 |
Hockney's style evolution: wearing a stripey tie in 1981, a spotty bow tie in 1975, and trademark round-framed glasses in 1965. PHOTOS: REX
|
David Hockney: back on the fashion map
David Hockney's Royal Academy of Arts landscape show 'A
Bigger Picture' opened to the public this weekend, sparking Hockney-mania in
Fashion Land.
BY ELLIE PITHERS | 25 JANUARY 2012
David Hockney at the preview of his landscapes show for the
Royal Academy of Arts
Hockney's fashion credentials have been undisputed for
decades - this is the man, after all, who successfully exported the English
dandy aesthetic to Los Angeles - but this week, with the opening of 'David
Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture' in London, the veteran painter has found himself
firmly in the style spotlight once again.
Fashion types flocked to the show's preview at the Royal
Academy of Arts last week, which celebrates the artist's depiction of the
English landscape, finding focus in the Yorkshire wolds of his childhood. Among
those paying homage were Jasper Conran and Dame Vivienne Westwood, a close
friend who has even named a checked jacket after him. Hockney himself was
working the colour blocking trend, with a red knitted tie and a yellow rose in
his lapel.
Hockney's depiction of the ever-changing seasons in 'A
Bigger Picture' provides a pert parallel with fashion's relentless pursuit of
the new - almost as though he is acknowledging his status as 'flavour of the
month' in his paintings.
Those who have been doing their fashion homework will know
that Hockney is the man around whom Christopher Bailey of Burberry has drawn
whole collections, honing in on his striped ties and clashing sweaters, calling
him "my icon".
He popped up in the show notes for John Galliano Homme for
spring/summer 2012, with Bill Gaytten naming his catwalk collection 'Big
Splash' in homage to Hockney's famed 1967 painting A Bigger Splash .
Also taking inspiration from Hockney this season is Osman,
whose "art-led" spring/summer 2012 catwalk show was redolent with
zingy, Californian brights: "I was inspired by the colours of David
Hockney from his Splash series, but I wanted to punctuate this with cobalt,
cherry red and ivory to loosen it up but still give the clothes a sense of
gravitas."
This week, on the back of the tidal wave of publicity that
has surrounded Hockney's opening weekend at the RA, Mrporter.com have taken the
great British painter as their main source of style inspiration.
Mr Porter invite you to ' Shop Mr. David Hockney ', running
a collection on their website crammed full of Hockney classics to accompany an
interview with the outspoken British painter. Injecting a flash of Hockney's
dandy aesthetic into your wardrobe is as simple as purchasing a pair of
round-framed tortoise shell glasses, a herringbone tweed flat cap, a stripey
shirt (unironed, naturally) or a bright silk tie.
Flavour of the month? Hockney is a man for all seasons.
'David Hockey RA: A Bigger Picture' is on at the Royal
Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, from Jan 21 - April 9.
Los Angeles, lovers and light: David Hockney at 80
Art and design
From cool blue pools in LA to Yorkshire woodland to desert
highways, a major Tate retrospective to mark Hockney’s 80th birthday celebrates
his vibrant vision
Olivia Laing
Fri 13 Jan 2017 12.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018
17.08 GMT
As a small boy in Bradford, David Hockney would watch his
father paint old bicycles and prams. “I love that, even now,” he remembered
decades later. “It is a marvellous thing to dip a brush into the paint and make
marks on anything, even a bicycle, the feel of a thick brush full of paint
coating something.” He knew he was going to be an artist, even if he wasn’t
sure exactly what an artist did. Design Christmas cards, draw signs, paint
prams: it didn’t matter, so long as his job involved the unmatched sensuality
of making marks.
He’ll be 80 this July: the best-known living British artist,
his verve and curiosity undiminished. In 1962, he spent a painstaking day
lettering a note to himself on a chest of drawers at the end of his bed. “Get
up and work immediately,” it said, and he’s been obeying it ever since. From
monumental paintings of swimming pools and seething summer fields to tender,
meticulous pencil portraits, from cubist opera sets to vases of flowers drawn
on iPads or sent by fax machines, Hockney has always been a relentless
reinventor, an artist who appears familiar while refusing to stay still.
As a spectacular new retrospective at Tate Britain makes
clear, these twists and turns in thematic preoccupations and new techniques do
not represent a lack of discipline or focus. Instead, they are staging posts in
Hockney’s great quest: his passionate, obsessive attempt to remake the solid,
moody, fleeting world in two dimensions. What do things look like, really, to
stereoscopic human eyes, connected to a human heart and brain? Never mind the
camera, with its rigid Cyclopean vision. There is a better way of seeing,
though it might take a lifetime to master.
