SICLEN – Journal Arts Writer – February 26, 2006

BOSTON — Say the name “David Hockney” and most art lovers immediately picture a swimming pool. And not just any swimming pool, but one of those perfect southern California pools — the ones with the glistening blue-green water edged with white concrete and framed by tall, swaying palms.
Though born and raised in England, Hockney has lived in Los Angeles since the late 1960s. Over the years, he’s depicted California’s plush, pool-centered lifestyle so often and so well that the words “Hockney” and “pool” are practically synonymous. He is, without too much exaggeration, the Picasso of pools.
But Hockney has other interests, too. He is, for example, a talented painter of landscapes and still lifes, as well as an accomplished portraitist.
How accomplished? That’s the question posed by a “David Hockney: Portraits,” a major survey of Hockney’s portrait-making efforts opening today at the Museum of Fine Arts.
Organized by the MFA and London’s National Portrait Gallery, with help from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the show features more than 150 prints, paintings, drawings and other works.
Among them are some of Hockney’s best-known paintings, including his now-iconic portrait of British fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell posing with their cat, Percy. (Last year, when the BBC held a contest to pick the “10 Greatest” paintings in England, Hockney’s Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy was the only work by a living artist to make the list.)
Other highlights include A Rake’s Progress, a series of etchings inspired by Hockney’s first trip to New York City in 1961, and My Parents, a sensitive 1977 portrait of his mother and father. (Question: When was the last time a contemporary artist did a sensitive painting of his or her parents?)
The show, which fills the MFA’s spacious Gund Gallery, also offers a soup-to-nuts overview of Hockney’s artistic development.
The show’s earliest canvas, a small dark-toned portrait of his father, was painted in 1955. At the time, Hockney was 18 and still living at home in Bradford, an industrial city in the northwest of England. The show’s most recent works, including a series of portraits of Hockney’s “posse” of West Coast friends and collectors, were completed last year.
In between, the show follows Hockney as he works his way through often-idiosyncratic permutations of Pop Art, Cubism and even Old Master portraiture. There are also sections devoted to Hockney’s use of photography, including his now-famous Polaroid grids and collages.
There’s even a “pool painting” — 1966’s Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool — in which a hunky male nude stands thigh-deep in one of Hockney’s trademark swimming pools. Besides being a terrific painting, it’s a reminder that the 68-year-old Hockney was one of the first artists to openly express his homosexuality through his art.
Timeless compositions
So how do Hockney’s portraits stack up?
Pretty well, actually. The paintings, especially some of the larger double portraits, have a classical poise and balance that belies their contemporary subject matter. The clothes, houses and people may be modern, but the compositions themselves feel timeless.
(After Boston, the show will travel to Los Angeles and then on to London’s National Portrait Gallery, home to the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, Reynolds and Gainsborough. My guess is that Hockey’s portraits will look right at home alongside these Old Masters.)
Hockney is also an outstanding draftsman, a skill underscored by the show’s large selection of drawings in pencil, charcoal and pen and ink. His colored pencil drawings of the elfin-faced Birtwell, a longtime friend and muse, are worth the price of admission on their own.
If Hockney has a weakness, it’s a tendency to flog certain pet ideas and enthusiasms long after they’ve gone stale.
Hockney’s fascination with Picasso and Cubism, for example, has inspired some of his best work, including Artist and Model, a wonderful 1973 etching in which a naked Hockney and clothed Picasso face off over a kitchen table. At once playful and admiring, it captures the tangle of emotions — dread, worship, envy — that young artists often feel toward their artistic elders.
Less successful are some of Hockney’s later forays into Cubist territory.
A group of 1984 drawings, including a portrait of British writer Christopher Isherwood, are so thoroughly disjointed that they border on the grotesque. Hockney’s widely publicized experiments with the camera obscura, a kind of Renaissance-era Etch-A-Sketch, have also had mixed results.
Decent, honest, hard-working
Fortunately, it’s almost impossible to dislike Hockney. Indeed, he comes across as a fundamentally decent, honest, hard-working artist, someone who clearly enjoys the trappings of success but hasn’t been spoiled by them.
What’s more, Hockney seems genuinely fond of the people in his life. In fact, he rarely accepts private commissions, preferring instead to work with a close-knit group of family, friends, lovers and fellow artists.
As a result, “David Hockney: Portraits” often feels like a family affair, with many of the same faces popping up over and over again.
The show’s curators — Sarah Howgate of the National Gallery and Barbara Stern Shapiro of the MFA — highlight this aspect of Hockney’s work right at the start. As visitors enter the exhibit, they’re surrounded by images of Hockney’s real-life family, including portraits of his father, mother and brother.
Many of these works date from the mid-1950s, when Hockney was enrolled at the local Bradford School of Art. They reveal a young artist who, even in his teens, displayed a precocious talent for both drawing and portraiture.
Surprisingly, Hockney continued to paint and sketch his parents long after he’d become an art-world celebrity. The presence of works such as Mother, Bradford, 19 Feb. 1978, a small ink drawing done on the day of his father’s funeral, and My Parents, a loving, if gently humorous double portrait from 1977, gives his work a poignancy rare in contemporary art.
Extended ‘family’
Though family portraits continue to crop up from time to time, the balance of the show is devoted to Hockney’s extended “family” of friends, lovers, art dealers and collectors.
The show’s centerpiece, both literally and symbolically, is a section dominated by three large double portraits, each depicting people who’ve played important roles in Hockney’s life.
The earliest — painted in 1968, shortly after Hockney’s move to California — shows Los Angeles collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman surrounded by objects from their collection. As in many of Hockney’s double portraits, the figures are placed far apart, though whether this is meant as a comment on their relationship or merely a compositional device is hard to tell.
In any case, the young Hockney can’t resist poking fun at the Weismans, giving Fred Weisman a clenched fist and tautly static pose that echo a nearby stone sculpture. Marcia Weisman’s toothy smile, meanwhile, is repeated in the faces on a Northwest Indian totem pole in the background.
Another Hockney favorite is former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler. An early supporter of Hockney’s, Geldzahler, who died in 1994, appears in a number of works, including a 1969 portrait with his then-partner Christopher Scott, as well as several drawings.
Though large-scale paintings such as Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott and Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy are clearly the stars of the show, viewers shouldn’t overlook Hockney’s smaller works. Indeed, while his larger paintings can sometimes seem a bit stiff and schematic, his prints and drawings radiate a lively, engaging intelligence.
Among these more intimate works, look for Hockney’s affectionate portraits of Pop artist Andy Warhol (looking uncharacteristically pensive in a colored-pencil drawing from 1974), actor Dennis Hopper (who appears in a series of small Cubist-inspired photographs) and poet W.H. Auden (whose famously grizzled visage suggests a kind of human-size Shar-Pei).
In these smaller works, as much as his larger paintings, Hockney demonstrates the full range of skills — a keen eye for detail, psychological acumen, artistic talent — that all great portraitists must possess. Clearly, he does more than just pools.
“David Hockney: Portraits” continues through May 14 at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston. Exhibition hours: Mon.-Tues. and Sat.-Sun. 10 a.m.-4:45 p.m. and Wed.-Fri. 10 a.m.-9:45 p.m.

The Art of Absorption – The subjects of David Hockney’s portraits have been totally absorbed into his art and autobiography – By PETER WALSH
WBUR – Boston’s NPR – March 21, 2006.

The biggest crowds at the MFA’s “David Hockney Portraits” hover near a wall of large-format etchings titled “A Rake’s Progress” (1961-63). Based on a famous set of 18th-century satirical images of the same name by William Hogarth, Hockney’s “Rake” etchings are one of the finest achievements of his young career — and probably in the history of English printmaking. Strictly speaking, though, these prints do not even belong in this show.

Despite their autobiographical content, the “Rake” images are not portraits. They make up the first in the three brilliant series of etchings Hockney did in the ’60s, which also include ” Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C. P. Cavafy ” (1966), and “Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm” (1969). But they are not true illustrations, either.

In Hogarth’s originals, a young English prodigal squanders his youth, money, and ultimately his sanity in reckless dissipation. Steeped in Hockney’s own, off-center humor, with his peculiar shapes and oddly abbreviated, doll-like figures, the remake depicts Hockney’s own first trip to New York City , his adventures amid the terrors and temptations of American culture, his first taste of artistic success, and his first contacts with the New York gay scene. Hockney has entirely transformed Hogarth’s narrative — to the point of partly reversing its meaning — by making it into his own memories.

Something quite like this is also going on in the “portraits” in the MFA exhibition. The people in the show — family, friends, lovers, heroes, celebrities, important patrons, as well as near strangers — have been totally absorbed into Hockney’s art and autobiography. These pictures, for the most part, are not about them. They are about him.

To be sure, similar struggles for dominance happen with nearly every powerful portraitist (John Singer Sargent comes to mind). But Hockney’s favorite models appear so often, and are so thoroughly integrated into his life, that they often seem to have no independent existence. Still, Hockney’s personal charm, talents, and skills are all so prodigious that no one seems to mind.

Take the wonderful “Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices” (1965), one of the strongest formal sittings in the show. Hockney’s father — a dapper and eccentric accountant from provincial Bedford , in Yorkshire — sits next to a pile of cubist blocks borrowed from a Leger canvas. The vaguely phallic shapes lined up above his head are, we’re told in a label, brushstrokes borrowed from Abstract Expressionist paintings.
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The senior Hockney’s Cezanne-like face wears an indulgent expression, despite being hemmed in by his son’s work tools. He is, in fact, one of only a handful of the painter’s models who resolutely keep their own identities while being wrapped in Hockney’s art. In “Artist and Model” (1973-74), by contrast, Hockney even manages to upstage his greatest hero, Picasso — making the Master old, wrinkled, and fully clothed, while he portrays himself as young, beautiful, and nude.

Much of cocky energy in these early works comes from Hockney’s mischievous mixing of soda and vinegar — abstract shapes and expressionist splotches with classical realism, deliberate crudeness with breathtaking technical virtuosity, childlike simplicity with bawdy Music Hall humor and homoeroticism. Later on, things calm down quite a bit. The huge talent remains but the chemistry changes. And the explosions happen a lot less often.

Hockey’s large, mid-career portraits in oil never have quite the charm and erotic charge of his drawings and prints, or the early paintings. In key works like “Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott” (1969), Hockey develops a standard set of elements for his double portraits — near photographic style, stark, fashionably modern setting, one casually seated, frontal figure contrasted with another standing stiffly and awkwardly in profile. These paintings are filled with an intriguing, suggestive stillness, but promise psychological depths they never quite deliver.

