hockney on modern art

8/11/2019 Hockney on Modern Art

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But Hockney says "the power is with images", and in neglecting them the artworld

has diminished the very thing it aimed to protect: art.

It's difficult to ignore Hockney's latest images that now fill the vast galleries of

the Royal Academy in London. They are huge (two paintings are about 10-metres

across), they are innovative (numerous iPad print-outs and an 18-screen film

installation), and they are very colourful (purple paths and orange tree trunks

aplenty).

By and large, they all depict the same subject: the hills, fields, woods and roads of

rural East Yorkshire. These things are subjective, but I found them potent and poetic.

And exciting. Exciting because it has been a rarity over the last half-a-century for a

supremely gifted painter to take on the English landscape. Constable and Turner did

so in the 19th Century. And John Nash and Stanley Spencer rose to the challenge in

the mid-20th Century. But not much has emerged since.

Maybe it's due to the 30 years he has spent in Hollywood that Hockney blames the

camera for the hiatus. He directs a damning finger at the one-eyed monster in all its

guises: photography, film and television. He believes it is the camera that has caused

many of today's artists to forsake figurative art, having decided that a single

mechanical lens can capture reality better than any painter or sculptor.

David Hockney

Born 1937 in Yorkshire

Early star of British Pop Art

scene

Found fame painting sunlit male

nudes in swimming pools of Hollywood

More recently his focus has

shifted to landscapes of his home

county

"But they're wrong," he told me. "A camera cannot see what a human can see, there

is always something missing." He talks about the inability of a camera to reproduce a

sense of space and volume.

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/






He makes the point that a photograph documents only a split second in time.

Whereas a landscape painting, portrait or still life might appear to be a moment

immortalised in a single image, but it is in fact the culmination of days, weeks and in

the case of many artists (Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Hockney), years

of looking at a single subject.

It is a result of vast quantities of stored information, experience, jottings and spatial

sensitivity that has eventually appeared in the colours, composition and atmosphere

of a final finished artwork.

For all his outspokenness David Hockney is a canny man. He twinkles when talking

about why he chose to tackle the English landscape, seeing it, I suspect, as an

opportunity to make another big splash: a great subject overlooked by most other

artists.

When people told him that the "landscape genre was worn out" he thought it illogical.

"The way of looking at it [the landscape] might be worn out, but the landscape can't

be," he said. "It needs re-looking at…[to] look at it afresh."

Which is exactly what he has done. And it looks like Hockney on Yorkshire will be a

hit with the public as advance bookings are already at the upper end of the Royal Academy's expectations. But I wonder if the show will have a more lasting impact

than simply to re-assert the general feeling that the Bradford-born painter is the

country's greatest living artist.

I think it is possible that it could mark the moment - together with the Lucian Freud

exhibition that will be opening shortly at the nearby at the National Portrait Gallery -

when figurative art once again starts to become the dominant genre in the

contemporary exhibitions and displays mounted at the likes of Tate, Paris's

Pompidou and New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The paintings of urban Coventry by George Shaw were shortlisted for last year's

Turner Prize. He didn't win. But maybe this year will be different, and an artist who

produces landscapes or portraits or still lifes will carry the day?

http://www.npg.org.uk/freudsite/






hockney on modern art

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