Hockney’s not great at painting says Tate boss
HE’S perhaps the country’s most celebrated living artist, with his latest exhibition breaking records at the Tate Britain gallery.
But the show’s curator says that David Hockney does have a flaw – he’s not that great at painting.
Chris Stephens, who was the gallery’s lead curator of modern British art, said the 80year-old’s work had ‘a sort of lack of finish’.
He said: ‘I don’t think he’s a terribly skilled craftsman when it comes to painting.
‘He is one of the most brilliant draughtsmen of all time, but the painting is less accomplished.’
The Hockney exhibition, which included his 1967 work A Bigger Splash, ran from February to May.
In that time it drew 463,087 visitors, becom- ing the most visited exhibition for a living artist ever held at any of Tate’s four galleries.
The only show in the gallery’s history to attract more people was an exhibition of Henri Matisse in 2014.
Hockney, who is from Bradford, suffered a stroke in 2012 that affected his speech, though he is still able to paint.
When asked if the stroke had also affected Hockney’s art, Mr Stephens, who now works as the director of Bath’s Holburne Museum, said: ‘There is a sort of lack of finish in his painting, but I don’t know if that’s to do with the stroke or not or whether that’s just a wilful decision.’
And Bruno Wollheim, who had access to Hockney when he filmed and directed documentary A Bigger Picture about him, said that the late artist Lucian Freud was ‘scathing’ about his work.
‘I had a very scared breakfast with Lucian Freud and I sort of asked him what he thought about David’s work and he was really quite scathing, I thought in a way that was quite interesting’, he told the Cheltenham Literary Festival.
‘I mean Lucian would turn up to every exhibition and vice versa.
‘I think basically Lucian’s view was while the sex in David’s painting was hot, the pictures were great.
‘As soon as that disappeared as a subject, it no longer interested him so much.
‘So that was his sort of take, which I haven’t told David about.’