YES, DAZZLING HOCKNEY IS BRITAIN’S VAN GOGH!
...as revealed in a brilliant new exhibition that showcases their glorious similarities
Astupendous exhibition has opened in Amsterdam, in which the works of Vincent Van Gogh, perhaps the most accessible of all the great post Impressionists, are hung beside those of our own david Hockney.
It received an unexpected publicity boost this week when, on his way to the Van Gogh Museum, Hockney got stuck in the lift at his hotel and had to be rescued by firemen.
on his release, staff apologetically offered him a glass of whisky. He said he’d rather have a cup of strong Yorkshire tea and a nice cigarette. It was an endearingly english answer from this very english artist. But is Hockney really england’s Van Gogh, as the new exhibition suggests?
Certainly, the curators of the show are on to something in comparing Hockney’s work with the brilliance of the dutch painter. After all, Hockney has himself admitted his enormous debt to Van Gogh.
He has painted vases of sunflowers, not in imitation so much as in conversation with Van Gogh’s most famous canvas. He has painted portraits of household chairs in the style of Van Gogh. In the new show’s catalogue, Hockney says: ‘I have found the world quite beautiful, looking at it. Just looking. that’s the important thing I share with Vincent Van Gogh. We both really, really enjoy looking at the world.’
the Amsterdam exhibition, entitled the Joy of nature, reveals both artists’ extraordinary observational ability. Van Gogh only took up painting in his late 20s, after a depressive life in which he had tried to be a missionary.
His first essays in paint were gloomy in the extreme, and it was only when he went from a winteroppressed paris to sun-blanched Arles in provence in 1888 that the bright yellows of corn and sunflowers, the dazzling blue of the sky, awakened him to his most distinctive work.
In many of Hockney’s forest scenes, where Yorkshire timber is being felled for instance, one is reminded of the earlier much darker and more unhappy woodland pictures of Van Gogh, in which gloomy dutchmen were to be glimpsed in the glades.
In contrast, Hockney’s manner of depicting the rolling, fertile fields around Huggate and sledmere, bright and sunlit, seemed to suggest that if you come to Yorkshire on a good day, it is as good as a trip to the south of France.
You could say this burst of sun and colour in Hockney’s work stems from his own Arles moment when the openly gay artist — who had grown up in grimy Yorkshire before the days of homosexual liberation — went to gay-friendly, sun-filled California and started painting his brilliant canvases of young men standing beside bright blue pools of
Los Angeles chlorinated water. The differences between the two men, however, could not be more marked.
Poor Van Gogh’s depression did not leave him. Mania gripped him, as on the notorious occasion when he cut off his own ear.
Even in his sun- drenched cornfields of southern France, black crows hover ominously like the darkest of thoughts. Aged just 37, he took his own life.
Hockney, now 81, is one of the sanest men who ever lived. His sheer capacity for enjoyment shines out of almost everything he has ever drawn or painted. Whereas Van Gogh was often drunk, Hockney is teetotal, although still a chain-smoker.
He is also modest. In a BBC interview this week, he stated simply that he was not as good as Van Gogh. He emphasised what a brilliant draughtsman Van Gogh was, but was too unassuming to recall his own skills in that area.
The real clue to Hockney’s greatness is found in the years he spent at the Bradford School of Art, learning how to draw. He has always been a fierce critic of those art schools which did not make drawing central to their teaching, and he urges young students not simply to play around with videos and installations.
He draws every day. He never stops. And his facility with charcoal and pencil is staggering. Not since Picasso has there been an artist with a surer grasp of what he is doing when he draws a line or a draughtsman with better co- ordination between hand and eye.
Some of the most breathtaking things he has done in the past decade are charcoal drawings of trees and fields depicting the arrival of spring in Yorkshire after his return there.
When you look around a Hockney show, you will always be struck by two things. One is the sheer brilliance of the art on display.
The other is the look of happiness on gallery-goers’ faces, as they see the beauty of nature more clearly than ever through the prism of art.
At this miserable time in British history, when everyone seems so grumpy with one another about Brexit, it is wonderful to see these Hockneys alongside Van Goghs.
The new Amsterdam show is a great demonstration of how the best British art has always been part of the mainstream of European tradition that brought us the genius of Van Gogh.
It also reminds us how lucky we British are to live here surrounded by some of the most glorious landscape on this beautiful planet.
The sheer variety of colours in the British landscape, the play of light, varying with each passing week, is what has inspired our great artists such as Constable and Turner.
Hockney belongs very firmly in this tradition. It is cheering to remember that the blossom will still be here and the trees bursting into leaf, whether or not those achingly boring politicians ever agree about the Irish backstop.
HOCKNEY-VAN GOGH: The Joy Of Nature is at the Van Gogh Museum in amsterdam from today until May 26. THE Sunflowers are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh’s Masterpiece’ by Martin Bailey is out in paperback.