In the late ’60s, Hockney’s homoerotic work, a hallmark of his entire career, turns to true portraiture. By then, Hockney was living partly in Los Angeles. There he met Peter Schlesinger, a classic Californian in Hockney’s eyes, who became the artist’s lover and favorite model.

Daring and even revolutionary at the time, Hockney’s images of Schlesinger and other beautiful young men seem far less edgy now that erotic male images sell almost as many commercial products as female ones. But their basic point — that the male body, too, could be a sex object — helped bring about just this change in mainstream culture.

For many of his male nudes, Hockney uses traditional techniques, his breathtaking line, and classical references — voluptuous Boucher girls with exposed, upturned buttocks or languorous Ingres odalisques — reversing the gender while leaving in all the original erotic tricks. As beautiful and touching as these images often are, they suffer a bit from the artist’s heavy breathing. More convincing are the equally ravishing paintings and drawings of his friends, Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, stronger for their air of aesthetic detachment.

“A Bigger Splash,” Jack Hazan’s film about Hockney and the breakup of his relationship with Schlesinger, was released in 1974. The movie — a surprise hit in some of America’s more decadent cities — featured many of the same people and paintings in the MFA exhibition. It more or less completed the total fusion of Hockney’s career, life, and relationships with his status as an icon of gay pop culture.

About this time, Hockney’s art begins to stiffen. The brilliant flashes of abstraction, the mind games, the silly shapes, the thrilling, deadly accurate jokes, slowly drain out of the work. As the trajectory of his fame and success move ever upwards in the ’70s and ’80s, Hockney adopts a realist style of icy, almost frightening precision. The brilliant draftsmanship caresses expensive clothes, fashionable furnishings, wealthy faces. Some of these scenes (”Portrait of Sir David Webster,” 1971) are so cold and empty you can hear the rush of the air conditioning.

Sadly, things go mostly down hill from here. There are a few — too few, really — of Hockney’s fascinating, neo-Cubist photo collages from the ’80s. But the visitors thin out in the last galleries and even the sitters start to look bored. The subjects are trendier and older: there are lifeless repetitions of the earlier double portraits, painted in a self-consciously awkward style that — from one so deeply talented — seems pure affectation. There is a wall of dreadful, garishly painted heads — visitors to Hockney’s LA studio. They resemble nothing more vividly than those framed cartoons of patrons in once-trendy restaurants, whose famous subjects have long since moved on.

“David Hockney Portraits” is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA through May 14, 2006. Afterwards, the exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 11 — September 4, 2006) and then to the National Portrait Gallery, London (October 12, 2006 — January 21, 2007).

Found: the self-portrait David Hockney gave his first girlfriend almost 50 years ago

The newly-rediscovered painting is now on show in Boston – By MARTIN BAILEY – The Art Newspaper – May 30, 2006

LONDON. This rediscovered self-portrait of David Hockney dates from 1954, when the artist was a 17-year-old student at Bradford School of Art. Abandoned in a garage and then an attic, it has recently been reunited with its owner, the artist’s first girlfriend, after nearly half a century.

The Art Newspaper has traced the astonishing saga of Hockney’s earliest self-portrait, giving an unexpected insight into his teenage years. The picture has just gone on display in an an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (until 14 May), although the real story behind the work is not revealed in the catalogue. The show then travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London.

The 1955 Christmas “insect ball” at the Bradford Art School. David Hockney is at the back, with Terry Kirkbride in a kilt on the right. The students made papier mâché insects to decorate the room. Ms Kirkbride believes that the mural was painted by Hockney, which would make it a previously unpublished work
In 1957 Hockney was in his final year at Bradford School of Art. Abstract Expressionist Alan Davie (born 1920) was coming to visit for a few days’ tutoring, and the young Hockney helped out a fellow student who had no hardboard for painting. He gave the impecunious girl two panels which he had used earlier.

We can identify the fellow student as 16-year-old Terry Kirkbride. During Davie’s teaching sessions, she painted over the larger board, on which Hockney had originally done a landscape. Terry never used the panel with the self-portrait, leaving it in her “studio”, a dilapidated wooden garage adjacent to her landlady’s house. Shortly afterwards, she left Bradford in rushed circumstances, and although taking most of her possessions, the self-portrait was abandoned.

Discovery

The landlady, Josie Smith, later moved to Sheffield, and the self-portrait was rescued from the garage and moved to the attic of her new home. In 1999, when she was clearing her attic, she came across the picture, remembering that it had belonged to her lodger in the 1950s. She recalled that Terry had studied with Hockney, and wondered whether it might be a self-portrait.

The problem was how to trace her lodger. Until the 1960s Ms Smith had kept in touch with Terry’s cousin. Although they had not met for decades, Ms Smith wrote to the cousin, who had remained at the same address, enclosing a letter for forwarding to Terry. By good fortune, it eventually reached the recipient.

Ms Smith wrote: “I’ve now rediscovered a painting among the clutter of half a century… much damaged from many years in garages. We think this is probably an unwanted student exercise by David Hockney.” Ms Kirkbride had completely forgotten about the picture, and in April 2000 she finally collected the work.

The 18 x 14 inch board was very battered. Four years later Ms Kirkbride contacted the NPG, asking whether the work was of interest and for advice on how it could be conserved. Her letter could not have come at a better moment, since the gallery was preparing the “David Hockney Portraits” exhibition. A photograph of the picture was shown to Hockney, who remembered the work, and the painting was conserved for display.

NPG curator Sarah Howgate was delighted to be able to include the self-portrait as the first work in the show. She dates it to around 1954, three years before it was given to Ms Kirkbride. Ms Howgate believes it was painted at the Hockney family home in Hutton Terrace, in the Bradford suburb of Eccleshill. The scene in the background could well be the view from the window. She says the painting “bears the hallmarks of Hockney’s later work, such as the colouring.” The intense scrutiny and concentration are typical of his self-portraits.

Romance

Last month we tracked down Terry Kirkbride, who is still an artist. She told us the story of the self-portrait and explained the fate of the other painting, which she took with her when she hurriedly left Bradford. “Once Hockney became famous, I looked at the second board he had given me, on which I had painted an abstract work. I got advice on whether the overpaint could be removed, but was told this would be very difficult. When I split up with my husband in 1979, I left the picture behind. I have no idea what happened to it.”

There is another twist to the story. Although she has never before spoken out about it, Terry was Hockney’s first girlfriend. They went out with each other for just over a year, in 1956-7, often going to the cinema, with David walking her home. This was before Hockney became open about being gay, in the early 1960s.

The only passing reference to Hockney’s early romances is in Peter Webb’s biography, in which he wrote that “David’s sexuality was rather a mystery” to his fellow Bradford students. Webb added one more sentence, saying that Hockney was “very friendly with two college girls, Barbara and Terri [sic].” The last time that Terry Kirkbride saw Hockney was when she came down to London for a dance at the Royal College of Art in 1959. Although by this time they had split up, she vividly remembers the occasion: “I had never seen anything like it before—wild people, the clothing, the dancing.”

Ms Kirkbride might meet Hockney again, at the opening of the NPG exhibition in October. This would be their first encounter for 47 years. “David had been such a good friend and an important part of my early life,” she told us. And why did she never paint over the self-portrait, when she was short of board? “Sentimental reasons,” she says.

A letter from David Hockney, published in the Guardian Website, Saturday 25 February 2006.

I can tell you don’t seem to get it. I don’t think the MPs know what they are actually doing. I do not have a high opinion of them. The case against the medical evidence about smoking is this. They have got all their statistics I have read them. I have read what they shout on the uglified cigarette packets, but I will make this observation.

In the Labour party – let’s get a lot more human in our observations – the 80-year-old Mr Benn is a happy pipe smoker; Mr Robin Cook took up “healthy” fell walking, it killed him; same with Mr Smith; Tony Banks another non-smoking vegetarian health fiend falls over with a stroke at the age of 61.

What does one deduce from this? That fate plays part in life, that mysterious forces are at work on life, it is not all “material”. The medical statistician cannot grasp this, but almost everyone else does. This is why people will always ignore the prude and prig.

Gorrdon Brrrown is a prig P.R.I.G., a dreary atheistic Calvinistic prig, who I’m sure will never be elected in England. He goes along with a “health lobby” whose view of life itself I detest.

I have utter contempt for it. I feel I am entitled to my opinion. I don’t mind prigs but when they want to take my little corner as well, I have a right to argue against their dreary view of life contaminating mine.

I don’t think the press know their readers anymore. I am spending time in provincial England. There is an anger you don’t seem to know.

This utterly over the top legislation is tyrannical (mine Host gone for a Burton) and is spreading a dreadful intolerance.

New Labour has become the most bossy prober into lives. It comes across as very anti-English. The first thing they did was set up a parliament for the Welsh and one for the Scots. England is Britain according to them.

Mr Blair would not give a holiday for children for the Queen Mother’s funeral; he did not want them to see the symbolism. The BBC didn’t even see it.

Watching it I pointed out Van Eyck, Massacio Veronese, all the European grand tradition of pictures was there. To hell with it they say. Yet people were moved by it. The Daily Mirror thought no one would be interested. They haven’t a clue.

You ask me: “What didn’t we report?”. You didn’t report that you could smoke in hospitals and prisons but not pubs. It’s barmy and just where bossiness leads. I repeat you should be ashamed of yourselves what you are supporting. There are plenty of no-smoking places, leave things to their natural path.

It’s not just your job to give us an opinion but actually to report on things. You missed the ridiculous side of this. Wake up.

David Hockney, London

Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2006-07 Season to Include Deborah Voigt’s First Salome – By Ben Mattison – 13 Jan 2006 – PlaybillArts.

The Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 2006-07 season will include new productions of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, Strauss’s Salome, and Verdi’s Il trovatore, the company announced yesterday.

The new Salome, directed by Francesca Zambello, will star soprano Deborah Voigt, making her much-anticipated first staged appearance in the title role. Lyric music director Andrew Davis will conduct.

Voigt, a universally acclaimed singer of Strauss, sang Salome at a concert performance at Tanglewood in 2001, but a staged performance has been slow in coming, in part because of the singer’s size. She has lost a large amount of weight since undergoing gastric-bypass surgery in June 2004.

Iphigénie en Tauride, a co-production with San Francisco Opera, will be seen in Chicago in September and October before moving to SFO in June 2007. Susan Graham will sing the title role in both cities; Robert Carsen is the director. Louis Langrée, the music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival, will conduct in his Lyric debut.

