Succulent with Californian sunshine, yet redolent of lush English summer
grass, David Hockney’s dazzling canvases leap off the dark-red walls of the
underground exhibition space at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park,
San Francisco ('David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition', until January 20). His landscapes and portraits, alike saturated with colour, are
endlessly engaging, from the vivid depictions of flower-filled balconies and Iceland’s
volcanic beaches to the studies of East Yorkshire countryside so inextricably
linked to the artist’s name. There are dozens of them here, from sketches of
Woldgate Woods to huge canvases of trees, created with oils, charcoal, iPads
and film cameras.
The main entrance of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park
Confrontational,
nervous, relaxed, restless, belligerent, patient, resigned, despairing, jovial
– David Hockney’s portraits of his friends and family display every emotion in the simplest of poses. Charcoal sketches capture wearied old age and restless youth, and colourful oil paintings invade the viewer's space with their flamboyant tones. The artist's self-portrait, resplendent in red braces, is
challenging and ever so slightly annoyed, as if the viewer has interrupted him
at work. The same chairs are seen again and again, impersonal office swivel
chairs and hard wooden upright chairs that set off the sitters' personalities and deep, welcoming armchairs, none more
comfortable looking than that in which the curator of this excellent
exhibition, Gregory Evans, is seated. Mr Evans deserves to relax – this is the
largest exhibition ever staged at the de Young Museum, comprising more than 300
works in the first comprehensive examination of Hockney's works since 2002, building on the Royal Academy's 2012 show in London. The last
room of portraits displays work created in California in the summer of 2012, just before this exhibition opened in October. The paint must barely have dried before they were
whisked from the studio to the gallery walls.
Confronting visitors as they leave the first room with its bright landscapes is the exhibition’s most striking work, The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction.
It is striking for its dissimilarity to the rest and for its powerful subject
matter, reminiscent of Goya’s Execution
of the Defenders of Madrid. A group of fleshy, naked, ultra-human figures stand
on the left, a small child picks a cheerfully yellow flower in the centre, and
their executioners, more machines than men, blot out the sunlight with their
grey, doomladen bulk on the right. It is with relief that one turns aside, to indulge in the warm, wide views of East Yorkshire. As California suffers in what some people are calling a 100-year drought, the lush, rich, green tones of the damp English fields and woods are more beguiling than ever.
California in January 2014 - a far cry from green East Yorkshire
Also thought-provoking are a series of paintings inspired by Claude Lorrain's Sermon on the Mount. Hockney calls his take on it a 'sermon on 30 canvases... a picture for the 21st century... A Bigger Message'. They culminate in a huge work composed of 30 canvases, centred on an imposing, red-rock Mount that draws the eye inexorably from the blank faces of the listeners and the odd sulky camel up to the robed figure atop. Shown with drawings of Yosemite, they make the space all about 'looking up', and are a unique take on an ancient story.
Hockney
has always delighted in new technology, and seized on iPads as an exciting, and
entirely natural, development in artistic practice. He has said of his new
medium: ‘People from the village come up and tease me: “We hear you’ve started
drawing on your telephone.” And I tell them, “Well, no, actually, it’s just
that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.”' The first group of his iPad
paintings here, The Arrival of Spring in
Woldgate, East Yorkshire, in 2011 (twenty eleven), Version 3, is
astonishingly successful, hardly recognizable as computer-generated at first.
Blown up large, the 12 iPad works, done en
plein air, herald the arrival of spring and culminate in a vast oil painting
made up of 32 canvases done in his studio, in which spring is an explosion of colour and life. The
12 panels, set beside the oil painting, offer a contrast between works that are
painted in a naive fashion and works that look simplistic because they were
created on an iPad. Having said that, the computer-generated works display a
painterly line, and are altogether more successful than the huge iPad drawings
of Yosemite that close the exhibition alongside A Bigger Message. Here, blown up far beyond their original
sizes, the lines are ugly, bald and bold, with odd streaks and childish
scribbles. I must confess to being a traditionalist, and thus ill-disposed to
enjoy these works, but I couldn’t help but wish that Hockney had taken a loaded
brush to capture the imposing cliff of El Capitan.
The de Young Museum, clad in bronze, with its 144ft tower
that offers spectacular views of San Francisco
Much more
successful, to my eyes, are Hockney’s Cubist Movies. Consisting of single
scenes filmed on several different cameras, the resulting films are played
simultaneously on grids of screens set up to form a single giant screen, with
the action fracturing as it moves from small screen to small screen. A juggler
will walk slowly from one side to another, his head too big for his body at one
point or his feet reaching a square long before the rest of him. Occasionally,
Hockney himself will be glimpsed, just his flat cap and pipe at the bottom of
the screen, directing the action or talking to unseen figures. In Yorkshire,
back in his beloved Woldgate Woods, he filmed with nine cameras at once in
spring, summer, autumn and winter, displaying the results on nine flat-screen
televisions to offer contrasting perspectives of the same scene. The effect is
beguiling, a constantly changing panorama in which the beauty of the seasons in
an everyday corner of England comes to the fore.
This is an absorbing exhibition, worth allowing a good few hours for, and reveals the astonishing scope of David Hockney's work. His skill as a draughtsman, his eye for colour and his passion for the new is all here, together with his love for both California and Yorkshire. I can sympathise with such apparently disparate affections, having swapped my beloved English countryside for the sun-soaked west coast of the USA. This week, I am riding to hounds for the first time in California and, no doubt, the experience will offer a whole new set of absorbing contradictions. Hockney would understand.
