The current exhibition of David Hockney’s work at the Royal Academy has been the most successful exhibition ever held at this strangely hybrid institution. So great has been the demand that even Friends have had to book in advance. It is a question to ask, why this should be so. Hockney, after all, is hardly a major painter. But I think I know the answer: he is safe; he is an antidote to the perceived outrages of Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, et al; and he has been painting the English countryside — or at least he purports to have been doing so. Apparently, he has been painting the Yorkshire landscape, but I am not too sure that anyone would know. His paintings fail completely as subtle representations of their putative subject matter. Equally, they fail as ‘landscapes of the imagination’; they lack truly imaginative motifs; and there is a significant disjuncture in the colours deployed in many of them — especially those in which poisonous greens and purples obtrude to the detriment of all else.
Well, it is easy enough to make these criticisms, but they need to be underpinned by argument and example. I am not sure that I need many examples, and in fact comparative details from just two paintings may be sufficient to illustrate the assertions of my opening paragraph. Those that I have chosen are: Van Gogh’s ‘Pine Trees with Setting Sun’, 1889, and David Hockney’s ‘A Closer Winter Tunnel, February–March, 2006. Both are oil paintings. The comparison is between the ways in which each painter has represented trees.
We can see at once how passionately Van Gogh has drawn his trunks and branches. Scarcely can they be contained by the canvas and impasted brush strokes, so urgent is their linearity. Anxiety underlies this painting, and that is one of the primary reasons that we find it so exciting — as well as disturbing. (A masterstroke is the orange ochre of the torn off branch, top centre. Its being midway in tone between the sun and the sky makes it essential to the composition. Put your hand over it, and a degree of dullness ‘infects’ the rest of the painting.)
Turning to Hockney, we can immediately see with what crudity the trunk and suckers of his tree have been drawn. Scarcely, in fact have they been drawn at all — in any sense of their having been closely observed. There is indeed inconsequentiality about the suckers and small branches: they take certain directions, but with this manner of drawing they could take any other without the slightest improvement to the composition. As for the upper twigs, they might have been drawn by Rowland Hilder... And when we turn to the trunk, we have to wonder what all those haphazard splodges of colour are doing. The answer is nothing: they are purely arbitrary, and a product of laziness. The trunk too, is a poor rubber sack of a thing. As for the sky and the fields, how impoverished they are! Comment on the ‘hedgerow’ is unnecessary in light of what I have already said.
How to account for this sorry pass? It is a mystery. Time was when Hockney was a very fine draughtsman and a moderately interesting painter. He is a very agreeable person, but it is time that his friends had a little more courage to speak their minds. Oh, and by the way, I have been to the exhibition!
Here below is Hockney at his finest:
No comments:
Post a Comment