Il trovatore will star Dolora Zajick as Azucena; Bruno Bartoletti, the Lyric’s artistic director emeritus, will conduct. The production, directed by David McVicar, is “Goya-inspired,” according to a press release, and set in Spain.

The season will open with Puccini’s Turandot, in a David Hockney production directed by Garnett Bruce, and will also include Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, with Dina Kuznetsova as Juliette and Matthew Polenzani and Massimo Giordano sharing the tole of Roméo; a holiday production of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus; Mozart’s Così fan tutte with Thomas Allen and Nathan Gunn; and Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, with Isabel Bayrakdarian, Patricia Racette, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, making her Lyric debut.

The company will also present a “Subscriber Appreciation Concert” featuring soprano Renée Fleming on October 6. Davis will conduct.

The Lyric also announced that its subscription prices would remain unchanged in 2006-07. Subscriptions go on sale in February.

Hockney Night – Boston Night of David Hockney – courtesy of Artforum.com.

Hockney Night – Boston – 02.22.06.

“This is going to be one of those cozy Boston events,” said my friend as she steered us into the Museum of Fine Arts parking lot. We maneuvered past crowds of fragile, pink-cheeked men and ladies in mink moving towards the gala for “David Hockney Portraits,” a show co-organized by the MFA and London’s National Portrait Gallery in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Caught incongruously in a group photo with other “sitters” flown in for the occasion (apparently at the artist’s expense) was Chloe McHugh, teenage daughter of California-based photographer Jim McHugh—otherwise the average age was sixty-something. While the show itself felt peculiarly alive (like all collections of portraits), those subjects who were actually in attendance—as easily distinguishable from the Boston crowd as peacocks from penguins—became hyperreal versions of themselves. As the real-life, laughing group portrait (in which the adorable artist of the moment sat between the wild-haired James Levine of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and his brother Tom) broke up, another friend in a gorgeous plaid shirt, cummerbund, cravat, and white sneakers told us that Hockney had painted him five times, “and none are in the show! Isn’t that total crap, to use the technical term?”

There’s not much to say about portraiture, possibly because portraits say so much. My companion and I most enjoyed the drawings that married virtuosity with plain old glamour, especially the delicious Celia in a Black Slip Reclining, Paris. Dec. 1973 (Elizabeth Peyton, eat your heart out!), while a photocollage of friends and Mum playing Scrabble tiled one homely moment on another, revealing something living in each individual. Of everyone, perhaps Henry Geldzahler’s presence/absence was felt most strongly, from his direct stare, glasses glinting, out of the painting in 1969’s Henry Geldzahler and Howard Scott to a 1994 pencil sketch showing him on his deathbed. Sarah Howgate, contemporary curator at the National Portrait Gallery and cocurator of the show with the MFA’s Barbara Shapiro, told us that Geldzahler had had no mirrors in his house but lived “surrounded by portraits of himself by the artists he loved.”

Left: David Hockney with exhibition curator Barbara Shapiro and Malcolm Rogers. Right: Arthur Lambert, Charlie Scheips, and David Hockney pose before their respective portraits.

While taking on a buffet that featured—in a nod to the artist’s homeland—an upmarket version of Yorkshire pudding, we heard a somewhat incongruous performance by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Boston and had a conversation with Lawrence Weschler. “I could be walking around listening to my own thoughts,” he mused: He’s sat for (and written much on) Hockney but also happened to have recorded the MFA’s audio tour. I took the opportunity to tell him I love and habitually reread Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, his 1982 biography of Robert Irwin. “Funny you should say that, because every time I write something on David, Bob Irwin calls and says, ‘I read the whole thing, it’s really bothering me, I disagree profoundly with everything,’” replied Weschler. “And when I write on Bob, David calls and says exactly the same thing.”

Twilight of the Bad Boy – David Hockney is older and more British but still just as mischievous – By RICHARD LACAYO/BRIDLINGTON – Sunday, Feb. 12, 2006

Just as Goya did, David Hockney is going deaf. He has been for years. It doesn’t keep him out of many conversations, though. He loves to talk, and with the help of two hearing aids, he can follow the flow of most discussions well enough. He’s always happy to talk about art. He’s particularly happy to talk about portraiture, especially since his own portrait work, more than five decades of it, is the subject of an important show that will open Feb. 26 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He’s very happy to talk about the shortcomings of photography, which he wants you to know is hopeless when it comes to representing the visible world. “The camera can’t see space,” he says. “It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.”
But we’ll get back to art in a moment. What Hockney really wants to talk about lately is smoking. To his immense annoyance, the British government plans by 2008 to ban it in nearly all workplaces, in restaurants and even in pubs that serve food. A few weeks ago, leading me around his sturdy brick house in Bridlington, a British seaside resort town not far from where Hockney was born, he’s steaming. “You know that Hitler didn’t smoke?” he asks suddenly, as though daring me to disagree that this alone might explain der Führer’s lust for world conquest. Last fall on British radio Hockney debated Julie Morgan, the Labour Member of Parliament who spearheaded the ban. “Death awaits you whether you smoke or not,” he warned her. “Pubs are not health clubs.” As for New York City, now that it has its own smoking ban, he’s through with it. “Little Emily with asthma,” he sighs. “She has taken over Manhattan.”
So although it has been a while since he was the bad boy of British painting, a title that passed years ago to Damien Hirst–he of the dissected sharks–Hockney still takes pleasure in casting aside the latest standard of middle-class morality. He has aged, and in some ways he has mellowed, but he has not gone soft. He’s 68, a time when many artists are repeating themselves or fading into the margins. But Hockney has always managed to take his art down enough new paths–double portraits, photocollages, Cubist landscapes–to keep himself, if not always cutting edge, then at least fresh and relevant. He’s in the small club of living artists whose work has fetched more than $2 million at auction ($2,869,500 in 2002 for his 1966 Portrait of Nick Wilder). His devotion to representational art has sometimes made him seem out of step, sometimes in. Two years ago, he was one of just a handful of artists of his generation to be included in the Whitney Biennial, the New York City museum survey that tries, however bumptiously, to define what’s happening. The curators credited him with “serving as a model for painting’s renewed focus on the intimate and the figurative.” And with the Boston show, which will travel to Los Angeles and London, Hockney is more visible than he has been for some time.

THIS IS, AFTER ALL, SOMEBODY WHO started his career by remaking not just his work but himself. In 1961, when he first visited the U.S., not long after finishing London’s Royal College of Art, Hockney was thrilled by the freedom and challenge of Manhattan. He responded by bleaching his hair blond, his trademark look for years to come. But his real transformation began three years later, when he discovered Los Angeles and refashioned himself into somebody even more California than the Beach Boys. So heartfelt and persuasive was his embrace of L.A. that within a few years his lambent paintings of lawn sprinklers, swimming pools and palm trees became part of everybody’s mental picture of the place. Although he saw it all through eyes schooled in Piero della Francesca and Picasso, you could tell that what he loved above all was simply how of-the-moment L.A. was, with its sunstruck hedonism and emerging sexual freedoms, so unlike the confines of postwar Britain. It’s useful to recall that one of Hockney’s enduring contributions to the history of the nude–we mean this–is the tan line. That’s not something he would have seen very much of back in Yorkshire.
All the same, in his 60s, Hockney has been looking homeward. Since last spring, Yorkshire is exactly where he has been, living and painting in the rolling farmland he has known since childhood. And he has gone native again, just as much as he ever did in California, although this time it’s in the place he’s native to. In California Hockney was all about brightly striped shirts and mismatched pastel socks. Bridlington Hockney goes in for charcoal tweeds and plaid slippers. The blond hair has gone gray. The big round eyeglasses have been exchanged for wire ovals. His socks match. Hockney has begun looking like a man who has found his psychological default mode. It’s the eternal English householder.
Even so, he’s not the type to keep an ordinary household. His downstairs parlor is crammed with tall cartons that contain the stretched canvases he has delivered regularly from London. On the stairway leading to his studio, somebody has tracked bright red paint up the carpet. Hockney lives here with John Fitzherbert, his companion for more than a decade, and a studio assistant, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima. Hockney still keeps a place in London and another in L.A., where he plans to return in May. But until then he’s in Yorkshire to paint landscapes through all four seasons, a natural cycle he lost touch with in California. “I was coming here for years with my mother,” he says. “To paint a landscape, you need to know the place quite well–where the sun is going to come up, how it will move.”

hat’s pretty much the guiding philosophy behind Hockney’s portraiture too. He rarely accepts commissions, so almost all his portraits are of friends, lovers and family. Many of his pictures feel intimate even when they don’t involve an old boyfriend hoisting himself buck naked out of the water, as in Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. Some of Hockney’s most interesting canvases are the double portraits he started doing in the 1960s, pictures of people, like the writer Christopher Isherwood and his lover Don Bachardy, whom Hockney knew well. In My Parents, the physical space between the two figures becomes a psychological separation as well. “I am very interested in space,” he says. “Especially the space between two people–which, after all, is what a lot of people want to eliminate. All creatures want union.”
The Boston show will have more than 150 portraits in almost every medium that Hockney has worked in, including the intricate photocollages he made in the 1980s under the influence of Picasso’s Cubism, a recurring obsession. “People feel that the world depicted through photography is absolutely real,” he complains. “But it’s not. That’s just a tiny aspect of reality.” So to make The Scrabble Game, 1 January 1983, Hockney combined dozens of separate photos from a succession of moments, allowing the scene to play out in time as well as space. The picture also presents itself in the way the eye actually sees, as a sequence of darting glances. In pictures like that, Hockney beats the camera at its own game, using photographs to prove the insufficiency of any one photograph.
He often talks about his art as though it were an assault on the still formidable cultural pre-eminence of photography. That’s a big job, but Hockney gives the impression that he has the energy for it. One morning, as we’re driving around the Yorkshire countryside, he gets out of the car to approach a large tree he painted the day before. “You see,” he asks, “how its branches bend down and then curve up again?” To demonstrate, he abruptly lifts both his arms into the air. “The life force pushes it up, then gravity pulls it down, but it insists on rising back up!” He’s holding a cigarette, of course. The smile on his face is just this side of triumphant. It doesn’t take long to realize that he’s talking about himself.

