David Hockney’s Looking at Woldgate Woods, a series of 10 paintings, is up for viewing at the Arts Club of Chicago, a nearly century-old private club where many world famous 20th c. avant-garde artists made midwest debuts (which means it doesn’t have to have a web presence).
Relevant linkage:
Hockney brings the awesome. If it doesn’t storm today, I’m taking Til for a ride on the trail. Inspired by these.
Hockney does bring the awesome. One of my favorites.
These paintings ought to travel.
Hockney is a good guy. He gets his hands into a lot of different things.
I’m surprised these aren’t getting much response yet. He’s incredible, with a stealth-audacity in each new body of work I see.
“Stealth-audacity” is a really perfect way to say what Hockney does. It would be nice to see more of, in painting. I’d be Stealthy-Audacious if I could, but it’s harder than it looks.
Stealth audacity, yes. The combination of a bright mind and a light touch.
I also have to admit I loved how hilariously flaky he seemed when he cameo’d in that old documentary about the psychedelia movement in Britain (I think it’s Let’s Make Love in London). Talking comparatively for a good 5 minutes about bar closing times in L.A. vs. London–he preferred L.A.’s, which was later.
How did everyone else first hear about Hockney? It seems like it was years before I heard people talk about him as a painter. Like, the same thing that the ‘British School’ is/was…
I seem to remember that his large photo collages and his theater designs were being talked about the most when I first became aware of him. On the other hand, his large figure paintings, usually of couples in their homes, or the “splash” paintings, were always prominent in the modern art history books, like HH Arnason.
Speaking of the Splashes, there is another film, a kind of quasi-documentary, that follows him as he paints one of those, called “A Bigger Splash”, from the early 70’s I think. A good film, where his love life and art life coalesce in the London scene…I’ll have to check to see if it is on DVD.
the first image i encountered of hockney’s work was the iconic “pearblossom highway, 1986″ collage at some point in my first year at the pratt extension. of course, when i got to SAIC i saw the large painting “american collectors” that hangs at the AIC and that’s what i associate with him in my mind… though i do often think of a few of those drawings from modern painters a few years ago – the ones where he was trying to demonstrate his camera obscura techniques – and those stick in my mind as well.
I remember “A Bigger Splash” from textbooks, too. I feel like he was always thrown in with Pop artists, though.
I took a community ed class on Perspective Drawing when I was 16. We watched a video on those photo collages. After that, I wasn’t unaware of him as a painter, but also wasn’t especially aware of him as a painter until near the end of undergrad. I had a prof at UMass, Nelson Stevens, who had pushed me to go see the Kitaj show at the Met in 94, so for a long time Hockney was a tangential character to Kitaj. Another undergrad prof was at University of Iowa in the 60s when Hockney was around for a summer or so. He always talked about Hockney more as character than as a painter, which probably had some affect on my opinion on Hockney for a few years.
Seems like that old story about the king and the artist and the perfect drawing of the crab might be relevant here.
wait wait wait a sec…
chris, did you go to UMass?! or am i reading that wrong…
we, would have been, like, neighbors. except i guess the years would have been a little bit off.
i also was aware of kitaj primarily and hockney only as a fringe character. then, i got interested in michael andrews, really late in undergrad, and at about the same time, started looking at hockney’s pool paintings.
Michael Andrews…there’s a painter’s painter.
Did anybody else ever check out that Coldstream/Andrews book that floats around Fine Arts libraries?
yeah, i’ve seen it.
i think andrews is pretty phenomenal.
I have the Andrews book that Friends of Art Bookstore carried…pretty comprehensive of the whole career, and beautiful reproductions. I love his work, but have seen very few firsthand…the Met almost always has on the wall (or did from ‘94-’02) one of his ethereal “pier” images, and I remember how great it was to see the painting of him teaching his daughter to swim at Tate Britain.
(Now, I imagine you’re asking yourselves, “isn’t Tate Britain an awkward place to teach someone how to swim?” Not for someone of Andrews’ caliber, it isn’t.)
Returning to Hockney, I have a vivid recollection of Hockney’s watercolor portraits knocking the nearby E. Peytons of the wall at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
I loved this show but wished dearly that it could have been shown in a larger venue. You can only appareicate these huge paintings from 30 feet away. That’s when they really glow.
These paintings are so satisfying.
I feel like I should say more, but the sensation is so straightforward–I don’t want to pile up words and complicate my explanation/reaction.
i know what you mean. the reaction i keep having is “that green tree in the foreground is so…green…and in the foreground.” (in a good way.)
[...] Chicago: David Hockney at the Arts Club of Chicago, through July [...]
I know that lindsay, above, said that she didn’t think the venue was the best, but I do keep thinking still, there has to be something special about these being in chicago. it seems like there is some resonating between these and all the great impressionist and post-impressionist work at the art institute especially the big vuillard mural.
that also reminds me: there are supposed to be some big James McGarrell landscape murals in downtown st. louis. at an at&t building. has anyone ever seen those?
I’m with you on that, Chris.
