David Hockney's More Felled Trees on Woldgate (2008)
© David Hockney, Photo: Richard Schmidt
From my first minutes in the Van Gogh Museums show, Hockney-Van Gogh: the Joy of Nature, I started asking myself questions. I watched the introductory video, on a big screen, beautifully produced, with the old duffer David Hockney himself waxing about “endless inspiration and joy in nature”, cutting to scenes of soothing, rolling English hills, back to a jolly, friendly Hockney dabbing his palette. I thought: “Is this a marketing video for a retirement community?”
My mind wandered a bit as springtimes green fields and pretty woods unfurled. Then, I heard Hockney exclaim: “Its like natures having an erection… and it only lasts two days…”
“Whoa.” I lurched backwards. On watching it again, it was spring in England that lasted two days, the span of its metaphoric erection left unstated, the stuff of dreams. “Wheres this going?” I was talking to myself at this point. It turned out, no place libidinous. The shows a tame, though colourful, bit of fluff, so blatant that it put me in the frame of mind to ask more questions.
They prove that the bigger the art, the more insistent and persuasive its mediocrity
First and foremost, what do Hockney and Vincent Van Gogh really have in common, aside from citizenship in the brotherhood of man, sometime landscapists and extraordinary colourists? It might be the stickler, stodgy art historian in me but the “deep, intense longing felt by both artists throughout their careers for new vistas and new worlds” means, to me, not much. Hockney was inspired by Van Gogh to paint outdoors, “just to find a new kind of language…and I tried to create new space”. Van Gogh savoured “that flat landscape in which there was nothing but…the infinite…eternity.” Thats the catalogues take (ellipses not mine). The catalogue and show are filled with bromides. Its a lot of baby talk.
Besides, as Hockney reminds us in the video, “theres love in those paintings, isnt there?” I squirmed. Please, not spring in England again. My thoughts strayed to Yvonne De Carlo singing Im Still Here when she was in the musical Follies. Hockneys been around for a long time. Whenever I look at his art, I quickly start thinking about something else: movie stars, Julius Shulman photographs of Neutra-designed houses, Evelyn Waughs The Loved One. Just plopping himself in Hollywood makes an Englishman something he wouldnt be if he moved to Buffalo. Or maybe the work is just to be glanced at.
"Like natures having an erection": David Hockney's May Blossom on the Roman Road (2009)
© David Hockney, Photo: Richard Schmidt
Van Gogh and Hockney are distinct and separate propositions. I suppose theres a tome the size of the Manhattan phone book about what they dont have in common, like their centuries, milieux, trajectories, biographies, philosophies, impulses and mental conditions: since one was psychotic and the other the refreshingly grounded Hockney. What the show tells us they have in common is either flights of fancy or a forced march from Filippo Brunelleschi to Fra Angelico to Eugène Delacroix to J.M.W Turner to Jean-François Millet to Van Gogh, then leaping over the vast oceans of Modernism, Dada and Pop Art to Hockney.
Van Goghs look at nature is visceral. Its nature in the raw. Hockneys is cheerful, playful, even nostalgic, which is why some of the late things look like folk art. I once had an old Yankee cousin desperate to establish a blood link to Charlemagne. Family resemblance not doing the trick, he deployed a legion of charts to establish a link that was as tenuous and hypothetical as it was inconsequential. As we say in rural Vermont, “wishin aint gettin”.
Vincent van Gogh's Field with Irises near Arles (1888)
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
The show places a few nice Van Gogh paintings from the museums collection here and there but their presence is suggestive. Theres no tough, Jesuitical point-on-point comparison. The shows almost all Hockney work from the last ten years. Almost all of it belongs to the artist or the David Hockney Foundation. Is its next stop the marketplace? If thats the case, itll go there spruced up with the incandescent, contrived but immensely attractive lineage the Van Gogh Museum has bestowed upon it.
The Hockney landscapes on view are enormous. They prove that the bigger the art, the more insistent and persuasive its mediocrity, unless its a Baroque altarpiece. Theyre billboards for spring with none of its energy, nuance, warmth or delicacy. Theyre wallpaper more than anything and look like the stage sets for which Hockney is justly renowned. They look like the big springtime watercolours of the great Charles Burchfield or Milton Avery—but flattened by a truck.
Small landscapes done in watercolour or charcoal are installed tightly in blocks of 25, like sheets of themed postage stamps. Were not meant to look at each one individually but, like a billboard, at overall effect and instant messaging. I defied expectation and looked at them closely. Theyre nice but nothing remarkable. Theres a big gallery of video art depicting the four seasons. I liked it, but why was it there? Wheres the storyline?
David Hockney's Woldgate Vista, 27 July 2005 (2005)
© David Hockney, Photo: Richard Schmidt
I was keen to learn more about massive prints that started as iPad drawings. Im fine with using new technology. Good for Hockney. They look like lithographs or even stained glass. What does the new medium mean to Hockney, aside from allowing him to draw in bed? Thats about as profound as the show gets.
Hockneys a fine artist and an unusual variant in the Pop Art movement. Yes, his sociable paintings have a vibrant palette and nothing to upset the viewer, much less deeply challenge him. Theyre not fatuous, though, and theyre blessedly free of kitsch. Its California Cool art, Pop Art in its Art Deco phase, to string bits of jargon together. Its bright, fun, a little carnal since hes Hollywood and gay, but rigorous and distant, too. Hockney brought a touch of class to Santa Monica, as English ex-pats always do. The bars low there, so an English accent and English reserve confer instant élan.
Hockney has always been a serious, hard-working, free-ranging artist, too. Hes weathered 50 years of art fads. In the late 1960s into the 1970s, his arch, hip swimming pool pictures and portraits of collectors and connoisseurs as well as self-portraits combined a cool glam, an of-the-time psychedelic palette, and just enough monumentality to impress seriously. Theres good social commentary there, too, since clothes, hair, setting and languRead More – Source
[contf]
[contfnew]
the art news paper
[contfnewc]
[contfnewc]
