DAVID HOCKNEY EXHIBITION 63


Hockney’s abiding interest in the complexity that lies behind the apparent simplicity of some of his favourite artists: Monet or Van Gogh, Picasso or Fra Angelico, or Claude Lorrain, whose Te Sermon on the Mount (c1656) inspired him to make a series of paintings culminating in a vast rendition of the 17th-century masterpiece that he entitled, ironically, A Bigger Message. In his most recent self-portrait, Play within a Play within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, Hockney has depicted himself sitting in his garden, together with a collage of the work in progress, and daffodils announcing the arrival of spring. Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Binoculars was


the starting point for Hockney’s photographic collages and multiple viewpoint-painted


images. It gave him the initiative. Proust was writing at a time when Jacques-Henri Lartigue was beginning to take his famous instantanées in the Bois de Boulogne, snapshots that assumed great importance in the writer’s thinking, and a time in which Hockney was later to immerse himself, living in Paris from 1973 to 1978. Proust distinguished three ways of seeing or recreating the world: the cinematic that produced the effect of motion; the montage that produced disparity and contradiction interrupting the continuity of experience; and the third principle – which held Hockney’s particular attention – the stereoscopic, which abandoned the portrayal of motion to establish a form of arrest that resists time, images sufficiently different from one another


that nevertheless give the effect of continuous motion, a principle that allows our binocular vision to hold contradictory aspects of things in the steady perspective of recognition, of relief in time. Proust moved around the three principles in his vast novel in the quest for truth that affirmed, as Shattuck saw it, a ‘miracle of vision’. Now, as we enter the second quarter of


the 21st century, Hockney’s own miracle of vision is on show in Paris, one long journey through landscape and portraiture, from his earliest likeness of his father to his very latest works. Something wonderful has certainly happened.


Te David Hockney 25 exhibition is on until 31 August. fondationlouisvuitton.fr


PHOTO: © DAVID HOCKNEY © FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON / MARC DOMAGE


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