I use to think of David Hockney as a decorative painter. His work has a strong graphic quality – all flat fields of sweet pastel color – that’s poster-ready. Reproduced in magazines, his paintings look like pretty pictures for pretty people to hang in their pretty houses. So seeing the current Hockney retrospective at The Met is eye-opening. His canvases are substantial, over six feet tall and as wide as twelve feet. And each one commands the space in front of it, luring visitors for closer consideration. Its surface holds together in tension.
Hockney most famous paintings,
from the 1960′s and 1970′s, that depict the homes of his well-to-do Los Angeles friends and collectors, make their own cultural anthropology. Outside there are tiled patios, flat green lawns, whistling sprinklers, and palm trees. Inside there are overstuffed chairs, low glass-topped tables, shag carpets, and primitivist sculptures. This glossy, untroubled world is populated by regal white-haired ladies in caftans, and fashionable young men in flared trousers and tube socks. It’s a place of wealth and repose. Southern California sunlight – wistful, shimmering, white – washes objects and people evenly, and gives the scenes an awesome quiet.
The richest canvases incorporate one of more human figures, nearly life-size. Hockney renders them with particularity and vitality; we believe that they are real, and that the world they inhabit is too. In The American Collectors Fred Weisman appears officious and detached, and Marcia Weisman appears direct and critical. The scene is clear, but rendered without pure perspectival logic. The lines of the gridded tile floor lead to different points, so that space seems folded right up
against the surface of the canvas. The sky is an even blue fill, the tiles are a dotted pattern, and shadows are puddles of color. Fred and Marcia seem unfixed, disconnected from their landscape and also each other. They stand close to one another but stare – unperturbedly, expressionlessly – in different directions. They are objects in a strangely elegant still-life, energized by movements that we don’t see.