FUMING – David Hockney on painting, bohemia and freedom of choise – By KAREN WRIGHT – December 2005 / January 2006

David Hockney opens the door to his house. He’s wearing a bright turquoise shirt that almost matches his eyes and he’s fuming with anger. ‘Come in,’ he says curtly. He stares at me fiercely. ‘What has happened to your magazine? Where is the painting?’ Then he sighs deeply and invites me into his studio, which is at the rear of the house, to see what he’s been doing. And so we go into the house, out the back door and on through the garden he has created of rocks that, rather bizarrely, resemble the San Fernando Mountains north of his Hollywood home.

To enter his studio is to endure yet another geographical shift – an experience that is like walking into the Yorkshire landscape. One wall is extensively hung with large, colour-soaked canvases of fields and hills and, above all, skies. Painted electric blue, the latter are filled with scudding clouds that seem, almost perceptibly, to move across the canvas. ‘They are hard to paint – they move so fast,’ observes Hockney, watching where my eyes have settled. For the past few months Hockney has been spending increasing amounts of time in East Yorkshire, near to where his sister lives. The works we are looking at are rendered in oil on canvas, in contrast to the watercolour works he has been engaged with over the last few years. This, in turn, has necessitated a change in methodology. Watercolour means that one has to work quickly and leisurely without mistakes, whereas oil allow for corrections and a more leisurely pace of production. Using watercolour also meant that Hockney had to work flat, sitting ensconced in his car with large watercolour blocks on his lap. He now works standing behind his easel, literally within the landscape.

A knock on the door heralds another visitor: Celia Birtwell, who is almost more famous for being in the nation’s favourite painting in the Tate’s collections (according to a recent survey), Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clarke and Percy (1971), than for being a fabric designer. She is still beautiful, elegant and stylish even though now well into her sixties. ‘How are you?’ she enquires of David. ‘Frustrated,’ he says. This time he’s not talking about Modern Painters but rather his ongoing and much-publicized campaign against the British government’s plans to ban smoking in pubs. ‘I hate this government,’ he mutters. ‘Tony Blair is like a prefect: he would be the one saying “Don’t smoke, Hockney!” and I would be the one saying “Piss off, Blair!”’

Hockney’s campaign is not about smoking, he continues, it is about people’s right to have a choice about whether or not they choose to smoke. ‘We are all going to die anyway. I would rather smoke than be on Prozac.’ I remember being with David in Los Angeles and opening one of his well-organized plan-chests only to discover row upon row of beautifully arranges packets of cigarettes. Even as a student at the Royal College of Art during the 1960s he was famous for smoking Lucky Strikes – a sign of true sophistication in those days – and for the gold jacket he wore to special occasions. One of the reasons he abandoned the idea of spending all his time in LA, and decided instead to spend in restaurants and bars. I remember once leaving a bar in LA to see if Hockney, who was outside, smoking, was all right and almost being arrested for trying to leave with a drink in my hand. It now looks like England will be the same pretty soon.

Hockney turns and glares at both Celia and me. ‘There would be no bohemia without smoking,’ he tells us fiercely. He pulls out some books of plates, turning to scan the bar scenes by Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec. It is true that the faces in the bars are literally lost in wreaths of smoke. Over the years I have pored over countless books of drawings and paintings, not to mention scrolls and sculptures, peering at line and detail with things fresh. This ability to look has led him to make discoveries that no art historian lost in study of context could. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, Hockney’s book on the use of optical devices by some of the world’s most famous artists, has now been translated into 12 languages. He is currently working on an additional section of new comparisons. Scholars may be angry that they did not make these discoveries themselves, but increasingly his findings are being accepted into the canon as something they endorse.

‘Look what I found in Paris.” He rummages around on a table unearthing a page with photographs pasted together. ‘Picasso would have known this Egyptian baboon sculpture in the Louvre he states firmly. ‘This must be the source for his sculpture of Baboon and Young (1951).’ Sure enough, when we compared the seated baboon from the Louvre to the Picasso, which he’d seen at the Museé National Picasso Paris, I was convinced that Hockeny is dead right. ‘I have sent it to John Richardson to respond to’ he tells me. It is an old-fashioned form of connoisseurship, this making of connections, and something that happens far too infrequently these days. To Hockney, who carries images in his mind that relate to everything he sees, this approach comes naturally.

But back to smoking – Hockney is currently engages in a campaign against The Guardian, a newspaper that regularly toes to the government line. He has been bombarding them with letters that they are currently refusing to print. And, he is incensed. Celia tells him that he’s going about it the wrong way. ‘They don’t know who you are! They don’t know that you are someone who smokes and produces these wonderful works,’ she exclaims, and then gestures at a wall covered with the images of fields drenched in the yellow heat of the English summer. ‘Get them to come to the studio and photograph you with this wall of work. Let them understand the context that you are coming from. Let them learn from these paintings.’ We gaze at a computer loaded with a PowerPoint presentation of pictures of Hockney, poised at his easel, in the setting he is painting. Celia is right, I feel. No one can dismiss Hockney when he is engages in his work. He is a pure painter revealing through paint the essence of what he is engaged in.

Hockney is going back up to Yorkshire tomorrow. ‘Last week I was painting on the side of a road. In three hours only one car drove by… it is so beautiful there,’ he enthuses. ‘I could paint the Cotswolds, but you can imagine the traffic.’ I giggle, thinking of the man who is probably England’s best loved artist perched by the side of the road and the inevitable traffic chaos that would ensue.

Hockney’s People – A LACMA exhibit, the first solely of portraits, reflects the evolution of the artist. – By BARBARA ISENBERG – Los Angeles Times – June 06, 2006

David HOCKNEY still recalls vividly the day, in his teens, when he first painted a portrait of his father. The older Hockney bought him the canvas, then set up a mirror to watch his son work. Although his father complained that “the colors were a bit dark,” Hockney says, “that was the first painting I ever sold.”

Hockney, now 68, captured his father many times over the years in sketchbooks, oil and in a monumental double portrait with the artist’s mother. On Feb. 19, 1978, the day of his father’s funeral, he drew his mother, her coat buckled up, eyes cast downward. “It was my way of sitting with her,” he has said.

The British artist, who has made his home in Los Angeles for much of the last 40 years, may be best known for his colorful landscapes and sun-drenched swimming pools, but portraits weave through his 50 years of art-making. Returning again and again to family and friends in paintings, photo-collages, drawings, watercolors and prints, Hockney examines and reexamines the face, the body and relationships.

More than 160 of those works, including his 1955 “Portrait of My Father,” will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in “David Hockney Portraits,” the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the artist’s portraiture. Included will be early photo albums and dozens of sketchbooks on view publicly for the first time.

“Every three or four years, I go back to portraits,” Hockney said Friday, dapper in a gray suit and white beret as he walked through the exhibition as it was being installed. “It’s a habit, I suppose.”

LACMA Senior Curator Stephanie Barron prefers to think of it as Hockney’s “ongoing concern.”

“Looking at the portraits over a span of years provides a window into the nature of the relationship between the artist and sitter,” Barron says. “The portraits also reflect the style and medium that Hockney is working in at that particular moment.”

In addition to Hockney’s late parents, there are self-portraits, portraits of his sister Margaret, brother Paul, lovers and friends. He may have drawn, painted or photographed a few literary and art world luminaries he didn’t know well, but the bulk of his portraiture, and the exhibition, highlights such Hockney regulars as British textile designer Celia Birtwell, the late museum curator Henry Geldzahler, friends and lovers Peter Schlesinger and Gregory Evans.

“It’s a visual diary of his life and his loves,” observes Sarah Howgate, contemporary curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery, which organized the exhibition with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with LACMA. “I find the exhibition incredibly moving.”

Hockney’s 2005 painting of Evans, for instance, was painted while Evans was waiting for the phone call that his seriously ill mother had died. Evans leans against a wall, eyes down and hands clasped in front of him.

“I was willing to pose because I trusted him,” he says. “It was a very intimate thing too, because it was a way of David being able to acknowledge my sadness.”

Art collector Leon Banks, a retired L.A. pediatrician who has known Hockney since the ’60s, says they have often spoken about why Hockney doesn’t bring in professional models.

“He says he needs the interaction with the sitter,” says Banks, who has sat for Hockney many times over the years. “He likes to wait until he knows people.”

Banks is one of several friends Hockney painted in his Hollywood Hills studio last year. Some, like Evans and Banks, were painted alone, but the artist also used the canvas to explore relationships in works similar to the double portraits he did most famously in the 1960s and ’70s. Large canvases included in the exhibition feature such familiar Hockney sitters as Gemini GEL’s Sidney B. Felsen with his wife, Joni Weyl, and photographer Jim McHugh and his daughter Chloe.

“The Photographer and his Daughter,” one of the 2005 paintings in the show, places McHugh in a chair looking at the teenage Chloe, who stands a few feet away.

“I’ve known Chloe all her life,” says Hockney, “and I’ve done quite a few drawings of her. She is just about to become a woman, and the way she posed is fascinating.”

That pose, with her hand on her hip, came in part from exasperation, confides Chloe, now 16. Never mind that the McHughs were at the studio for four days, six hours a day. That was only after Hockney had started painting.

“At the very beginning, we didn’t know if I’d sit or stand, and we tried a bunch of different poses,” Chloe says. “We put in different tables and chairs, and it took us two hours just to figure out how we were going to stand or sit.”

The LACMA show includes a number of photograph albums from the ’60s used as memory devices in creating such iconic paintings as “Beverly Hills Housewife,” a 1966 portrait of Betty Freeman, a Los Angeles photographer and arts patron, and “American Collectors,” a portrait of Marcia and Fred Weisman. The photo studies, mostly Polaroids, are in albums in specially designed cases and open to pages that refer to adjacent paintings. Photographs of the Weismans, for instance, illustrate rejected poses as well as details from the pose Hockney chose.

About 40 sketchbooks from the last four decades are displayed in two contiguous galleries. “Every suit I have made, I have big pockets for the sketchbooks,” Hockney says, opening wide his gray jacket to reveal an enormous inside pocket. “If you carry sketchbooks, you start drawing things you’d never otherwise draw. You’ve got the equipment.” Fifteen of these sketchbooks, covering 18 months in 2002-03, are accessible via a touch-screen monitor installed in the galleries. Although the actual sketchbooks are open to just one page, viewers may leaf through the entire book on-screen. (In addition to the usual exhibition catalog, the LACMA bookstore will sell copies of the sketchbook DVD for $34.95.)

The sketchbooks and even the wall signs, which re-create Hockney’s distinctive script, were ways of personalizing the show, Barron says.

