Shoot the works
The latest art-onscreen movie fixes a gaze on British legend David Hockney.
Phil Grabsky has spent many years putting art into the arthouse with the Exhibition on Screen series he started in 2011. Since, the English documentary director-producer has shown and explained the works of many of the world’s great painters – Manet, Vermeer, Munch, Matisse, Leonardo, Rembrandt and more – on cinema screens in more than 50 countries.
His latest, his company’s 19th, is the first to feature a living artist. In David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts, the veteran British painter is interviewed during two major exhibitions of new work: his 2012 A Bigger Picture, of landscapes from his native Yorkshire, and 2016’s 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life. The film shows Hockney, now 80, still as prolific, energised, funny and dapper as the man who emerged in the 1960s pop art movement.
After 18 documentaries about great artists at last, you’ve got a live one.
It was always my intention, and I didn’t want to do a Hockney retrospective. I wanted to focus on him now, in his later years, because as has been proven with the Exhibition on Screen films, as artists age, they get better. Often their best work is when they are in their sixties, seventies and eighties. It’s partly because they usually have an economic stability at that point. And it’s partly that they don’t care any more.
Some of the Hockney landscapes and related video works are massive. The portraits are more modest in size. Is there a trick to making moving pictures about still ones?
We’ve done all sorts of different things – put cameras on tracks and Steadicams, as well as [fixed camera] shots. Some artworks are best filmed straight on, some with maybe a bit of side lighting – Rembrandt and Van Gogh kind of sculpted with paints so they are quite three dimensional – and of course, we are using ultra highresolution cameras.
Another thing is to show the art respect, which means that we hold the pictures up longer than
most would do. So I’ll show you the painting and let you look at it. And sometimes I will show it to you as if you were in the gallery and in that privileged position that there is no one else there. With Hockney, I think that the portraits do need more looking at. When I first saw that second exhibition, my first reaction was “they’re a little bit sketchy”. But then I learnt that they all took three days, they were all people known to him and that you are meant to see them all as an entire work. The more I see them on the cinema screen, the more powerful those portraits become.
Whether it’s Hockney himself or the various commentators in it, the lm is refreshingly free of artspeak.
We ask straightforward questions. We are not trying to suggest to each other somehow that, because we are using artspeak, we are better than the general population; we are the general population. Talk to me in a way I can understand.
By treating the audience with respect, we want you to decide. We will put the artist’s case and show it to you in a way that it is unlikely you have ever seen before. You decide whether you like the portraits or the landscapes. Personally, I would rebuild my house to fit in one of those landscapes. They are fantastic. In 100 years, in the anthologies of great artists, he’ll be in there, whereas a bunch of other contemporary artists probably won’t be.