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“Love is the only serious subject.”
Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, 1966
The Scrabble Game, 1 January 1983
Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970-1971
Lester Strong talks with a modern portrait master
OVER THE SPAN of his fifty-year artistic career, David Hockney has drawn or painted portraits of a great many people, most of them family members, friends, or lovers, and he’s portrayed many of them on multiple occasions in a variety of media. A major retrospective of his portraits that recently opened in Boston could justly have been titled “Hockney Among Friends.”
If the subject of Hockney’s art is often friends and friendship, the content of his artistry, regardless of the medium, is united by a persistent interest in the application of color. Whether the medium is oil, acrylic, pastel, colored pencil, or watercolor, whether the venue is a book, a home, a gallery, a museum, or an opera stage, Hockney is known for the use of color in his work. (The importance of color for Hockney extends to the clothes he wears: the day I interviewed him, he was nattily dressed in a blue blazer, dark slacks, and tie, along with a shirt whose multihued horizontal stripes could have been painted on the fabric by Hockney himself.) This use of color has left Hockney’s work open to the criticism that it’s merely “decorative”—and there’s no denying its decorative appeal. It’s one of the reasons that he’s been asked to design stage sets for some of the world’s major opera houses. However, in figurative work such as Hockney’s landscapes and portraits, color functions in a variety of ways.
Take landscapes. “I bring landscapes back to me so the viewer will feel inside them the same way I feel inside them,” he commented in the interview. He does this through the use of intense, arresting colors that compel the viewer’s eye to enter directly into the picture’s space, becoming part of its world. The same can be said of his portraits. Here the colors are usually more subdued, but they still pull the viewer into the room, onto the terrace, into the shower or pool where the people or animals in the pictures reside. One can almost feel the silky fur of the deliciously white cat in one of his most famous paintings, Mr. And Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–1971), or the caress of the water against one’s legs in his iconic Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966).
Color in Hockney’s art also serves to stimulate what I will label the “gay optic nerve.” Hockney is not a “gay artist” in the same way as, say, Tom of Finland, whose images of pumped-up male bodies in various sexual positions were meant for gay male eyes only. Indeed, as Hockney suggests in this interview, he rejects the whole notion of “gay art” as a distinct genre. Still, he is an artist who’s gay, and it’s hard to believe that some kind of gay male penchant for the optically flamboyant has not made itself felt in the lush ochres, lavenders, and aquamarines that cover his canvasses.
Hockney is also interested in the art of photography, both as a practitioner and as a theorist of the relationship between photography and painting. His photocollages present a refracted, composite image of an everyday event, such as a game of Scrabble, comprised of overlapping fragments of the scene.
In recent years, Hockney has sparked a lively controversy in the art world by suggesting that some of the masters of the 16th century used a projection device such as a camera obscura to assist them in their painting, especially of very intricate objects like embroidered fabric or reflective metalwork, as well as human faces and hands. His chief evidence for this (offered in a 2001 book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters) is that painting suddenly became much more accurate and detailed in the 1430’s with the discovery that an image of the world could be projected onto a flat surface in a darkened room, and again in the 1590’s with the use of lenses to focus the image. If Hockney is correct—and this theory does have its detractors—it suggests that there’s an element of photography in some of the Renaissance painters known for their extreme realism, such as Caravaggio and Vermeer. Indeed the use of optical aids continued into the 19th century with artists like David and Ingres, until true photography came along and forever transformed the visual arts.
Born in Bradford, England, in the late 1930’s, Hockney moved to Los Angeles in the 1960’s, where he has continued to maintain a residence ever since. A major retrospective of his portrait paintings opened recently at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which was the occasion for the following interview. I actually spoke with David Hockney in New York City a month or so before the opening, and found him to be an open, gregarious person with a knack for making friends out of strangers in short order.
— Lester Strong
Lester Strong: I look at your portraits and sometimes I’m reminded of portraits by several other artists, mainly Alice Neel, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon. Yet your portraits are all distinctly by you. What makes a portrait by David Hockney a Hockney portrait?
David Hockney: How do you make a memorable image? If we knew, there’d be a lot made, wouldn’t there? Even people who have made them don’t necessarily know how to make another. It’s just one of those rather mysterious things, isn’t it?
