David Hockney @ Centre Pompidou

David Hockney, Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986

I have never been a big fan of David Hockney’s art. I first encountered his work in London in the 1980s, when as a young Australian on my five year world odyssey ,I saw everything and anything. In among my discovery of great masters and awe-inspiring museums, I was excited by Hockney's photo-montages. I enjoyed them because of what they did and said about photography; but even then, I wondered what he was doing that Picasso and the Analytical Cubists hadn’t already done. While I recognized this kind of fragmentation of the image as breaking apart the world that made all things less certain and less predictable, I wasn’t convinced there was much behind Hockney’s photo-montages. At the time, no one else was doing this kind of thing with photography, but in my eyes, Hockney's efforts weren't ever substantial enough to make the work radical.

 

David Hockney, We Two Boys Together (clinging), 1961

Then over the years, I have seen the odd Hockney exhibition, but his work has never interested me again to the degree that the photo-montage works did. And I would hazard a guess that this is because he’s not a great painter, and he’s not a great intellectual. His work is interesting for its exploration of space, multiple perspectives, its challenges to the two-dimensionality of the image, and with this, its eventual unsettling of the viewer as the central concern of the late works. However, to me, all of these concerns are being explored at the level of the conceptual —rather than through a manipulation of the medium of paint. And I can’t help feeling as though once you have seen one, you've got the point, and don't need to keep looking.

David Hockney, Summer. The Four Seasons,  2010

That said, I did appreciate the early works on display at the Pompidou Centre’s retrospective, particularly, the drawings and those that reference the Dubuffet style. I was interested by the marriage of Hockney's search for sexuality, and simultaneously, in the same images, the search for representational principles. In the early works, we see him looking for meaning, gradually starting to interrogate the parameters of the image as he will do over the course of his career. We also see the recurrent frame of blank canvas around the painted image, the frequent swathes without paint in the centre of the canvas, and the search for eroticism and desire at the end of the paint brush or stylus.

 

David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972

I enjoyed the late works for their baroque aesthetic—lurid blues, greens, oranges and purples; perspectives in which the influence of virtual reality is clearly inspiring Hockney, and consequently, pushing the possibilities of two dimensional representation. Of course, I have to admit that these works are all about paint because it couldn’t be done in any other two dimensional medium, but it is not about the gentle pushing and pulling of paint around a canvas. I enjoyed Hockney's venture into film–which I previously didn’t know he had done—in The Four Seasons, for the feeling of queeziness as I stood before the installation. I felt as though I was indeed travelling the path together with the camera that is being carved out in the snow, in between the trees and covered in leaves in autumn and spring, and dappled in sunlight in summer.

David Hockney, Garden with Blue Terrace, 2015

However, I also felt alienated by the paintings. In the same way that the figures in the double portraits do not look at each other, in fact, they have very little to no interaction at all, or in the same way that it is always a single swimmer in a pool creating ripples on the water, I felt completely alone before Hockney’s paintings. There is nothing about them that would make me want to be inside their worlds, and nothing to pull me into any kind of relationship with them. Rather, I was standing looking at desire as it is painted on and in the behavior of water, the landscape. I felt placed as an observer to Hockney’s own desire as a painter, as a gay man. For this reason, I didn’t come away from the exhibition feeling as though my world had expanded, or as though I had been transported to places I had not previously been. 

David Hockney, My Parents, 1972

It is an interesting exhibition, and the display of the late works in particular is lovely and maintains their integrity. But so much of what Hockney is doing feels like pastiche, superficial and insubstantial. It is an exhibition that is drawing crowds, primarily because  the works are representational; there is a lot to look at and people who appreciate color, design and commercial art will be interested in the brightness and composition. In addition, when I went the exhibition was filled with young gay couples—in numbers I have never seen them at a Francis Bacon or a Lucien Freud exhibition—all of whom no doubt connect to Hockney’s lifetime search to articulate his own identity as an artist and a gay man. If this is what it takes to get the public into an exhibition, that would make the Hockney exhibition an occasion to applaud.