"The face must not be caught in a bearing that is too suggestive of a short period of time." While David Hockney, the best-known British artist of his generation, is referring here to his so-called composite Polaroid pieces, specifically "Billy Wilder Lighting his Cigar," all of his portraits transcend time. He paints a history behind each face.
"David Hockney Portraits," a new exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in the Gund Gallery, includes an array of more than 150 works done over a span of 50 years. It is a depiction of the artist's life through his portrayals of the people he has met, known and cared about. Being the first Hockney show of exclusively portraits, it provides viewers, whether unfamiliar or well acquainted with his work, with a comprehensive summary of his thought process, evolution of style, and development across various mediums.
English and art history majors should be especially interested in Hockney's work, as he is well versed in both subjects, having read all of Walt Whitman's writing by the age of 23, and having spent years consumed by the work of Ingres and Picasso. In whatever style or medium he employs, his striking intelligence is pervasive and his subjects are psychoanalyzed on the canvas, inspected by the painter with such stealth and skill that they do not seem to realize it.
Since most of the subjects are ones he knows personally, it is fitting for the exhibit to begin with "Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices," a painting containing a sampling of lines characteristic of different modern artists. Behind a mound of Leger-like columns sits the artist's father, all in gray and suited, with traces of pink skin tone peeking out from beneath. Hockney captures his father's allegedly eccentric personality in his slight smile.
Hockney's parents are recurring subjects, and he studied his mother in nearly every medium he explored. As one walks through the gallery, what is most noticeable is how he never ceases to transform his style, fluctuating between highly structured and glossy finished works and sketchy, unfinished experiments. He moves between electric, intensely colored paintings and simple ink on paper drawings.
Yet no matter what style he chooses, portraits of his mother are always remarkably intimate. In the small sepia ink drawing "Mother, Bradford, 19 Feb. 1978," a quick sketch done on the day of his father's funeral, her hat dissolves into a pointillist cloud above her profound gaze.
Later Hockney would work on larger double-portraits that were less spontaneous. He manages to preserve the same intimacy of painter and subject, though it is unsettlingly absent between the two figures. Especially disconcerting is "Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy" (1970-1971), the signature piece of the exhibit, which was painted as a wedding present for two of his close friends. It is posed, but in such a way that the newlyweds appear to confront the painter and viewer separately with an individuality that defies their own relationship.
Infused with the history of art, this piece is a masterful comment on classical portraiture, with the man seated and the woman standing. The tension of this masterpiece is much like Degas' work, and with the swirling chaos of the shag rug, the disinterested back of the cat, and the positions of his subjects, Hockney recognizes something the couple does not: The caption explains that they separated not long after the painting was finished.
Born in Bradford, England in 1937, Hockney had moved to Los Angeles by 1964, immersing himself in the lively artistic and gay circles of the city. There he befriended artistic giants and literary geniuses, rendering some parts of the show a kind of who's who of pop culture, with portraits of Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud and Man Ray, to name a few. While Hockney sometimes gets caught up in the fame and glamour of the L.A. art scene, he is endearing in his humility.
The section entitled "Meeting Picasso," presents a group of works sparked by the 1960 Picasso Retrospective at the London Tate Museum. Hockney's admiration of Picasso led him to his brilliant composite Polaroids, his own variation on Cubism, and some less successful works of twisted figures with extra arms, vaguely like the work of Francis Bacon.
The exhibit concludes with the artist's recent work, looser and more spontaneous, including some large watercolors and less confrontational portraits of friends, who interact more with each other than the artist. "David Hockney Portraits" is a dynamic show, a testament to the ever-changing styles of an artist whose realism was a welcomed relief among the conceptual pop art of the 1960s, a role equally precious in today's intellectualized art world.