He was the fourth of five children, born in 1937 to
creative, politically radical working class parents. His father had been a
conscientious objector and was a lifelong campaigner for nuclear disarmament,
while his mother was a Methodist and vegetarian (years later, asked by Women’s
Wear Daily what he found beautiful, he picked his mum).
From the off, Hockney was canny if not outright
machiavellian at pursuing his ambitions. At Bradford Grammar, art was only
taught to people in the bottom form. “They thought art was not a serious study
and I just thought, ‘Well, they’re wrong.’” A bright scholarship boy, he
promptly went on strike, idling in all his other subjects in order to gain
access. At 16, his parents finally consented to art school, first in Bradford
and then, in 1959, at the Royal College of Art.
A cheeky lad in cartoonish glasses and weird, elegant
clothes, he stood out at the RCA immediately, not least for the Stakhanovite
intensity of his working day. Drawing was the foundation, the bulwark of his
buoyant self-belief. If you could draw, he reasoned, you could always make
money. The bloke selling sketches in the park was a comfort, not a fear, though
in fact before he’d even graduated he was already making substantial money from
his work.
In the late 1950s, abstract expressionism – the sploshes and
splashes of Jackson Pollock – was casting a long shadow over British art. At
first, Hockney played along, but the figure burned at him, a source of illicit
fascination. It took a fellow student, the American RB Kitaj, to nudge him
towards representation, suggesting he try mining his real interests for subject
matter.
Their conversation unlatched a door. Hockney had known he
was gay since boyhood. Reading the poets Walt Whitman and CP Cavafy in the
summer of 1960, both of whom attested freely to their love of men, he saw a way
of inhabiting his sexuality that was at once frank and fruitful. Desire could
be his subject; he could make what he described as “propaganda” for queer love.
The paintings came fast. In We Two Boys Together Clinging pastel escarpments of
pink and blue announce a mood of romance, while in Adhesiveness two squat
scarlet figures like pornographic Mr Men engage in oral sex, one sporting an
alarmingly fanged mouth nicked straight from Francis Bacon.
Coming out so emphatically took courage. Until the 1967
Sexual Offences Act, homosexual acts were illegal even in private. These new
images were a political act, as well as a fantasy he willed into being. Take
Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, in which a lanky pink boy in pinny and socks soaps
the back of a naked hunk standing beneath a solid blue jet of water. Hockney
was imagining California permissiveness before he had even been there,
conjuring a utopia that would become both his home and best-known subject.
Mr Whizz, as his new friend Christopher Isherwood nicknamed
him, first visited LA in 1964, and immediately recognised a scene in need of a
chronicler. The swimming pools, the sprinklers and jungle foliage, the taut,
tanned people in their glass houses full of primitive sculpture were
simultaneously raw material and aesthetic problems to be solved.
Light on water, iridescent ribbons of glitter, a splash: he
could deploy all the lessons of abstraction here, among them Helen
Frankenthaler’s trick of diluting acrylic paint with detergent, so it would
flood the canvas with reflective pools of colour. As for the people in his
paintings, the lovers and friends, the central question was how to depict
bodies in space while simultaneously capturing something of the relationship,
the currents of emotion between them.
That many of his subjects were famous, the glamorous beau
monde of Tinseltown and swinging London, can distract from the seriousness of
his investigation, the weirdness of his solutions. The first of his double
portraits was 1968’s Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. The novelist sits
in hawkish profile, eyes locked on his much younger lover. A bowl of fruit,
behind a phallic cob of corn, distorts the horizontal line into a triangle,
forcing the viewer’s gaze to circle restlessly around the canvas.
This marriage of artificiality and liveliness returns in a
visionary portrait of the curator Henry Geldzahler sitting on a pink sofa,
haloed by a glowing window. Standing to his left is the rigid, transfigured
form of his boyfriend, Christopher Scott, who in his belted trench coat has
something of the air of a messenger angel, causing the museum curator Kynaston
McShine to compare the painting to an annunciation. Though both men’s feet rest
emphatically on the same tiled floor, they exist in different orders of
reality.
Over the next few years, Hockney’s work became increasingly
naturalistic, culminating in portraits such as Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy and
1972’s melancholy Portrait of an Artist, in which his former lover Peter Schlesinger
peers coolly down at a distorted body moving through the troubled light of a
swimming pool. At first, naturalism had felt like freedom, allowing him to
spring away from his contemporaries’ obsession with flatness, their need to
labour the artificiality of a painting. He became fascinated by one-point
perspective, a development that coincided with a growing interest in
photography.