I do know I’ve always enjoyed drawing people. I’ve never done commissions. I like to record my friends, to see what’s going on with them. I didn’t realize I’d done it so consistently—I think practically every year for fifty years or so. There were periods when I wasn’t painting pictures particularly, [but was] working in the theater, opera, or ballet, or periods when I’d stop portraits to paint something else. Then I’d suddenly start again. It might just be drawings. But I’d feel, “Well, I need to record my friends again, and what’s going on with them.” A lot of artists do that, don’t you think?
Some [portraits] were a lot more complex than others, of course. The double portraits tended to be. They were painted from life, and therefore done quite quickly. You have two people sitting there, and I’ve found you need to paint them quickly because each of them has to think they’re needed sitting there. If you spend too long on one person, the other one might get up and walk away for a bit, and then you lose the relationship between them. So I realized they will both remain seated, especially if they see progress on the portrait, say, each half-hour, and are allowed to rest.
The Boston show covers fifty years of my portraits, so it has a lot of variety—drawings, paintings, etchings, watercolors, lithographs, photocollages, portraits of individuals and couples. There will also be a lot of new paintings never before exhibited. At first I wasn’t so enthusiastic about the idea of a big retrospective of my portraits. Such shows always take a great deal of time, including my time, which I prefer to spend actually doing my art. But I’ve just seen the proofs of the catalogue, and I’d say it was a really good idea.
LS: You’ve never been shy about being gay, either personally or in your art. Aside from subject matter, do you think being gay affected your art stylistically?
DH: I’ve no idea. I’m not one who thinks there’s something you can label “gay art.” I remember in the early 1960’s I was with a friend at an exhibition in London containing paintings of girls’ legs. This friend stood looking at the art, and said, “David, if there’s one thing worse that homosexual art, it’s heterosexual art.” I know what he meant. There’s only art.
LS: You’re known for having produced work with openly homoerotic content early on. Do you think your art has contributed to a greater openness for gay images and gay culture in mainstream culture?
DH: It might have, but I personally wouldn’t know. I suppose it did a bit. I do know even early on in my career I was painting males as sexy, erotic figures at a time when it was mostly females who were portrayed like that. But what influence that had is not a topic I think about too much.
LS: Do you think your work has contributed to the greater acceptance of gay people socially over the years?
DH: Possibly. I’ve always said, “I’ll defend myself. I’m not speaking for others, but I will speak for myself and defend my way of life as well.” Possibly that had an effect.
LS: I think your images have arguably permeated society in a way that has made a big difference. But it might take a sociologist to track it all down.
DH: Yes. I mean it’s not my job to track it down, is it? But I do think about it a bit. As I say, I’ve always defended myself and my way of life. You know, I remember Stonewall. I remember before [Stonewall]. I first came to New York in 1961, in the summer, when I was 23. I thought it was fantastic compared to London. It ran 24 hours a day. You weren’t pushed off to bed at eleven o’clock, and there were quite big gay bars. I remember one where, if the lights flashed, the boys had to stop dancing because the cops came in for their money or something. I was in one of them once. Then I went to L.A. in 1964, where they had much bigger gay bars. I thought, “This is amazing!” I was only 25 or so, a time you’re very active sexually. The Red Raven in L.A., remember it? There was nothing like that in London then. Nothing at all. I [thought], “I like this. I like this way of life. I like the climate. I like the sun. It suits me. I’ll stay here.” And I did.
LS: Do you think your openness about being gay has affected your career one way or another—either opened doors or closed them?
DH: I have no idea. And it’s not something I’d care about, either, to be honest. I wouldn’t let something commercial affect my way of life that way.
LS: I’m not aware of any gay activism, as it’s usually understood, on your part, like participating in gay marches or participating in AIDS organizations like ACT UP, although I think the homoeroticism in your art functions in a certain way as a kind of gay activism.
DH: I’m not an activist. I’m not particularly that political, either, only because I don’t want to spend too much time on things other than my work. My job is being a painter. I have a sense of duty about that. I’ll defend myself, but I’m not really going to speak for others. Nevertheless, I support organizations and groups involving various issues—AIDS organizations, for example.
LS: What pleasure does art give you as an artist and a viewer?
DH: It gives me enormous thrills, deep pleasures. We just went to see the Van Gogh drawings and Fra Angelico show [both on view at the time of this interview at New York’s Metropolitan Museum]. I came away absolutely thrilled. For me such art is very deep as well. I admit it doesn’t affect everybody like that.
