Reverse Point of View or Reverse Perspective Way art
David Hockney, Contrarian, Shifts Perspectives
Mr. Hockney's new paintings are riveting in their spatial distortions. A born colorist, he'd rather be a Cubist.
David Hockney repainted his puddle — and signed and dated it July 8, 2017, the day before his 80th birthday. Credit... Nathanael Turner for The New York Times
LOS ANGELES — When David Hockney began his career, figurative painting was considered old hat and fifty-fifty retrogressive. The assumption, in avant-garde circles, was that abstraction was wholly superior, raising big, lofty questions well-nigh the essence of painting instead of getting bogged downwards in the niggling details of postwar life. What possible wisdom could be gleaned from a painting that depicts a palm tree, for instance, or the glistening turquoise of a lawn swimming pool?
Mr. Hockney, who is often described as England'south most celebrated living artist, has painted those precise subjects and is well aware of the suspicions of triviality his work can arouse. On a recent morning, sitting in his studio in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, he recalled an amusing snub. He was visiting a gallery in New York, when he bumped into the critic Cloudless Greenberg, abstract art'due south almost vociferous defender. "He was with his 8-twelvemonth-old girl," Mr. Hockney remembered, "and he told me that I was her favorite creative person. I don't know if that was a put-down. I suspect information technology was." He laughed softly, and so added in his gravelly, Yorkshire-inflected vocalism, "I thought I was a peripheral creative person, actually."
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Nowadays, in an age when the choice betwixt abstraction and figuration is dismissed as a false dichotomy, and when younger artists imbue their work with once-taboo narrative and autobiography, Mr. Hockney is an artist of unassailable relevance. One suspects we volition run into as much when a full-dress retrospective of his piece of work opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art on Nov. 27. An active, inquisitive draftsman inclined to conscientious observation, he has always culled his subjects from his immediate surroundings. His art acquaints the states with his parents, his friends and boyfriends, the rooms he has lived in, the landscapes he knows and loves, and his dachshunds, Boodgie and Stanley. He is probably best-known for his double portraits from the '60s and his scenes of American leisure, the sunbathers and swimming pools that can accept a foreign stillness near them, capturing the eternal sunshine of the California listen with an incisiveness that perhaps only an expatriate (or Joan Didion) could muster.
In the 1960s, Mr. Hockney was easy to recognize, a boyish figure with an apple-circular face, a mop of blond hair, and his trademark owlish glasses. Nowadays, at 80, he has gray hair, and he wears a hearing aid in each ear. "Every time I lie downward, I accept to take them out because they fall out otherwise," he noted. He is able to carry on a conversation amid the quietude of his studio, but feels it is futile to head out with friends. "If you are going out in the evening," he said in a slightly rueful tone, "yous are going out to mind, and I am non very good at listening."
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His studio sits on a hill above his house, and the grounds are slightly riotous. Every bit in sure Hockney paintings, large-leafed plants abound and exterior walls are painted in discordant hues of hot pink, purple bluish and yolky yellow. An inflatable swan floats in a kidney-shaped swimming pool that itself contains a Hockney painting: an abstract limerick with curving blueish lines dispersed rhythmically across the surface, like a cartoon rendition of waves.
Mr. Hockney is still a dapper, vigorous presence. His chat is broad-ranging and larded with literary references, and his fashion is so genial and confiding that at first you do non notice how stubborn he tin be. He delights in espousing reverse opinions, some of which come at you with the force of aesthetic revelation, while others seem perverse and largely indefensible.
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In the latter category, y'all can probably include his regular denunciations of the antismoking movement. He smokes a pack a solar day, and blithely discounts the hazards of cigarettes and cigars. "Churchill smoked 10 cigars a 24-hour interval for lxx years," he tells me with apparent glee. "Well, nowadays, they tell you that cigars are the kiss of death. Churchill didn't recollect and then."