She also has placed throughout the show chairs and loveseats similar to those in Hockney’s 2005 paintings, and attempts to visually link newer and older works. Large openings from one gallery to the next permit viewers to look back and ahead. This is particularly noticeable in the last gallery, where, while standing amid the large-scale double portraits of his ‘05 canvases, the viewer may look off to the right and see the ’60s paintings. On the exit wall, in a sort of reprise, are photographs of about 60 images from the show.

As Barron took Hockney through the exhibition, where some works were still being hung, he spun about, looking behind him at his past, surrounded by his recent work.

There was no visible trace of jet lag, despite his having arrived in Los Angeles just the evening before. His arrival here had been postponed several times because of his continued work on landscapes near Bridlington, the Yorkshire seaside resort town not far from where he worked in the fields as a boy.

Back and forth he goes, between Los Angeles and Bridlington, portraits and landscapes. He is chronicling the hills, trees and sky of Yorkshire in every season, a project he thinks will take many more months.

Although he is clearly eager to get back to Britain, Hockney’s affection for L.A. is apparent: “I’ve been away from Los Angeles for nearly a year, and you realize why you’re here — the marvelous light. You can get some lovely sunny mornings in Yorkshire, but they’re quite rare.”

Hockney portraits article taken from Yorkshire Post.

A STUNNING display of David Hockney portraits is to be shown at a new exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery next year.
As part of its 150th celebrations the London gallery will reveal 50 years of his pictures of loved ones as well as some of himself.
The work will show pictures of people such as his close friend and lover Gregory Evans and another good friend, textile designer Celia Birtwell.
One of the Bradford-born artists’ best-known works, the double portrait Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, had its first outing at the gallery in 1971 and is to return from the Tate for the new show, which will take place from October 12, 2006 until January 21, 2007.
Hockney became fascinated with portraiture while a teenager, when he painted Portrait of My Father (1955). Although portraiture has been a consistent thread running through Hockney’s work, this will be the first exhibition devoted solely to the genre.
The exhibition presents a visual diary of Hockney’s life and artistic preoccupations as well as providing studies of some of the leading cultural figures of the 20th century including Andy Warhol, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden.
Sandy Nairne, the gallery’s director, said: ”We are working very closely with David to go back 50 years of his portraiture.”
A set of stamps featuring images from the gallery’s collections will also be issued by the Royal Mail to mark the anniversary but it is known whether Hockney works would be among them.

Hockney makes a £2.6m splash at auction – courtesy of Guardian.co.uk.

The record price for a David Hockney painting was smashed again last night after one of his most familiar works fetched £2.6m at auction, capping an extraordinary week for art sales in London and New York.

A crisp, clean work that depicts the instant after someone dives into a swimming pool, The Splash is one of the most iconic images of the mid-60s and Hockney’s first years in California.

It easily beat the previous high of £1.9m set by the painter’s lawn-sprinkler picture A Neat Lawn (1967) just six weeks ago.

“We priced it above the world record because it’s the most iconic pool available,” Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby’s European chairman of contemporary art, said.

The sale came in a week where an estimated £260m was spent by buyers during London’s annual slew of high-profile art auctions, the highest figure ever recorded for the British art market.

Sotheby’s has taken a total of £109.3m during the last few days, while Christie’s sold £87m of paintings on Tuesday night alone. Boosted by a contemporary art auction at Sotheby’s tonight, some estimates suggest that the week’s total will reach over £320m, double that of last year.

On Monday, Klimt’s glittering Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) fetched a reported £73m in New York in what is thought to be the highest sum ever paid for a single painting.

Some have compared the current buoyancy of the London art market to the feverish days of the late 1980s, when the involvement of big-budget financial speculators fuelled record prices.

Encouraged by the weak dollar, American buyers in particular were out in force in London this week.

“A lot of American collectors who haven’t bid in recent sales came back in because there might not ever be another opportunity to buy works of this quality,” Helena Newman, a board director of Sotheby’s Europe, told the Independent.

“In the room bidding [on Monday] there were more people sitting there than I have ever seen before, including a lot of new people – and a few who had never been at auctions before.”

Hockney’s The Splash is the second painting in a series of three, all in the Bradford-born artist’s distinctive bright and clean style; A Bigger Splash is in the Tate’s collection in London and A Little Splash is in private hands.

Held in a private collection in California for the past 20 years and once owned by movie mogul David Geffen, the painting had been estimated to sell for between £2.2m and £3m. It sold for £25,000 when it last came up for auction, at Sotheby’s in London in 1973.

Last night’s auction also contained pieces by other high-profile artists including Andy Warhol and Peter Doig, and raised a total of just over £30m.

Hockney donates huge work to Tate by Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent, Guardian.

David Hockney has given the largest painting he has ever made – a landscape 12 metres long by five metres tall (40ft by 15ft) – to the Tate.

The work, Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), is a monumental-scale view of a coppice in Hockney’s native Yorkshire, between Bridlington and York. It was painted on 50 individual canvases, mostly working in situ, over five weeks last winter.

Although Hockney settled in Los Angeles in 1978, he has always spent Christmas at his mother’s house in Bridlington. Four years ago, he began to work there seriously, splitting his time between Yorkshire and California, with the rolling chalk hills around Bridlington the focus of his art.

Trees especially have caught his attention. In 2006, he made a series of five oil paintings of Woldgate Woods, returning to the same spot between March and November to chart the drama of the changing of the seasons.

Each of those works was made up of six panels, and for Bigger Trees Near Warter Hockney scaled up his efforts to produce a single complete work of 50 panels that fit together like a jigsaw.

He said that trees were “like faces – every one is different. Nature doesn’t repeat itself”. Winter trees were particularly difficult to capture, he said. “You have to observe carefully; there is a randomness. Human beings want to avoid randomness, but you certainly see it in these winter trees.”

The clump of trees is dominated by a mighty sycamore that sits in the foreground of the picture, its curling branches spreading over 30 of Hockney’s canvases. “They were probably planted 150 years ago, and they left room for the trees to grow,” he said.

Hockney started Bigger Trees Near Warter on January 12, when he made initial paintings of the scene over six canvases, working in the open air.

On a trip to LA, looking at images of his Woldgate Woods paintings, he had the idea of working up the same scene over a much bigger scale, figuring out how he could do so – without a ladder, and in a small house in Bridlington. “The enormous 19th-century oil paintings like The Coronation of Napoleon in the Louvre were made in specially designed studios.” Hockney wanted to avoid working on a ladder or on scaffolding however: “The trouble is that with something like this you need to step back. Artists have been killed stepping back from ladders.”

First, Hockney sketched a grid showing how the scene would fit together over 50 panels. Then he began to work on individual panels in situ. As he worked on them, they were photographed and made into a computer mosaic so that he could chart his progress, since he could have only six panels on the wall at any one time. Gradually, with the help of the constantly updated computer mosaic, Hockney built up the picture.

The work had to be created quickly, since not only did he have a deadline in the shape of the Royal Academy show, but he also needed to get it done before spring kicked in and the trees came into leaf. Finally, the artist rented a small warehouse where he was able to see the complete work for the first time.

The work can now be shown in its entirety in Tates Modern, Britain and Liverpool, though Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota doubted there was a wall large enough at Tate St Ives to take the whole work. But it can also be seen in halves or quarters. The complete work will go on display at Tate Britain next year.

I smoke for my mental health article about David Hockney from The Guardian.

Following our G2 special on the smoking ban, artist David Hockney offers a personal view on why he will always be devoted to cigarettes

On July 1 2007, the most grotesque piece of social engineering will begin in England: the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces, imposed easily by a political and media elite. They think it will lead to healthier people and a cleaner atmosphere. They believe they can change people easily. The science of marketing has been absorbed by them and they think they can control everybody. I don’t think they can. People will stay at home and do drugs instead – legal and illegal.

I have lived in California for a number of years. They started smoking bans, but they didn’t affect smokers that much. In California you move around in your own private space. If one goes to a public space, say the opera or Disney Hall, then because the climate is ideal the smoker can just step outside, at all times of the year. Many restaurants have gardens and the bans have never really bothered me. But something else has happened in California since the bans came in, unreported by the media, and it took me a while to notice because I have spent the past seven years working in England.

The amount of drugs advertised on television tells me what has replaced tobacco (although 20% still smoke): painkillers, Prozac and antidepressants, mostly prescription drugs – you just tell the doctor what you need. When prescription drugs are advertised in the press there is always a lot of small print listing side effects, and on television you get a speedy talking voice listing the side effects. You perhaps hear one word in four – paralysis, diarrhoea, death, headaches. I expect it all to come here. Drugs (legal and illegal) are the world’s largest business, and one can understand why, since they make us feel better.

I know about fanatical anti-smokers – my father was one of the first (although his eldest son has outlived him and smoked until he was 70, and I’m still smoking at almost 70 – indeed, my birthday is nine days after the ban). I smoke for my mental health. I think it’s good for it, and I certainly prefer its calming effects to the pharmaceutical ones (side effects unknown).

Well, you say, smoking has dreadful side effects. Certainly on some people, but not on all. So we should ask the British Medical Association to explain Denis Thatcher smoking Senior Service (unfiltered) and dying at 88, or Kurt Vonnegut living till 84 after smoking Pall Mall cigarettes for 70 years. What is the explanation? Nobody seems to ask and no one gives any explanation.

In the late 90s the ex-mighty New York Times was very anti-tobacco. I kept writing letters to them. None was published. When Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, died at the age of 92, there was an obituary in the New York Times. Three days later there was the most foolish letter which said that Mr Deng was a very bad example to the young because he always had a Panda cigarette in his hand or mouth.

I was appalled that they had printed this, and wrote to them suggesting Mr Deng had lived a very long life – how long do you expect people to live? – and the logic of his argument would be that Adolf Hitler was a very good example for the young as he didn’t smoke. It wasn’t published, and I began to realise the New York Times was no longer a serious newspaper. After that I was sceptical about everything I read in newspapers.

Meanwhile in England, the press, without tobacco advertising, sided with the anti-smokers. The BBC made itself “smoke-free” and I realised how sinister this was. The BBC’s problem, which won’t go away, is that there is no neutral viewpoint. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is part of the basis of the mathematics that led to the computer, but it also stated that the observer affects the observed – no one is neutral. The BBC used to claim that it was neutral, but now it is part of a massive social engineering project paid for by its listeners and viewers. It is against a group of 12 million people who choose to smoke – not very fair.

The British press might be quite lively, but it is also pathetically childish. I take little in it seriously, and when I am in Bridlington I only glance at newspapers. They are not sceptical enough, which is why I see them now as part of the social engineering. No one asks what the consequences will be – all will be good, they childishly think.

