Oil
on canvas, 56 x 76 in., Courtesy of the artist. ©David Hockney.
All rights reserved. Downloading, transferring or otherwise making
copies of this image without prior written permission is strictly
prohibited.
From heart to eye to hand:
The portraits of David Hockney
 The
Press
Hockney
and Portraiture
Artworks
with Commentary
See additional works by and about Hockney from our permanent collection
THE PRESS
"What remains constant is the artist’s will to engage
the world fully through his craft — to employ his hand
and eye in forging a record of having passed through this
life. The portraits themselves maintain a position of powerful
ambiguity, as handsome, often brilliant individual artworks — but
perhaps more importantly as the leavings of a life lived
as art. Without the quotation marks."
Doug Harvey, LA Weekly
“Notes toward a grand self-portrait. We are given a gregarious
man who, over five decades, turned repeatedly to friends and lovers
as subjects. In the process, he created a transcontinental community,
knit together by his own visual diary.”
M.J. Andersen, The Providence Journal
“Looking at the paintings of this period, as well as at
the extraordinarily prehensile linear drawings in ink and the gossamer
colored-pencil drawings of friends, lovers and luminaries like Andy
Warhol and W. H. Auden, you get the exhilarating feeling of
an artist on a roll who can do no wrong.”
Ken Johnson, The New York Times
"Artist and Model also announces Hockney's well-known fascination
with Picasso, his protean predecessor. Given the cheerful audacity
of pairing himself with a titan, the etching brims with the sense
of artistic ambition that unfolds throughout the galleries."
Christopher Knight, The Los Angeles Times
“Seductive … From the most straightforward line drawings to the
Cubist-style, splintered photographic pieces, these portraits radiate life.”
Joanne Silver, ARTnews
“He may well be the world's most famous living artist.”
Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe
“Hockney is California’s poet laureate of canyon majesty and Malibu
blues ... [He] understands how symbols of ‘California’ function
as a kind of potent idealism, a way to paint dreams and longings.”
Rachel Kushner, C Magazine
HOCKNEY
AND PORTRAITURE
David Hockney’s long engagement with portraiture reveals
his intense curiosity about people. He has returned to portraiture
many times throughout his career, exploring different styles, techniques,
and methods of representation. He has used it to chronicle his
life by repeatedly picturing those closest to him, revealing layers
of their personalities and his own in a way that goes beyond mere
documentation of appearances. His portraits display his fluency
with a variety of mediums, his expert draftsmanship, and his deeply
humanistic way of looking at the world.
Born and raised in Yorkshire, Hockney arrived at London’s
Royal College of Art in 1959. Artistic innovation and rebellion
were part of London’s cultural milieu, and Hockney, already
schooled in academic technique, experimented with new approaches
to painting. After graduating in 1962, he moved to the Notting
Hill section of London. The next year, London art dealer John Kasmin
gave Hockney his first one-man exhibition; the pictures sold out.
He quickly gained critical success as well. Hockney was attracted
to California during the 1960s, and he eventually moved to Los
Angeles in 1978. Drawn by the California lifestyle depicted in
physique magazines and the gay novels of John Rechy, he found that
the city lived up to his expectations.
Although he has produced a wide variety of works throughout his
career, Hockney has consistently relied on portraiture as a touchstone
for his art. The first painting he sold was a portrait of his father,
and at frequent intervals since then he has completed series of
portraits and self-portraits. The genre tests his powers of observation,
hones his drawing skills, and provides a means of finding solutions
to broader artistic problems and challenges. “I
tend to do that at times when I feel a little lost, searching around,” he
says. Over the years Hockney’s portrait series have been
executed in a variety of mediums, including oil, acrylic, pen-and-ink,
etching, lithography, Polaroid compositions, photocollage, and
more recently, large-format watercolor painting.
Apart from their stylistic and technical qualities, Hockney’s
portraits form a highly personal visual diary. Hockney has rarely
accepted commissions for his portraits. He does not feel obligated
to flatter his sitters, and he keeps the pictures; as he said recently, “I’m
doing them for myself.” He has often done multiple portraits
of the same subject over time (for example, his mother, Celia Birtwell,
Peter Schlesinger, Henry Geldzahler, and Gregory Evans), and these
reveal the physical changes of aging or illness, but more significantly,
they chart the intimate connection between artist and model. Double
portraits, a genre he has recently returned to, add yet another
dimension, as Hockney seeks to elucidate each pair’s relationship,
both with each other and with him.
Asked about the relevance of painted portraits in the new millennium,
Hockney responded wryly that although one might think that the
representation of the human face is now best accomplished through
photography and other technologies, he does not agree. For Hockney,
capturing a subject’s likeness, and especially his or her
personality, can only be properly done with the human touch, or
as he says, “it has to be directed through my heart to my
eye to my hand.” In this way Hockney’s portraits have
come full circle: for all their technical experimentation and virtuosity,
in all their inventive forms, they ultimately reflect the artist’s
fundamental desire to learn more about himself by focusing on other
people in his life and work.
ARTWORKS WITH COMMENTARY
Here are seven portraits from the show, each followed by a
brief description and a comment from the artist.
Acrylic
on two canvases,
72 x 144 in.,
Private collection, Beverly Hills.
©David Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading,
transferring or otherwise making copies of this image without prior
written permission is strictly prohibited.
Hockney painted Beverly Hills Housewife in 1966, when he began
to spend more time in Los Angeles. He was introduced to contemporary
art collector, photographer, and music patron Betty Freeman soon
after he arrived, and he asked to paint her backyard pool. He ended
up painting Freeman instead.
“In Santa Monica, in a tiny little room, a tiny studio,
I painted Beverly Hills Housewife, which is twelve feet long, two
canvases run together. I could never get more than about five feet
away from it.”