Unlike other exiles, who typically bemoan chaos in their homelands, Mr. Hockney is notwithstanding a British citizen and speaks about Queen Elizabeth II with unalloyed adoration. He is currently completing a 20-foot-high stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey in her honor. Her reign, he said, "is at present longer than that of Queen Victoria." He showed me his pattern for the window: a 10-foot-tall inkjet printout inscribed with a lush floral scene. He equanimous it on his iPad. Its subject, he said, is the English hawthorne blossom, but to my center, it appeared semiabstract and called to mind Matisse'due south windows for his chapel in Vence.
Epitome
Mr. Hockney, it might seem, is a direct heir of Matisse's Fauvism, pushing colour contrasts to trippy and hedonistic extremes. Yet when Matisse came up, he was curiously silent. Peradventure the story of Matisse'due south influence is so abundantly evident that he feels that there is zip to say almost information technology. Or possibly he simply feels more temperamentally aligned with Picasso, whom he does like to talk about, and whose Cubism speaks to his obsession with the mechanics of vision. In 2001, Mr. Hockney published an important book, "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters," which argues that advances in realism in Western art could not have been possible without the sly use of mirrors, camera obscuras and other optical devices.
These days, in his newer paintings, Mr. Hockney is exploring the concept of "reverse perspective," which poses yet another challenge to the accepted story of Western painting. Earlier my visit to his studio, he emailed me a recent discovery of his: a 105-page essay by Pavel Florensky, a now-forgotten Russian mathematician who died in 1937, a victim of Stalin's goons. Florensky was as well a gifted fine art historian and his 1920 essay, "Reverse Perspective," is a dazzling piece of revisionist criticism conceived in defense of 14th-- and 15th-century Russian icons. He argues that correct perspective is overrated. The absence of perspective in Russian icons — equally well every bit in Egyptian fine art and amongst the Chinese — was not a blunder only an inspired option.
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Elaborating on that theme, Mr. Hockney told me, "In Japanese fine art, they never use shadows." He took out a book of woodblock prints past Utagawa Hiroshige and flipped to a page that showed a small wooden bridge arching across a powder-blue body of water. "There is no reflection," he said. "Fifty-fifty with a span, there is never a reflection in the water."
I looked up at the new paintings on the walls of his studio, wondering if he, also, had omitted shadow. Not entirely. The work still contains deep space and foreshortening, but the viewpoint keeps shifting. The pictures are riveting in their spatial distortions, and it's as if they were saying, "To hell with the idea of a single vanishing point." Most of the new works are painted on irregularly shaped canvases, whose bottom corners are sliced off, destabilizing the rectangle and cultivating the rogue energy of diagonals. In one of his more than engaging, not-yet-titled works, Mr. Hockney juxtaposes images of a disappearing road, a tuxedoed gentleman dancing toward you and a boxy pseudo-stage on which a portrait of a lion (a pun on 'line'?) is displayed behind hot-pinkish curtains. "Just chopping off the corners has done wonders for me," he said.
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Later on a while, his chief banana, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, indicated it was time for lunch. JP, as everyone calls him, is a bearded, taciturn Frenchman of 52 whose background is in music and the accordion. Mr. Hockney describes him every bit "my faithful companion of 15 years." I asked them whether they intend to ally, and they replied in the negative. "Marriage is about property," Mr. Hockney said, with his usual distrust of orthodoxy. "When you get divorced, you know information technology's virtually holding."
As we left the studio and headed down the outdoor stairway that leads to the house, the view of the garden was recognizable from Mr. Hockney'southward paintings. He may similar to articulate recondite theories almost "reverse perspective" — O.K., whatever. What makes his piece of work memorable is non its devotion to technical questions but to lived experience. The new serial began with "Garden With Blue Terrace," from 2015, which captures the deck outside his living room equally a giant chunk of aquamarine, angled to make it wider than life. On the correct side of the canvas, jumbo-size dark-green leaves seem to push forward from backside the railing, and the whole scene feels live with the excitement that tin can come up from getting closer and closer to the things you intendance nigh.