The Guardian says that the ban has been a “success” in Scotland. What do they mean by “success”? Pub takings have gone down, some pubs have closed. But surely the ban would only have been a “success” if the non-smokers had been flocking to the pubs. They have not.

What do I think? You’re living in a madhouse, David … Actually, I’ve always thought that, but I have a love for the surface of the Earth that is an escape from the mean-spirited and dreary people who seem to have taken over England.

The ban won’t affect me much. I live very privately. I’m not very social – I’m too deaf, and in the world I have created I will smoke. I’ve no wish to meet politicians – most of them have the most odious ideas about people. England is full of big pushers of the coming pill society, and we’ve lost a sense of messiness – no longer any Delight in Disorder here (a careless shoestring in whose tie/ I see a wild civility/Do more bewitch me than when art/is too precise in every part, Robert Herrick).

Two months ago I started the largest painting I’ve ever done: 15ft x 40ft. The moment I began I found myself running up the stairs (with a fag) and realised some people are more in tune with a life force than others.

I can’t be the only voice like this. In England people should speak up more, defend themselves, but it’s hard against all the forces at work. Two million anti-smoking signs are going up on July 1, including inside Westminster Abbey. The uglification of England is under way by people with no vision. I detest it.

David Hockney, the fallen beech trees and the lost canvas – courtesy of Guardian Online.

• Artist’s plan to paint all four seasons curtailed
• Century-old copse felled to sell valuable timber

Summer and winter are safe, but when David Hockney turned up to begin work on spring, he found a scene which the artist described as “a massacre”; the sky empty, and the ground littered with the limbs of fallen giants.

Nothing remains except stacks of sawn trunks and branches of the little copse of mighty sycamores and beeches near his home in East Yorkshire which he had intended to paint in all seasons.

Hockney found the trees as he found all his subjects, by driving for hours around narrow side roads. The small copse, at a T junction south of the village of Warter was one of two narrow strips planted over a century ago at right angles, on private land as a shelter belt for farm buildings and wide open fields. They appear to have been felled to sell the valuable timber.

“I knew I was coming back to do more, but I didn’t think there was any rush about it,” he said yesterday.

The two paintings of the copse, reproduced for the first time in the Guardian, will be included in an exhibition next month at the Würth museum in Künzelsau, Germany. They are now the only record Hockney will make of the wood in its glory. “I admit this may matter only to me. Perhaps nobody else would feel like this – and it was on such a remote little road hardly anyone else even saw them, perhaps two cars an hour might pass that way. But to me there was something shocking about the scene. The landscape I remembered was gone completely, and what remained looked like a scene from the first world war.

“To me even the approach to that little wood had a kind of grandeur, like the approach to some marvellous great temple, and the trees themselves were very large, very architectural, very majestic. I was really quite taken with them. It was like coming into some little village or town and finding that overnight the people had obliterated a great church that had stood there for 900 years.

“I admit they had a perfect right to do this – but it seems sad. If they had pulled down a great church people would have seen and asked questions, but nobody asked about these trees. Nobody asks enough questions any more.”

In his late 60s and early 70s the artist once known best for sun-dappled bodies in blue Californian swimming pools, who has flirted with photography and giant collage faxes as art forms, has returned to English landscape on a grand scale.

His main home became his house at Bridlington in Yorkshire, and he scoured the surrounding region for subjects. One epic painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter – of another, nearby woodland – took up an entire wall of the biggest room of the Royal Academy’s summer show two years ago. The picture is 12m x 5m (40ft x 16ft), made up of 50 smaller canvases, and Hockney said it engulfs the viewer. He later presented it as a gift to the Tate collection, the most valuable ever from a living artist.

Hockney came upon the strip of towering trees, framed by two narrow roads and a scrap of triangular green, about two years ago. He returned, taking hundreds of photographs and making scores of sketches. House guests came to know the trees well too: he insisted on some friends getting up before dawn, to accompany him to see the light hit the trunks at a particularly cherishable angle at about 6am. “They were very struck at the effect,” he said firmly.

He has completed two paintings, 3m by 4m each, showing bare winter branches, and summer’s towering greenery.

He last visited the wood two months ago, and returned on Wednesday to start sketching and photographing for spring, hoping the first leaves might just be starting to break on the trees. Instead he found a scene of desolation.

“I thought first they had gone for housing, but now I believe that can’t be right in such a remote spot. I think they were just harvested, as if they were any other crop – and though they had a perfect right to do it, it still seems very sad.”
He went back again yesterday with his camera – and though he still mourns the lost trees was impressed by the patterns of the massive stacked trunks.

“I think now this is my next painting of the wood. It will be very different – but the piles of wood are quite beautiful in their own right, simply because wood can’t help being beautiful.”

• This article was amended on Thursday 2 April 2009. The museum where David Hockney’s paintings of a copse in East Yorkshire will be exhibited this month is the Würth, not Wurtz, in Künzelsau, not Kunzelsau. This has been corrected.

‘Cooler than Warhol, more enduring than Freud’ – courtesy of Guardian.co.uk – Jonathon Jones, September 2006.

He was the bleached-blond rebel who electrified the art world, tearing at boundaries. Today, nearing 70, David Hockney might prefer sketching in Yorkshire – but he is still railing against authority and taking risks. To mark the opening of a major new exhibition, Jonathan Jones conducts a special interview

David Hockney is relaxing after lunch. The house feels full as his friend John, who made the meal, and assistant Jean-Pierre, an accordionist – true: I’ve seen the accordion – move around. “I remember seeing a Sargent in the Chicago Art Institute,” he says, “and thinking, fucking good, you know, great, and even the bravura slickness, I admire it. And then I went round the corner and there’s a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it’s not the level of Van Gogh.”

The house is a brilliant succession of different coloured rooms, a kind of benign House of Usher. Like his London home, it transports you into a generous roving space. I have to admit this was not how I imagined it when I was on a dank train from Doncaster to Bridlington, looking over at a woman reading a book called The World’s Greatest Serial Killers. It was a dismal late-summer day as I headed north towards the Yorkshire seaside town where Hockney has been spending much of his time painting the local landscape. I knew that his sister Margaret lives there, that his mother spent her last years there, and somehow I had pictured the famous Los Angeles-based British artist lodging in a spare bedroom in a relative’s house.

There is a photograph taken of him in the 1960s with Andy Warhol, in which it is not the evasive Andy but the bold, blond David, naturally smoking a cigarette, who looks cool. There are many other images of Hockney from the 60s and 70s that have that deadpan glamour. He seems sometimes nowadays to have changed unrecognisably. It is not just that he has grey hair and looks like the 69-year-old Yorkshireman he is. It is the polemics and debating fury that make him so different from the dreamy painter of men in swimming pools. He buttonholes politicians in defence of the right to smoke. He advances arguments about the death of photography. He writes art history that sells by the bucketload and enrages academics. It is all a long way from the Hockney of Jack Hazan’s 1974 film A Bigger Splash, which portrays him as an enigmatic flâneur on the boundaries of art and fashion.

With a retrospective of his portraits opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London next month, as well as a show of his Yorkshire landscapes and a new edition of his book Secret Knowledge, it is time to look beyond our current image of a bluff and British David Hockney. A couple of years ago, I went with him to see the Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery. He had a theory to expound, a new chapter for his book Secret Knowledge, and in front of each picture he showed me why he thinks Caravaggio must have used a camera lucida (an artist’s optical aid), constructing his scenes like a film director in the editing suite.

Afterwards, we went to his London home and John made dinner. David Graves, who helped Hockney research Secret Knowledge, came too. More fascinating for me, Gregory Evans, who appears in A Bigger Splash, was there, scrolling through recent Hockney watercolours on a Powerbook screen. If you visit the show at the National Portrait Gallery, you will see Hockney’s portraits of this old friend and assistant, including the 1975 drawing Gregory Leaning Nude. As Hockney rolled out a reproduction of a Chinese scroll with an endless landscape that, he pointed out, wonderfully depicts the world without any need for the western invention of perspective, I was really starting to enjoy myself.

Hockney is not the ageing British eccentric he might appear to be from the outside. He is surrounded by the same characters, and new versions of the characters, who appear in A Bigger Splash, the strangely beautiful and moving 70s documentary in which Hockney and his friends moon and brood in archetypal 70s interiors, at fashion shows and beside swimming pools. What made me happy that night was seeing the connection between Hockney now and Hockney then. I love those paintings of his from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which longing and emptiness and solitude all hang in the air, as a body vanishes into water or Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy pose in a Gainsborough masquerade.

Having had an insight into Hockney that night, I suppose I should not have been expecting anything different when I visited him in Bridlington. There is an undoubted surrealism to his spending so much time nowadays in a quiet corner of provincial England, but when you enter his house, you immediately realise how in control of this irony he is, and how foolish it would be to see a narrative of ageing and retirement in his current life. It is nothing like that simple. The house is an outpost of LA, except that instead of the Pacific it looks out on a bowling green and the grey North Sea.

What, I ask, drew him as a young man to LA, so much the opposite of the Yorkshire pastoral he is currently besotted with? It was the “sexiness” of the place, of course, but also its space. Hockney describes himself as an “agorophiliac” – he loves wide open spaces. Putting it another way, he says he’s mildly claustrophobic. For this reason he could never bear to live in New York. It’s the spread of southern California that delights him. When Hockney talks about LA he makes you see it through his eyes, as a place full of sensitive souls.

I ask him about the California painting I love best, his 1966 picture Beverly Hills Housewife. A tall woman stands in front of a modernist house that is a succession of flat planes, theatrical scenery almost, and disjunctive objects: a stuffed animal head; a zebra-hide lounger; a palm tree; a sculpture; empty blue sky beyond; evenly mowed grass in front. I’m crushed to hear that this painting, which still belongs to its subject, Betty Freeman, cannot come to the National Portrait Gallery because “She’s 84 now and so she’d only lend it to LA because she wouldn’t see it for a year – would she ever see it again?” Freeman is a photographer, says the catalogue, and a patron of new music. Hockney puts it less piously. “She had these musical salons – LaMonte Young [the Fluxus and minimalist composer], one note for three hours. That’s what drove her first husband away. Then she married an Italian, Franco, who didn’t mind the concerts. He was an Italian aristocrat, actually. He would make pasta in the kitchen, and he’d say to me, ‘I love Puccini, David.’”

