A Bigger Picture: Colour and Hockney's 'Hawthorn Blossoms'

Very few painters are fine or great colourists. The list of great colourists would include Titian, Turner, Van Gogh, Matisse, Klee, and Bonnard; but not Picasso, the protean nature of whose work tends to distract us from consideration of his colour:

Picasso’s limitations were the limitations of Spanish art: confined mostly to colour, to the problems of painting light as opposed to darkness. He tended to visualise forms monochromatically — sculpturally. Colour was a separate process. He either left everything monochrome [...] or he tinted things like an old–time photographer, with colours we associate with mannerism, those very sharp, acid pinks and yellows and greens we get in El Greco as well as in Spanish popular art — bullfighter’s costumes and the like. John Richardson talking to Richard Wollheim, 1996

                                             

Daumier, The Uprising, c 1860. Oil on canvas

So it is that a painter’s perceptions tend to be the determining factor in their ability to colour well, indifferently, or badly. Daumier, for example, was a great draughtsman, but his paintings are predominately monochromatic, and his colour an adjunct. This is not by choice: it is simply what happened when Daumier took up his brushes. Kathe Kollwitz can be instanced too: like Daumier, she was primarily a draughtsman, at home with the ‘black media’ of ink, crayon, and charcoal.    

Hawthorn Blossom, Woldgate No. 6, 2009

What is it then that happens to Hockney when he picks up his brushes? To a certain extent he too ‘fills in’ — often in an arbitrary way. But essentially he is not a colourist; and, when let loose with green or purple, the results can be truly appalling — not just strange, but weird. None more so than in Hawthorn Blossom, Woldgate No. 6, 2009. In this painting the ‘hawthorn blossoms’ look like giant popcorns or mammoth grubs, or — top right — like a pile of parti-coloured slag. While the ‘blossom’ which tops the ‘tree’ on the left must rank  as one of the most formless elements of any painting ever produced outside the sphere of amateurs. And what to say of the hideous pink road, the sloppy violet shadows, or of the ‘hedge’ at the bend of the road, complete with its residual ‘popcorn’ topping? This painting has nothing whatsoever to do with hawthorn trees and their blossom. Moreover it relates to nothing ever seen; is utterly devoid of imagination; is slapdash in the extreme; and is an embarrassment to British art.

We are in need of refreshment:

Van Gogh, Almond Tree, 1890