I love that Vuillard, by the way. A monolithic slap upside the head for young painters. And some old ones, too, I bet.
oops. the mcgarrells are in the mci building, not an at&t building. here’s a link.
i just got back from visiting the hockney paintings down at the arts club of chicago and wanted to make a few comments.
first, choberka’s “stealth audacity” comment fits very well, and after seeing these works with that notion in my mind i find that it’s illuminating other elements of hockney’s work – particularly as i reflect on them with these new paintings in the fore of my thoughts.
but stealth audacity in the service of what? i guess for me the works have a kind of impudence that i associate with hockney – an edge of boldness that, while not as effusive and shocking as, say, francis bacon, is nonetheless reminiscent of some of the grand statesmen of english painting. it’s less about a risk and more about a sloughing off of certain conceptions in order to highlight something else. i think that’s what’s really going on in these works for me.
i say this because from two feet away the works are practically devoid of élan. the directness and sense of the single – literally single – brush stroke over certain areas reads right on the line between faux-naive and naive itself. even in more built areas, the interaction and accumulation of the paint is very willfully limited. there is pretty much no mixing happening on the surface – and actually that’s one of the more interesting elements of the color situation, because you can sense the mixing that happened before the marks were made. i got a sense that he wanted to get to the image quickly, refuse the fussiness or modulation of forms (there is no rendering), and have the experience be about that presence of the work from a distance. the alan artner review in the chicago tribune mentioned this defiant push specifically. and they really were uncomfortable to be right up on, only to resolve into quite wonderful scenes at 15 or 25 feet. but it wasn’t an optical resolution for me, it was more of a chromatic and compositional resolution. really, the colors in these works are pretty nice, and the walls of the arts club were painted a fantastic russet brown that set the works off nicely.
but back to the close-up view for a second. the works limitations (to me) at these closer ranges are what keep them from the category occupied by the likes of the vuillard that chris mentioned above (one of my absolute favorite paintings of all time), or some of the fantastic works by bonnard (especially his late pieces from the 30s) that i keep thinking about in relation to what i imagine hockney is trying to do here. that vuillard is so dense, so constructed – the totality of the work flexes and responds to the square-inch purposefulness with which the work was made. the nearly-whimsical shifting colors in the late bonnards, that bound up and create such a frontal, illusion-defying experience, really seem to be based in a surface negotiation of inches rather than a will toward the whole. the small accumulates into the larger without the larger necessarily being the primary aim. for hockney, that larger view is the aim and he makes no bones about getting to it.
so that stealth audacity seemed to me to be that willingness to get at the totality and get obsessed over it over and over again (monet’s rouen cathedrals and haystacks are mentioned in many reviews). he did this with a kind of negligence about development (plenty of primed-only canvas to be seen) that was expressly intentional and key to what he was aiming at. for me that broad, take-it-all-in view was rewarding and interesting and trumped the total lack of interest that the surfaces evoked in me. two repeated factors made the paintings work for me: the color and that central pathway atmospherically reduced into the distance. these central areas were the most build and interesting places in the paintings for me (a couple brought to mind howard hodgkin, sans the thick paint (if that’s possible). the twisting, arcing character of the marks in this area was a contrast to the directed lines of the rest of the paintings surfaces. those directed straight and diagonal lines actually reminded me in some places of the patterns in some of the late munchs – the sort of argyle forms sitting right on the surface. in the hockney’s there are arrays of bands – trees, the cast of light – that really carry the character of light and atmosphere at a distance but are the merest slashes of mark up close.
there was one little tidbit that i found nice – a smaller work that hockney had constructed from memory. it was an autumn version of the same scene as the others and it followed the same format and keyed-up coloration as the larger works. but here the brush strokes had less area to cover, so they covered it. there was more buttery density in this piece, more ad lib marking (as opposed to the speedy gestured depiction-focused marks on the larger pieces), and a warmer, tighter composition. the audacity of the larger works was compelling, but the humility of this little one was, in a way, even more interesting.
That’s some excellent commentary, Ballou. It answers a lot of questions I have, not being able to see them in person. Thanks for sharing it.
Now, legions of sloppy/lazy painting students have a new hero/alibi: “Why do I have to cover the whole canvas. David Hockney doesn’t!”
actually, i think this one may get the prize for least canvas covered…
i second, sam’s good comment, ballou. you should submit that to publish somewhere real.
MW Capacity is real
ballou, i just got round to having a few spare minutes in which to read this, and it is really good. and chris is right; you should be submitting stuff like this to someplace that will put it in real, live, print.
i haven’t seen these in real life, but having looked as closely at the jpegs as is possible, i sort of had this gut reaction that suggested that if i were to see them, that i would be a little uncomfortable with the surfaces.
and i really love that vuillard. inch by inch. love it. and i have some sort of deep seated bias toward paint that makes the eye really crawl. single, floaty, brushstrokes and wide open spaces make me a little nervous.
not that this is a particularly intelligent or hip reaction to have. just is what it is, i guess.
…thinking more about it, i think it’s not so much paint (quantity) that is a requisite part of painting-experience (looking) for me. but, it’s this obsession that i have with reading paintings edge-to-edge, or mark to mark.
like, i can’t quite make the jump through a painting if the marks feel singular, or singularly additive. leaves me feeling dumbly marooned.
i really enjoy the potential energy/pressure that happens in paintings when the edges are really knit deep through the obsessive play with making the edge of the mark be, at once, forward, present, and on top, surface-wise, and then conversely making adjacent or near edges feel as though they are diving down, subducting etc.