Hockney’s life is nothing if not surprising. When he gets bored of Bridlington (although he, John and Jean-Pierre insist this is practically impossible), they get a boat from Hull and head off for Germany, where Hockney enjoys the baths at Baden-Baden. On a recent visit they went to the local art museum and he was explaining works by artists he respects such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. Anyway, these were interesting paintings, and he was finding things to praise. And then they came to a row of six late Picassos. Hockney stood speechless, then said to John, “This is art made with the hand, the eye and the heart.” “John looked for a while and he said, ‘And the pussy!’”

Picasso has been Hockney’s artistic hero since the 1960s. “I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.” Hockney never thought of himself as a portraitist as such – although, obviously, he has painted a lot of portraits – until this new exhibition. It captures something fundamental about his best work, its diaristic directness. Love and friendship – and loss – are what you see in these pictures. A lot of the people are no longer here, he acknowledges.

To make good portraits, he says,”You do need to be interested in people.” In his book Secret Knowledge he argues that Ingres, even Holbein, must have used some form of primitive camera to record faces with mesmerising realism – but he believes the greatest art, meaning Picasso and Rembrandt, has a humanity beyond appearances. Picasso’s portraits “tell you about the people. He’s looked at them, and they have something different from anybody else.” The cubist style does not preclude intimacy – it increases it – and Picasso is able to show you who people really are. Similarly, the interiority of Van Gogh is on another level from the exteriority of Sargent.

“There are painters who are very good who are not necessarily portraitists; Richard Diebenkorn painted the figure in a very interesting way, but not particularly portraits. He didn’t care too much about the psychology of it.”

Hockney does care about the psychology of it, and this sets him apart from the hack portrait artists whose works fill the modern section of the NPG. (He has only painted one commissioned portrait.) His pictures are of his familiars. A world takes shape when you look at them, a world that exists in the networks of affiliation that have surrounded Hockney and still do. There are two portraits in the retrospective of John and Jean-Pierre in Bridlington.

Of course, Hockney is here to paint, and upstairs he shows me the latest in a series of generously sized pictures in which he is following the seasonal changes at favourite locations in the farmland of east Yorkshire. He drives me back to York through this glacially formed, wide and gently cut landscape, explaining the geology to me and showing me the places he has painted – fields and woodlands, a “tunnel” of overhanging trees up a lane. Many people will see these as supremely backward-looking paintings, and so it is worth stressing how far Hockney is from being a conservative anti-modernist.

He enthusiastically describes visiting the Eva Hesse exhibition at Tate Modern a while ago. “I loved the show; I did some sketches of things falling down to the floor, the fragility of them, and they were wonderfully graphic, actually. And I thought the rooms were really quite beautiful. I remember seeing them in the late 60s and you thought, ‘Very unusual, things falling off the wall.’ But I loved the show, and yet you do realise – everything becomes decorative after a while.” Warming to his theme, he leaps from Hesse to ancient Aztec sculpture. “Remember that big pot that’s in Mexico City, that big serpent pot? I think they had it at the RA in the Aztecs show. Well, when Cortez [the Spanish conquistador of Mexico in the 16th century] saw that pot, it was the ugliest thing in the world, because it was meant to hold hot human hearts still pumping. It took them 300 years before they began to see the beauty in the pot. The use was so horrible, it would overpower form.”

Blood and guts and pots, bits of string and painted trees . . . Talking about art with David Hockney is fundamentally different from interviewing any other artist. Where most artists seem interested in other art only as a mirror of their preoccupations, Hockney is a voracious student with acute insights. What will his own place in art history be? He and Lucian Freud are the two eminent living British painters – but where Freud has enjoyed a reverence as an Old Master in his lifetime, it will be Hockney’s works of the 1960s and 1970s that are still looked at decades hence, when Freud has become a neglected minor master in the corners of museums.

I do not think it is flattery to say that, in unexpected ways, David Hockney still offers a model to young artists. As I was writing this piece I was getting emails in response to an article on why so little art has been made about the war in Iraq. Graffitists and online agitprop collagists sent me their images. Among them was a message from Hockney’s studio: he wanted me to see his recent painting The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction, which juxtaposes his interpretation of Picasso’s Massacre in Korea with an image of a war photographer, and implicitly asks: can painting still deal with war, can photography? It was done in 2003, as America and Britain attacked Iraq. This brilliant and experimental artist is still passionately engaged with the way the world works.

· The new edition of Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Old Masters by David Hockney is published by Thames & Hudson on September 23, priced £24.95. To order a copy for £22.95 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875. David Hockney – A Year in Yorkshire: New Paintings is at Annely Juda Fine Art, London W1 (020-7629 7578) from September 15 to October 28. David Hockney Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery in London (020-7306 0055) from October 12 to January 21 2007.

S.F. Delivers a Stalwart ‘Tristan’ – Wagner’s epic opera succeeds on the strength of its fine cast and well-focused music director – By GEORGIA ROWE – The Mercury News – October 06, 2006

Wagnerites and neophytes alike were in a state of bliss Thursday night at the War Memorial Opera House, induced by the San Francisco Opera’s splendid opening-night performance of “Tristan und Isolde.” The company hadn’t presented Wagner’s 1865 opera since 1998, but it’s been much longer than that since Bay Area audiences have seen and heard the work come together in a production so brilliantly conceived and thrillingly integrated.

Thursday’s mesmerizing performance, led with unerring focus and coordination by S.F. Opera music director Donald Runnicles, was a dynamic marriage of vocal, dramatic and musical elements. The David Hockney production, created for Los Angeles Opera and new to San Francisco, continues in five additional performances through Oct. 27.

Finding capable singers for Wagner’s operas has never been easy, particularly in the composer’s epic tale of doomed love between a Cornish knight and the Irish princess betrothed to his king. The opera’s superhuman vocal demands — not to mention its gargantuan, nearly five-hour running time — have been the undoing of many an aspiring vocal artist. The great achievement of this production is how well it is cast, down to the smallest roles.

Still, any “Tristan” rises or falls on the strength of its two death-obsessed protagonists. In Christine Brewer and Thomas Moser, the company has singers with the voices — and the stamina — to deliver Wagner’s score with passion, intelligence and soaring musical line.

Brewer was especially impressive. Singing the first staged Isolde of her career — she’s done the role in concert and recently recorded it with Runnicles — the soprano used her large, beautifully colored voice to arresting effect. Floating easily over the orchestra, Brewer revealed gleaming top notes in the Act I narrative and curse, blended ecstatically in the Act II love duet and infused the “Liebestod” with tenderness and wonder.

Moser, her Tristan, was perhaps not as precise, especially in his early scenes. But the tenor sang heroically as the night went on — firm and elegant in the “Liebesnacht,” vigorous and dramatically cogent in the deliriums of his harrowing Act III death scene.

The rest of the cast, which featured two prominent debuts, was just as fine. Mezzo-soprano Jane Irwin, making her U.S. opera debut, was a clear, warm-voiced Brangane. Baritone Boaz Daniel (another U.S. debut) was a forceful Kurwenal. Bass Kristinn Sigmundsson, who is also appearing as Sparafucile in S.F. Opera’s “Rigoletto” this month, brought resonant authority to the role of King Marke. Tenor Sean Panikkar sang handsomely in the dual role of Sailor and Shepherd, and tenor Matthew O’Neill was an articulate Melot.

Hockney’s designs, strikingly lit by Duane Schuler, gave the opera an enchanting fairy-tale atmosphere, beginning with the sleek lines, primary colors and ancient runic accents of the Act I shipboard scene. The steeply raked stage posed problems for more than one singer, but director Thor Steingraber did an excellent job of keeping movement simple and effective, making the action revolve around the principals and using silhouettes and stylized poses to create iconic moments.

Still, it was Runnicles who set and maintained the evening’s gold standard. The conductor’s past triumphs in Wagner’s music have been many and well-documented, and yet the vitality, the expansiveness, the lush Romanticism of his approach Thursday amounted to something truly unforgettable.

Do these faces look familiar?
They should. They’re the real-life subjects in David Hockney’s portraits at LACMA.

By CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS
Los Angeles Times
June 09, 2006

It was like seeing double, but more so. It was like “This Is Your Life,” but without voice-overs. It was an echo tunnel, made visible. It was the opening of the David Hockney portraiture show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

For an insiders’ viewing Tuesday and then a press preview and luncheon the next day, the museum invited 20 of Hockney’s subjects, who lingered and mingled with each other and their two-dimensional selves — many in the same outfits Hockney had painted them in — while the artist held forth.

The result was a strange visual resonance — but perhaps less odd for the man of the hour, who not only knows most of these people well, but has spent five decades looking back and forth between model and canvas. Since his first visit to L.A. in 1964, the Yorkshire-born artist has spent most of his time in California. As he explained for the gathered media, Hockney prefers to paint his family, friends and business associates “because I can be a little bit more sure what they look like.”

On the whole, he seemed a casual, philosophical, go-with-the-flow sort of guy. Which, his assembled subjects agreed, is entirely wrong.

Once the brush is in hand and the sitter is in place, they said, there’s not much kidding around, just sustained quiet and, for those who find themselves standing in uncomfortable shoes, hours of regret.

“To see David, and then to see him at work — it’s very different,” said photographer Jim McHugh, who sat for a 2005 portrait with his daughter Chloe. “His intensity is like a laser…. He sees everything. And a tiny flick of his brush will entirely change the complexion of a portrait…. The portrait he did of us was so accurate, psychologically.”

Chloe McHugh, 16, wearing the same green 3-inch heels she wore for the portrait, recalled the sessions with a grimace: four days, six hours per day. “I didn’t realize that I’d be standing the entire time…. It was painful, but worth it.”

Leon Banks, a Los Angeles pediatrician who wore the same black Gucci loafers as in his 2005 portrait, said it was painless for him — two sessions in Hockney’s studio off Mulholland Drive, about two hours each. But by now, Banks knows what to expect. Since the two met in the late 1960s, Hockney has drawn or painted Banks several times.

“He waits for you to find a position that you’re comfortable in. And then you’re obliged to keep it,” said Banks. “He’s very serious, very devoted.”

Does he talk?

“Not very much,” said Banks. “And you can’t talk, either. You meditate.”

The artist, who will be 69 next month, wore a white cap, blue shirt and gray jacket. He said he sympathized with the plight of the sitter, having once spent 120 hours posing for a portrait by Lucien Freud. But he also said he likes to remind his sitters to “remember Betty Lisa.”

Betty Lisa, he explained, agreed to sit for a portrait, then discovered she couldn’t make the appointment. So at the last minute she sent her sister, Mona.