But by the mid 1970s, naturalism too had become a trap, a
convention of seeing that failed to accurately capture the world. “Perspective
takes away the body of the viewer. You have a fixed point, you have no
movement; in short, you are not there really. That is the problem,” he
observed. “For something to be seen, it has to be looked at by somebody and any
true and real depiction should be an account of the experience of that
looking.” In short, he wanted to invite the viewer inside the picture.
The two main zones in which he discovered his new approach
were opera and the camera. In 1974 he was commissioned to design a production
of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at Glyndebourne, and over the next decade
he returned repeatedly to set design, gripped by the puzzle of incorporating
real bodies into artificial spaces.
The camera offered possibilities far removed from voguish
photorealism. In his 1982 exhibition Drawing with a Camera he showed the
composite cubist portraits he called “joiners”, made by collaging Polaroid
photos, an approach that quickly inflected his paintings, too. The eye is
bounced continually, alighting on small details; though the image is still it
gives an illusion of motion, capturing the subject’s joggling hands and
shifting emotional weather.
New technologies were always a thrill. Just as mastering
etching, lithography and aquatint had opened horizons for possible pictorial
constructions, so too did the photocopier and fax machine, the latter fondly
described by Hockney as “a telephone for the deaf”. He became so addicted to
sending friends enormously complex images, comprising hundreds of pages to be
pieced together by the recipient, that he created an imaginary institute, The
Hollywood Sea Picture Supply Co Est 1988. The smartphones and tablets of the
new millennium would prove equally irresistible (many of his 1,500 iPhone and
iPad drawings can be seen in a capacious new survey, David Hockney: Current,
published by Thames and Hudson this month).
Hockney first realised he was going deaf in 1978, when he
couldn’t hear the voices of female students in a class. He painted his hearing
aid in cheerful red and blue, but the diagnosis depressed him, especially when
he remembered how isolating deafness had proved for his father. The loss was
progressive, gradually inhibiting his ability to hear conversations in groups
or in the noisy restaurants he had once loved. There were compensations,
though. He suspected it induced a compensatory sharpening of his vision,
clarifying in particular his sense of space.
The other long shadow in those years was Aids. During the
1980s and early 90s, dozens and dozens of his acquaintances and closest friends
died, among them the film director Tony Richardson and the model Joe McDonald.
“I remember once going to New York and visiting three separate hospitals. It
was the worst time of my life.” Years later, he confided to a friend that he
did sometimes consider suicide, adding “we all have a deep desire to survive,
because we like the experience of loving”.
You might expect death to darken his palette, but what
emerged at the century’s end were revelatory landscapes. In 1997, Hockney was
back in Yorkshire, making daily visits to his friend Jonathan Silver, who was
dying of cancer and who suggested he might make a subject of his native county.
Driving each day across the Wolds, he was struck by “the living aspect of the
landscape”. It was seasonality that captivated him now, the slow decline and
stubborn regeneration of the natural world. “Some days were just glorious, the
colour was fantastic. I can see colour. Other people don’t see it like me
obviously.”
The Yorkshire paintings that emerged over the next decade
were vast, often made from multiple canvases joined together. Damp, fecund
England, as luxuriant as a Matisse, the hedgerows writhing with renewed life.
There is something cartoon-like and unadulterated about them, even gluttonous,
a need to seize the mad abundance before it becomes something else, bud to
leaf, puddle to ice, the endless migration of matter through form.
Hockney has long since attained the status of national
treasure, a passionate cardiganed dandy vocally impatient with the nannying
anti-bohemianism of the 21st century. In 1997 he was made a Companion of Honour
by the Queen; in 2011 the first volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’s warm and
knowledgeable biography Hockney was published.
A small stroke in 2012 didn’t inhibit his interest in
breaking new ground. Card players have his attention now. Sometimes these group
portraits have the look of photographs, and then you spot one of his own
paintings hanging on the wall, a witty rejoinder to different kinds of
pictorial truth. But as well as the wit, lightness and exuberance of Hockney’s
constructions they have a weighty quality, too.
“If you come to dead ends you simply somersault back and
carry on,” he once said. The English are perennially suspicious of this kind of
acrobatic ability, finding it easier to commend the diligent ploughing of a
single furrow. When faced with negativity or bafflement about his new avenues
and experiments, Hockney’s response has often been to note tersely that he
knows what he is doing.
Learning to look, that’s what he’s been up to, and learning
too that looking is a source of joy. Asked a few years ago about the place of
love in his life, he answered: “I love my work. And I think the work has love,
actually ... I love life. I write it at the end of letters – ‘Love life, David
Hockney.’”
• David Hockney is at Tate Britain, London SW1P, from 9
February. tate.org.uk/visit/tate-britain. Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City:
Adventures in the Art of Being Alone is published by Canongate.
No comments:
Post a Comment