David Hockney By David Hockney

"The book I chose is Hockney on Hockney , which I actually came to quite late, though it seems it has been a formative work for a number of colleagues too. I read it in preparation for the Tate exhibition that I co-curated in 2017. Much of what historians and critics have written about him is almost universally bogged down in biography. He’s such a flamboyant and colourful character, and a wit, I suppose it’s easily done. Now Hockney on Hockney is biographical too of course. He wrote it at what now seems very early on in his career, because he started painting so young, but even here his thought is very developed and mature. It was published in 1976, so he was approaching 40 and already a public figure, though his first exhibition was only in 1963. That’s only 13 years before this collection of essays was published, but he manages to fill 300 pages, and it’s anything but fluff. There is a lot of detail, about his life and work, about the period. It’s based around interviews in which Hockney talks about precursors, contemporaries and a large cast of characters that people his life and work. A lot of his work does come out of his life, because he’s concerned primarily about the language of painting, the suspension of disbelief that we all rely on for painting to work, the conventions which make paintings legible and make them into an experience. Take the recent immersive exhibition, yet again based around him questioning and thinking about and challenging what it means to experience art—the space in painting perspective, shadow repetition, depth and perception – all those very fundamental things that go into picture making. It’s almost unimaginable that Hockney would make sculpture because for him it’s all about picture making. And occasionally, he goes off and does something that seems crazy and unrelated, but it always comes back to that central painterly concern. In this book you really have the sense that this subject matter isn’t ever of secondary importance. Sometimes Hockney will go off and paint a ‘great’ subject—double portraits of friends, or the Grand Canyon, or whatever. More often though it’s a self-portrait or simply the people or the stuff around him. The subject is not central, because ultimately that’s not what he’s concerned about in his work. It’s the making and the language of painting that are his concern. That makes him quintessentially modern. “The subject is not central, because ultimately that’s not what Hockney’s concerned about in his work. It’s the making and the language of painting that are his concern” And that’s true I think even when the paintings are also quite personal. They are about art and tradition. Portraits of his mother draw out the fact that it is also about emotion and his own personal feelings, as do most of the portraits of people close to him, and even one or two commissions he may have come to regret. Here again, these are not particularly modernist concerns in that hard-edged Greenberg sense. In fact, they are explicitly anti-formalist in this way. Hockney has consistently gone against the critical tide, and as a result his work is often quite groundbreaking, as when he graduates from the Royal College of Art with a fusion of abstraction and figuration. Will he be the successor to Bacon? Maybe. But then his work becomes more and more realistic and he gets ‘stuck’—until the next breakthrough. He has been on record critiquing conceptual art at the height of its influence. Although this made him seem out of touch, he managed to be high profile and marginal at the same time. There are moments in his career where he almost unwittingly slips in something quite radical. Painting traditional marriage portraits of same-sex couples in 1968 for example."