When the giggles and groans died down, Hockney also told the assembled crowd that he is “going quite seriously deaf” and that he abandoned reading “The Da Vinci Code” after a single page. In response to a question, he said that if there’s a message embedded in the portraiture show, it’s something along the lines of ” ‘love life,’ I suppose.”

Yet for further proof of the artist’s tenacity in studio circumstances, consider Sidney Felsen and Joni Moisant Weyl. Felsen and Weyl, art-business veterans who have worked with Hockney on print publishing and sales for decades, sat for a Hockney double portrait early last year, then returned from a big trip to find he’d shelved it.

“It looked finished, but there were some things about it that David was not comfortable with,” said Weyl. So they started over, this time with Sidney wearing a broad-brimmed white hat, a summer suit and a bow tie, and the result of that sitting hangs now in LACMA.

Not far from Felsen and Weyl — and the Felsen and Weyl canvas — stood Charlie Falco, a professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona who has collaborated with Hockney in his investigations of lost techniques of the Old Masters.

Falco wore the same blue shirt, blue tie and dark suit seen in his portrait. And he recalled the sitting with a scientist’s exactitude: It was a Monday and Wednesday in March 2005.

“For the first hour and a half, he’d look at me for two seconds, then at the painting for two seconds. Two seconds, two seconds. For an hour and a half. The intensity,” Falco said. After that, the intervals of looking and painting came to last longer and longer.

For Peter Goulds, director of the LA Louver Gallery and Hockney’s West Coast dealer for 27 years, the picture came out of a single session in the artist’s studio, 10:15 to 4:45 on a Sunday, with an hour and 15 minutes off for lunch. Hockney had instructed Goulds to dress up and made him stand up.

In the painting, Goulds presses one finger to his cheek as if thoughtfully assessing a painting — and in fact, Goulds recalled, he got through the hours by focusing on another portrait that stood behind Hockney in the cluttered studio.

Yet the finished image “was a shock to me,” Goulds said. After years of close acquaintance with Hockney and his pictures, he doesn’t doubt the truthfulness of the image, but “it’s not how I see myself. It’s a level of intensity I’m not aware of in myself.”

The show, which runs Sunday through Sept. 4, includes about 120 portraits produced over five decades in oil, watercolor, ink and other techniques. It was organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Introducing it to the press, the artist fielded questions on the light in L.A. (it’s good) and the lessons one learns while painting portraits (probably the same lessons that one would learn doing something else) and denied possession of any secrets necessary to the making of great art.

“How you make a memorable picture, I have not a clue,” he said. “And neither does anybody else. Or there would be a lot more of them.”

Portraiture alive and well, says painter Hockney – By JEREMY LOVELL – Reuters – October 11, 2006.

LONDON (Reuters) – The art of painting portraits is thriving despite reports of its death, the country’s most lauded living artist David Hockney said on Wednesday.

Speaking at the opening of a major exhibition of his portraits spanning his half century career to date, Hockney said a photographic portrait could only capture a fleeting moment while a painted one could probe far more deeply.

“With most photographic portraits, you get a 35th of a second whereas painting is longer exposures, so you are going to get something more interesting from them,” he told reporters at the National Portrait Gallery in London. “No, portraiture will never die.”

Hockney, born in northern England but long resident in California, said he was now producing his best work.

“I feel happiest when I have a brush in my hand. Most artists will tell you the work they are doing now is the best they have done. That is what I feel,” said Hockney, 69.

Opening with three self-portraits dating from 1954 when he was just 17, the show includes 150 portraits with pen, paint and camera showing his versatility and skill as a draughtsman.

The exhibition, “David Hockney Portraits – Life Love Art”, runs to January 21.

Friends, family, the famous and the unknown are all captured by the relentlessly inventive Yorkshireman who admitted that each picture had captured a bit of himself along with the subject. “Any show of portraits is bound to be personal.”

To underline the changing nature of his work, Hockney said that while he had meticulously planned and posed previous portraits in acrylic paints, his most recent works were in oil and painted straight from life on to the canvas.

“It is a tour through his life and times,” curator Sarah Howgate told Reuters on a tour through the exhibition.

While the medium Hockney used changed continuously, three themes are clear — his open admiration for Pablo Picasso, his deep attachment to his family, and particularly his mother, and his repeated return to sensitive pen and ink line sketches.

Indeed, Hockney said he increasingly saw echoes of his parents in himself — despite the fact that they were fastidious and anti-smoking Methodists whereas he is openly homosexual and an equally committed smoker.

Portrait of the artist as a grumpy old man (who’s got it in for the nanny state and Gordon Brown) – By WILLIAM LANGLEY – Telegraph – October 15, 2006

David Hockney’s return to Britain might have passed quietly had it not been for his keenness, after 40 years away, to remind us of where we have gone wrong. The artist has taken to the streets in support of foxhunters, complained about the persecution of smokers and objected to travel restrictions on football hooligans. He has sounded wobbly on Iraq, sceptical on Europe, disapproving of New Labour, and likened having to wear a seat belt in his car to legally-enforced bondage.

Most of us are, nevertheless, happy to have him back. Even if the shy young prodigal who went away has reappeared at 69, plump, crusty, and not only deaf but apparently set on deafening everybody else.

By way of consolation, Hockney is giving us an important new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery; one that serves both to confirm what a fine artist he is, and to suggest — perhaps poignantly, given how chuffed he is to be home — that his best work is in the past. The paintings, more than 150 of them, spanning five decades, represent the biggest collection of his portraits ever assembled.

As he rarely accepts commissions, most of the subjects are his friends, lovers and relatives, giving the show an alluringly autobiographical dimension, but over it hangs the awkward question posed by Hockney himself: “How does one make an interesting portrait in the 21st century?”

The consensus seems to be that he doesn’t know. Disapproval and bafflement have greeted more recent works that tended to make viewers wonder, as the Apollo critic Yonna Yapou, put it, “whether they have even been finished”. Still, Hockney claims to be in the best shape of his life, and, newly installed in his late mother’s seaside villa in Bridlington, Yorkshire, is working harder than ever.

You can’t get much further from the palms, pools and muscle boys of southern California than this. Teashops run by scowling crones abound, and it rains 100 days a year. When Hockney moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, he was bowled over not just by the city’s warmth, colour and sense of sexual possibility, but its intoxicating of-the-momentness. With his canonical paintings such as A Bigger Splash and A Lawn Being Sprinkled, he changed the way LA looked at itself, fusing simple shapes with complex suggestions of movement and heady overtones of homoeroticism, and in the decades that followed became the city’s artist laureate.

What has brought him home? One factor was the death of his dachshund, Stanley, a painful loss that rendered his house in the Hollywood Hills less liveable than before. He sought, as people do in difficult times, the comforts and reassurances of all that is most familiar, and nothing was more familiar to Hockney than his native Yorkshire. Once settled, he set off, eyes wide with wonder, to re-explore it. “I wasn’t going to stay here,” he says, “but as things changed, and the corn got golden I realised there’s a f****** good subject here. So why should I go back to LA?”

He had returned, though, to a changed country. One, as Hockney saw it, in the grip of a nightmarish tyranny. Everywhere he looked, the do-gooders, the nanny-staters, the health-and-safety fascists, had their thumbs pressed on the nation’s windpipe. The very notion of personal freedom was, to these people, an affront; any whisper of dissent intolerable. He had seen this kind of creeping death of liberty in California and wanted to warn us of its consequences.

Debating with the anti-smoking Labour MP Julie Morgan on BBC radio, Hockney declared: “Death awaits you whether you smoke or not. Our pubs are not health clubs.” The Government, he went on to complain, was “a bunch of philistines”, adding sourly that: “At least Ted Heath [the last Prime Minister he had lived under] played the piano.”

So far, so reasonable. And, given that Hockney comes from a family of activists, perfectly understandable. His parents, Kenneth and Laura Hockney were, in their son’s words, “working-class radicals”, heavily involved in the social and trade union issues of the day.

Ken had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the First World War and later joined the International Socialists. When David sold his first paintings, he dutifully sent some of the money home to Ken, who spent it on Soviet-made wristwatches for his comrades.

It was a non-smoking, teetotal household, built on the solid Yorkshire values of thrift, godliness and heterosexuality. None of these qualities would figure prominently in David’s future life.

Born in Bradford, in 1937, he was a bright child who showed an early gift for drawing. At 11, he won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, and later transferred to the regional College of Art. There is a tendency now, especially in Bradford, to think of him as an instant superstar. It wasn’t really like that. Hockney grafted his way through his diploma, moved on to the Royal College of Art in London and was in his early twenties before he began attracting national attention.

In 1960 he saw, and was profoundly influenced by, a Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery, and the following year travelled to New York, where he met Andy Warhol and slipped blissfully into the louche, gay demimonde that surrounded the fright-wigged wonder.

It seems that America had an instant hold on him, for as soon as he had raised enough money he returned: this time to California where the combination of light, water and the cult of the male body-beautiful became the signature theme of his work.

Hockney has always seen things differently. Including the works of other people. His claim, in a book five years ago, that the Old Masters secretly used photographic instruments to project images onto their canvases has been hotly disputed by art historians, although Hockney is sticking to it.

Deserving as he is of a place back among us, it is hard not to feel that he has returned at the fag end of his career. The Yorkshire landscapes he is currently producing are a worthy endeavour, which he clearly takes seriously. “I’ve not been social,” he said, recently. “I don’t have any visitors; it’s too distracting. For days and days, I’ve not seen anyone.” Yet the critical response to them has been mixed, and around them hangs the faint whiff of subjects chosen to suit the artist’s convenience rather than his talents.

Not that Hockney doesn’t have important work still to do. A magnificent diatribe, published this year on the letters page of The Guardian, shows why we need him more than ever. “Gordon Brown is a prig,” wrote Hockney, “a P.R.I.G., a dreary, atheistic Calvinistic prig, who I’m sure will never be elected in England. He goes along with a ‘health lobby’ whose view of life itself I detest. I have utter contempt for it. I feel I am entitled to my opinion. I don’t mind prigs but when they want to take my little corner as well, I have a right to argue against their dreary view of life contaminating mine. New Labour has become the most bossy prober into lives.”

Who cares if he can’t quite work the canvases as he used to? What does it matter if he cuts a diminished figure on Bridlington’s rain-lashed promenade? This is a man with a soul. One who hasn’t given up the fight, and is able to see, with the clarity of the great artist, what most of us can’t see at all.