62 DAVID HOCKNEY EXHIBITION
exploding into spring. Far from the vistas of A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998) Hockney explored landscape at a scale both intimate and imposing, for which he defined a new and no less effective visual language. Working en plein air, while also using photography and computers, he completed his largest work, Bigger Trees near Warter or/ ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique. It was in 2018 that Hockney flew into
London from LA for the inauguration of his stained-glass window in Westminster Abbey and, on an impulse, then took off for a three- day trip to France. He saw the sun rise over Le Havre, set over Honfleur, visited the Bayeux Tapestry, and then in 2019 bought an abandoned 17th-century maison à colombages complete with cider press, south of Deauville, deep in rural Normandy. And then, as pandemic lockdown restrictions left him in the Pays d’Auge with nothing to do but paint, he created what became ‘the Covid Collection’: initially 116 iPad drawings blown up to 1.5x1m inkjet prints and called at the time Te Arrival of Spring, Normandy 2020. It was a different kind of mark-making. Some people were overawed, others were not so convinced. Ten there were 220 images, published as
220 for 2020 that were later combined into a continuous frieze 90m long, comparable to the Bayeux Tapestry. Among a set of iPad animations are 12 panels depicting his garden through the seasons, dawn to twilight, that unite finally into one sunburst image titled with a quotation from French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Remember You Cannot Look at the Sun or Death for Very Long. In Normandy, the artist also began a
series of flower ‘portraits’: bouquets of colour presented in ornate wooden frames as if they were traditional paintings. Teir arrangement, ordered daily from the florist in carefully chosen colours, never varied: a glass vase, jug or milk churn, allowing for the play of transparencies and reflections, is placed on a table covered with a checked tablecloth and stands out against a brown background. Tese are displayed next to a room of 60 elegiac portraits of friends and family, workmates, security guards, mayor, plus no less than 18 self-portraits, often self-mockery that verges on caricature. ‘Opera = collaboration = compromise –
which is something I do not do,’ Hockney has stated. Yet he is a natural stage designer, and his sets and costumes are celebrated in an all-engrossing room, with a special polyphonic programme devised with 59 Studio. Whereas a set design deprived of the spectacle of performance can seem dead, here the working documents are brought alive. Hockney has always loved music, seeking to translate it into colour and form. He saw his first opera, Puccini’s La Bohème, as a child in Bradford. From the 1960s onwards, his paintings incorporated scenic elements: curtains, sets and costumed characters. In
Right Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique
1975, he was commissioned by the Glyndebourne Festival to design the sets and costumes for Te Rake’s Progress by Stravinsky, an opera-fable inspired by William Hogarth’s engraved series of the same name. Te musical and visual reworkings of his images for various operas conceived for the exhibition also includes his vision of Te Magic Flute, Tristan und Isolde, Turandot, and Die Frau ohne Schatten. His intellectual restlessness and
addiction to ideas have been expanded into writing controversial books (Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters), a taste for scholarship that has always been far more serious than mere distraction. Much has been written about Hockney’s view of art
history and how artists may have used technical aids to deliver their paintings. His approach is rather like his own version of art historian Aby Warburg’s credo of Kulturwissenschaft, a scientific approach to cultural studies that turned on connections and juxtapositions. Two whole walls of interlocking and overlapping images at the Fondation Louis Vuitton attest to this continued fascination, from Albrecht Durer onwards, via Caravaggio and Jan Vermeer, to discover how artists made their art, an obsession exemplified by two recent particularly enigmatic paintings inspired by Edvard Munch and William Blake in which astronomy, history and geography cross paths with spirituality. Both called Less Is Known than People Tink they pick up on
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