LS: It thrills you because it’s life-enhancing? Or for some other reason?
DH: It is life-enhancing. I’m a very visual person. I like visual art. If it’s not that visual, I’m less interested. I like music, which is totally different. But I like depictions of nature. All the variety there is, really, has always interested me.
LS: Painting family, friends, and lovers like you do means painting people you feel close to and love. Would you define love as a subject of your portraits? Of your art in general?
DH: Love is the only serious subject. It’s the only thing that affects us deeply, isn’t it? Everything else is trivial. Many people have said that, not just me, but I believe it. I do believe it. I also believe in tolerance. I always point out to gay people: “You’ve really got to support tolerance because you’re always going to be a minority, always. Nature has just made you that way, and you can’t be any other way.” As a smoker, I point out [the world] is getting very intolerant of smokers. But I say, It’s a bit dangerous, that. Because once you start being intolerant of a lot of things, you could quickly see people become very intolerant of gays again. I think you need eternal vigilance to keep [tolerance] there. I think you have to be careful. But you do have to support a certain tolerant attitude to things.
LS: Love is certainly at the center of tolerance. They’re intertwined, in a certain way. It helps you appreciate difference.
DH: Yes. And that’s probably why I do portraits. Everybody’s different; they look different, and are different. Maybe deep, deep down we’re all the same. But on the surface we seem to be different, don’t we?
LS: In the preface to the catalogue of the Boston show, Mark Glazebrook writes, “Hockney advocates perceiving the world with greater intimacy.” What about intimacy speaks to you so forcefully as an artist?
DH: Visual images can push things away. Photographs often do that. There’s always a distance somehow. To me, though, everything good is intimate. A lot of my painting is concerned with closeness.
LS: That comes across even in your landscapes. I have in mind Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980), for example, or Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica (1990). More recently there’s also Expulsion from the Garden (2002), which brings the viewer right into Eden even as Adam and Eve are leaving it. They all really do bring the viewer into the landscape. You’re just sort of immersed in it, which provides an amazing intimacy for a landscape.
DH: Yes. You know the Renaissance concept of Alberti’s window? [In a 1435–1436 treatise Della Pittura (On Painting), Italian artist and art theorist Leon Battista Alberti wrote that when he painted a scene he assumed the picture would represent the world as if seen through a window.] I always point out that if you’re looking at the world through a window, where are you? Are you in the world? It seems to me Alberti’s window is actually a prison. It’s all about distancing things. I’m doing landscapes again these days, in Yorkshire, England. I bring the landscapes back to me, so the viewer will feel inside them the same way I feel I’m inside them. The landscape isn’t over there. I’m in it. The world isn’t over there. We’re in it.
I’ve come across some writers who talk about the distancing effects of technology. One of them pointed out that generations ago the moon used to be a very big part of our lives. We knew it affected the tides, had an effect on women’s menstrual cycles, and so on. He suggested that perhaps we felt we had to go to the moon in 1969 because our modern technology had pushed the moon too far away from us. I think that is a lovely, poetic notion. I wonder if perhaps outer space isn’t what we think it is. We’re part of the world, we’re part of nature, not separate from it. Nature isn’t “over there.” If it’s “over there,” where are we? In a void?
LS: Could you say a bit more about painting your friends?
DH: What people viewing the [Boston] show will see is that over the years my friends have stayed the same. New friends come in, and I’ve lost a lot of friends through death. But I haven’t lost friends in other ways. Friends are just too valuable to lose in other ways, aren’t they?
LS: I have one remaining question. Sarah Howgate, in her preface to the Boston show’s catalogue, quotes a comment by you: “Of course art is about sharing.” What is it you want to share with others through your art?
DH: My experience of the world, and my love of it. I love the world. I think it’s beautiful, even though we have terrible times in this world. We’re all touched with tragedy, aren’t we? Always; it’s part of being human. Unfortunately, not everybody can see the comic side. But the comic side has to be there too. Otherwise it would be even more tragic, wouldn’t it?
“David Hockney Portraits” runs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston through May 14. It then travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 11–Sept. 4); and on to the National Portrait Gallery in London (Oct. 12–Jan. 21, 2007). For more information about the show or to purchase the catalog, go to the website of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: www.mfa.org.
Lester Strong is special projects editor for A&U magazine and a regular contributor to OUT magazine.
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