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The new piece of work was scheduled to be unveiled at the Pace Gallery in New York this autumn, to coincide with the Met testify. Critics who have faulted Mr. Hockney for overproductivity should know that he didn't finish the work in time. "I have to do the paintings!" he said.
In the meantime, a small, well-called show of earlier piece of work — half self-portraits, half photographic collages — remains on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, through November. 26. The bear witness's jarringly festive championship, "Happy Birthday, Mr. Hockney," can make him sound less like a daring modernist than a beneficent kindergarten teacher. But the intellectual appetite of his work is evident. The centerpiece of the show is "Pearblossom Hwy., xi-18th April 1986, #1" a mural-size scene of a shining desert crossroads somewhere in Southern California. A road sign admonishes "Finish Ahead," only your optics keep moving across the slice, which was assembled from more than 700 close-ups that Mr. Hockney took with his Polaroid camera in an attempt to extend Picasso's Cubism into photography.
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Mr. Hockney's work is varied, maybe over-varied, merely it does offering up a coherent worldview. If his entire oeuvre was buried in a mudslide and unearthed hundreds of years from now, a person looking at information technology might think that our age was actually an admirable i — a time when we placed a premium on our friendships, savored nature and its splendors and promoted social tolerance. It is not irrelevant that he was painting portraits of his gay companions well before the Sexual Offenses Human action of 1967 decriminalized homosexuality in England.
One Baronial evening, a few days after my visit to his studio, Mr. Hockney drove over to the Getty to participate in a panel discussion well-nigh his work, in forepart of a crowd of several hundred people. The event's moderator, the writer Lawrence Weschler, forewarned the audition that there was no smoking at the Getty, unless you happened to be Mr. Hockney, who had been granted a special papal-similar dispensation for the evening. So, in a gesture that hovered ambiguously between a safety drill and a bit of surrealist theater, a guard walked onto the stage sportily displaying a red fire extinguisher. The audition roared.
It is possible that the great subject area of Mr. Hockney's subsequently work is landscape. He has occasionally traded the libertine vistas of California for the less sunny countryside of his native Yorkshire. In 1989, he bought a big cerise brick house for his female parent and sister, overlooking the ocean in Bridlington, not far from where he was born. "My mother lived for near of the 20th century," he reflected, back in his studio, "and the first half was the worst half. The 2d half was much better. She began life rough and hard, and concluded it in comfort."
One of the highlights of the Met bear witness is sure to be the landscapes he has painted in that surface area. He stayed on in the seaside firm subsequently his female parent's death, devoting himself to large-calibration views of winding roads and the intricate woods of the Yorkshire Wolds. Some of the paintings take clouds and stake low-cal, a sense of encroaching mortality, restoring the tenderness that had been bleached out of his earlier landscapes by the incessant California sun.
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"My female parent's ashes were sprinkled on a lovely niggling road that ran from Bridlington," he told me. "At the terminate of the road was a Gypsy encampment, so non many people ever turned down this road. But we did. I think this life is a large mystery. And there could be another."
Is he maxim he believes in an afterlife?
"There could be," he answered in an hostage tone. "I recollect about these things now. You could motility to a new dimension. In mathematics, they now have 10 dimensions, 12 dimensions. Well, we only take three dimensions, four if we count time. Merely fourth dimension is the bully mystery, isn't information technology? I think information technology was St. Augustine who said if you ask me what time is, I practice not know. But if yous don't ask me, I do know."
As he mulled on time in the abstract sense, the day was getting on. I was curious to ask him whether he thought his new works correspond an official "late manner," with all that implies virtually a suspension from the by.
"You don't know what a belatedly style is, really, until it is finished," he replied, taking another drag on his cigarette. "And the work is finished when you autumn over. That's what is going to happen. I will just fall over one day."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/arts/design/david-hockney-los-angeles-metropolitan-museum-of-art-reverse-perspective.html
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