In 1990, David Hockney turned down a knighthood. His reason? He doesn’t “care for a fuss.” Offered the opportunity to paint Queen Elizabeth II, he demurred, citing a busy schedule.
“I’m not stupid,” he once told an interviewer. “I can’t paint like Velázquez or Goya or Picasso. I would be mad to try. I just don’t have that kind of skill at all.”
Considering Hockney is one of the most famous, acclaimed, and influential artists of the past 75 years, these are modest words. A retrospective at the Tate Britain was seen by nearly half a million people; only a Matisse exhibit had ever brought more visitors to the museum. In 2018, his painting Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold for over $90 million (USD); it is the single most expensive work of a living artist ever sold. Looking to raise funds for his charitable organization, he donated some paintings he had lying around. Their estimated value? $80 million.
Commercial popularity and monetary value are not necessarily indicative of aesthetic accomplishment, and it’s true that his work has divided critics, especially in more recent years. But those critics who embrace it do so all the way; Andrea K. Scott, writing in The New Yorker, called his work “a delivery system for bliss.”
Through November 2nd, the Grand Rapids Art Museum will serve as host to that delivery system. David Hockney: Perspectives Should Be Reversed, Prints From The Collections Of Jordan D. Schnitzer And His Family Foundation, the first Hockney exhibition held in Grand Rapids’ history, features more than 154 prints created over almost seven decades (1954-2022), and is the largest exhibition of his prints ever held.
Jennifer Wcisel, the Dean and Helga Toriello Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at GRAM, sees the works included in the exhibition as representative of Hockney’s work as a whole, mentioning subjects “such as his tender and often quirky portrayals of family and friends, southern California swimming pools, towering panoramas, jumbled studio interiors, and playful theatrical designs.”
While his subjects—broadly, beauty and joy—have remained consistent over his career, he’s employed a wide variety of techniques in capturing them. “David Hockney is an incredibly innovative artist who…quite literally invented new ways of making pictures,” Wcisel said, pointing to his use of Xerox color copiers in the 1980s, digital printing in the 1990s, and iPads in the 2000s. Although his openness to fresh technologies could mark him as a trailblazer—and, indeed, he sometimes was the one to hack a new path—he’s not at all averse to traditional techniques, making him that rarest of birds: someone seduced neither by the promises of the new or the romance of the old, but an artist who works with whatever tool is best suited for the job at hand.
The work on display at the GRAM, which includes but is not limited to etchings and lithographs, draw on genuine expertise honed over many years. Works Wcisel highlighted include his first self-portrait, created in 1954; portraits of Stanley and Boodgie, his dachshunds; and drawings of flowers made on an iPad and distributed to friends and family during the COVID-19 lockdown.
The cumulative effect of the exhibition is to create a sort of visual autobiography, not least because it includes self-portraits separated by decades. In Self-Portrait, from 1954, Hockney wears glasses and a bowl cut. His arms are crossed in a posture that suggests self-protection. Despite the formal clothing, he looks like William T. Vollmann, the author, down to what seems to be discomfort at living in the world.
That discomfort, thankfully, appears to evaporate in later works, perhaps due in part to coming out of the closet (a dangerous act in England at the time, as homosexuality was still illegal). He later moved to New York City. This was before AIDS, which devastated the gay community; he would later say that he lost two-thirds of his American friends to the epidemic. Some of those he knew, whether friends, lovers, or both, have been immortalized here. If the work from certain periods can ever seem dated, it’s because Hockney’s artwork of the time contributed so largely to help define those periods. It isn’t that Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) looks like the 1970s so much as the 1970s came to look like that painting.
Despite the grief it all caused him, Hockney’s outlook, as seen in these works, is essentially sunny. There’s a quiet, nostalgic glow to his people and to his objects, too; if the water in his pools doesn’t look quite like the water we know—Hockney’s not a hyperrealist—it nevertheless looks softly inviting. That warmth can obscure some of the technical complexity of the work on display, but it shouldn’t. Linger, and you’ll see more than you thought you would.
Hockney calls himself a looker, Wcisel said, “because he is such a careful and keen observer of the world, from mundane things like the way his coat drapes across a chair to majestic landscapes like Yosemite.” This generous, inviting collection gives us many opportunities to see what he saw
Grand Rapids Art Museum
101 Monroe Center St. NW, Grand Rapids
artmuseumgr.org
David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed, Through Nov. 2
David Lubbers: Haunted Terrain, Through Aug. 3