Acrylic
on canvas,
84 x 84 in.,
National Museums, Liverpool, Walker Art
Gallery. ©David Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading,
transferring or otherwise making copies of this image without prior
written permission is strictly prohibited.
Hockney met Peter Schlesinger in California in 1966, when Schlesinger
was an art student at UCLA. During their five-year-long relationship,
Schlesinger frequently posed for Hockney. Since then, he has forged
his own career as an artist.
“It was incredible to me to meet in California a young,
very sexy, attractive boy who was also curious and intelligent.
In California you can meet curious and intelligent people, but
generally they’re not the sexy boy of your fantasy as well.”
Acrylic
on canvas,
84 1/2 x 120 in., Tate. Presented by the Friends
of the Tate Gallery, 1971 ©David Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading,
transferring or otherwise making copies of this image without prior
written permission is strictly prohibited.
The relationship of Hockney’s close friend Celia Birtwell
and her husband, Ossie Clark (now deceased), is the subject of Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy.
The portrait was a belated wedding gift, begun after the couple’s
1969 wedding, in which Hockney was the best man. Birtwell and Clark
separated not long after the painting was completed. Perhaps noting
tension in their relationship, Hockney created physical and emotional
distance between the figures; they seem more interested in the
artist than each other.
“This is the painting that comes closest
to naturalism; I use the word naturalism as opposed to realism.
The figures are nearly life-size; it's difficult painting figures
like that, and it was quite a struggle. They posed for a long time.
Ossie was painted many, many times; I probably painted the head
alone twelve times.”
Etching,
22 5/8 x 17 1/4 in.,
Courtesy of the artist. ©David Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading,
transferring or otherwise making copies of this image without prior
written permission is strictly prohibited.
Artist and Model is one of many works by Hockney that reveals
his great admiration for Pablo Picasso. Begun right after Picasso’s
death in 1973, Hockney produced the print in the Paris studio of
Aldo Crommelynck, who printed Picasso’s later etchings. Hockney’s
humility—picturing himself as a nude model posing for the
great master—is subverted slightly; otherwise naked, he wears
his glasses, one artist observing another.
“I had always had a great interest in Picasso, but never
quite knew how to deal with it—like most artists. He seemed
too big and his forms were too idiosyncratic. How do you learn?
How do you use them?”
Oil
on canvas,
16 1/2 x 10
1/2 in.,
Courtesy of the artist. ©David
Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading,
transferring or otherwise making copies of this image without prior
written permission is strictly prohibited.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Hockney turned his attention to designing
sets for opera productions. Throughout those years, however, he
returned to portraiture several times, using a variety of mediums.
Mum depicts one of his favorite subjects. Hockney’s warm
relationship with both of his loving and supportive parents is
evident in the many portraits he made of them. His father died
in 1978; his mother, in 1999.
“In 1988 I started doing a series of small portraits, painted
very quickly, most of them on the same size canvas. . . . I wanted
to look at my friends’ faces again. . . . If the best ones
are of my mother, it is perhaps because I know her best.”
Watercolor
on four sheets of paper,
48 x 36 in.,
Courtesy of the
artist. ©David Hockney. All rights
reserved. Downloading, transferring
or otherwise making copies of this image without prior written
permission is strictly prohibited.
Hockney made this watercolor in 2002 as part of a large series
of double portraits of friends. He had the sitters pose in office
chairs in his London studio; he felt the positions they chose revealed
something about how they perceived themselves and their relationship.
Here, the artist’s longtime friend, critic and curator Marco
Livingstone, and his partner, publisher Stephen Stuart-Smith, sit
with their knees touching.
“Watercolor was a medium I had been
exploring for a few months, for the first time in my life. It
required speed and discipline. Perhaps two people could be painted
fast enough for them actually to sit together.”
Oil on canvas,
72 x 36 in.,
Courtesy of the artist. ©David
Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading,
transferring or otherwise making copies of this image without prior
written permission is strictly prohibited.
Self-Portrait with Charlie is part of a recent series of almost
life-size oil portraits of friends who visited Hockney’s
Los Angeles studio. Here the artist paints himself with the aid
of a mirror, while his friend, independent curator Charlie Scheips,
watches, a twist on the traditional artist-model dynamic.
“I like painting. I don’t think there’s anything
that can replace it actually. I think that painting is an old man’s
art. I couldn’t have done these portraits when I was younger.”
This exhibition was organized by the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Portrait Gallery, London,
in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Los Angeles presentation was made possible in part by LACMA’s
Wallis Annenberg Director’s Endowment Fund. Additional support
was provided by the Frederick R. Weisman Philanthropic Foundation.
Education programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are
supported in part by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural
Affairs, the William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund for Arts Education,
and the Employees Community Fund of Boeing California, and U.S.
Bancorp Foundation.
Brochure text by Mary Lenihan, Education Department, Los Angeles
County Museum of Art.
© 2006 Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. All rights
reserved.
Click
here to see additional works by and about David Hockney from our permanent
collection.
Oil on canvas, 72 x 36 in.,
Courtesy of the artist. ©David Hockney. All rights reserved.
Downloading, transferring or otherwise making copies of this
image without prior written permission is strictly prohibited.
Oil on Canvas 24 x 24 in., Courtesy of the artist. ©David
Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading, transferring or otherwise
making copies of this image without prior written permission
is strictly prohibited.
Oil on Canvas 72 x 72 in.,
Tate. Purchased 1981 (T03255) ©David Hockney. All rights reserved.
Downloading, transferring or otherwise making copies of this
image without prior written permission is strictly prohibited.
Acrylic on canvas,
84 x 84 in., National Museums, Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. ©David
Hockney. All rights reserved. Downloading, transferring or
otherwise making copies of this image without prior written
permission is strictly prohibited.
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