Vocable (Anglais)

Sunshine Superman

David Hockney au Centre Pompidou.

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Le Centre Pompidou accueille jusqu’au mois d’octobre prochain une grande rétrospect­ive de l’artiste anglais David Hockney. Cette exposition, d’abord présentée à la Tate à Londres, puis qui sera transférée au Metropolit­an Museum de New York après son passage à Paris, a été remaniée pour l’occasion. C’est certaineme­nt l’un des évènements culturels les plus importants de l’année.

The morning I visited the David Hockney retrospect­ive. TV crews from around the world were flitting importantl­y from room to room, presenters offering shorthand pieces to camera in front of A Bigger Splash or Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. One American critic was essaying so many takes of her opening line that it came to sound like a looped commentary: “David Hockney was born in dreary, grey, rainy northern England, and as soon as he could he migrated to California, drawn by its sunshine and vibrant colours…”

2.It’s one way of looking at some of the rooms of this show but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The paintings Hockney produced at the Royal College of Art, intense semi-abstract canvases, make a pent-up prelude to the aquamarine pleasures that followed. In 1960 and 1961, when homosexual­ity was still criminalis­ed in Britain, the painter, then in his early 20s, was devoting most of his artistic energy to the risky business of coming out.

3.In style, his canvases borrow some of the language of the 1950s British avant garde, in particular Alan Davie’s efforts to paint the unconsciou­s, but Hockney determined­ly queered this particular pitch. There are paint-

The David Hockney retrospect­ive that just finished running at Tate Britain has drawn 478,082 visitors past the gate. This makes it the most visited exhibition ever held at the gallery.

ings decorated with the crude graffiti of toilet walls: “fist”, “69” and “ring me anytime at home” (1961’s version of “my phone’s on vibrate for you”), together with allusions to Walt Whitman’s all-inclusive love poetry – the low and the high of intimacy.

4.Some of the fantasy seems unspoken; phallic shapes loom out of his distressed surfaces unresolved. Some is stated more literally as with the pop art joke of Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10pm), in which embryonic figures with tubes of Colgate for pricks intertwine on a chained bed above an outsize pot of trademarke­d Vaseline.

5.The complicate­d display of these pictures – one is called simply Shame – was never, you guess, going to be honest enough for the defiant exhibition­ist in Hockney, who was at the same

time taking to the revue stage at the Royal College to sing “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” in miner’s boots and a tutu. California gave him a way to get rid of all that complicati­on. In his early American pictures – Arizona 1964, say – you can see him feeling the adventurou­s possibilit­y of the open road. When he subsequent­ly makes the leap from the unresolved interior life of the earlier paintings to the poolside paradise, it looks like a triumphant­ly political act as well as a personal liberation.

6.By 1967, he was done with scrawled allusion. He wanted the subjects of his lust in easy sunlight. The limitation­s of abstractio­n are satirised in these pictures. A Bigger Splash could be an American Mondrian, if one of Hockney’s golden lads hadn’t dived into the frame to create a riot of water.

7.Hockney famously commented how the city of angels had not been documented in paint:

“My God! This place needs its Piranesi… so here I am.” There is a prelapsari­an quality to some of these pictures, but all good Edens come to an end. By the time of Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in 1972, in which a static and disconnect­ed figure peers

7. Piranesi (dit Le Piranèse) graveur et architecte italien (1720-1778) / prelapsari­an d'avant la Chute (Bible) / to peer into plonger le regard dans.

into a pool at a submerged swimmer, Hockney appears to be dramatisin­g the distance between subject and object.

8.In some senses the subsequent 40 years of Hockney’s career look like a series of heroic attempts and strategies to manufactur­e the intensity of his early years; given his passion for tobacco you could argue that they represent the most extended postcoital smoke in art history. He refuses anything like bitterness and anything but the most seasonally comforting visions of mortality.

9.An abiding fascinatio­n with the eye’s habits of constructi­ng the world often takes centre stage in later work, but the humanity of his painting is never far away. The polaroid portraits already look a curiously archaic attempt to capture the moment by moment cubism of looking; still, they remain full of genuine heart. There is a poignant collage of My Mother, Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire, Nov 1982, which brought to mind an anecdote Hockney once told me in an interview, about his mum’s first visit to Beverly Hills. After two or three days out on the patio, she delivered her verdict on his lifestyle: “It’s strange – all this lovely weather and yet you never see any washing out.”

10.Hockney tries to reconcile those different backdrops to his life by transplant­ing – always take the weather with you – the lurid colours of the California desertscap­e to his native Wolds. Looking at the sheer shocking love of pigment in the largest of these canvases, you could make an argument that Hockney had waited all his life for the saturated backlit palette of an iPad, though the dexterous experiment­s with digital finger painting that are included here are not much more than curiositie­s. In the past decade or so, after the death of his mother at 99, the human figure all but retreats from his landscapes. Instead, in film, and in paint, and in charcoal sketch, he looks for all that might be important in the world outside his window, with enduring spirit and variable success.

 ?? (© David Hockney) ?? Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, 1963.
(© David Hockney) Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, 1963.
 ?? (Dinendra Haria/Shutters/SIPA) ?? 'A Closer Winter Tunnel' by British artist David Hockney.
(Dinendra Haria/Shutters/SIPA) 'A Closer Winter Tunnel' by British artist David Hockney.

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