The Art Historian’s Artist: David Hockney 25

Fondation Louis Vuitton

Bienvenue and welcome back to Musée Musings, your idiosyncratic guide to Paris and Art. This week we’re back at the Fondation Louis Vuitton for a longer look at the David Hockney exhibition. Hockney’s is a joyous world far away from the real one where cuts to the weather service has led to the unnecessary deaths of so many, including little girl campers in Texas. Our dear leader has cautioned people against casting blame. Is it possible to be a blameless blamer? The blamer in chief thinks so. There’s a new teflon president in town - btw, teflon is toxic.

On a much happier note, one of my penpals, Pieter Athmer, an artist based in Amsterdam, sent me this photo of himself wearing a Stop Bossiness Soon pin. (Fig 1) Here’s Pieter’s own excellent adventure in Normandy: https://depieterproducties.nl/en

David Hockney, Self Portrait wearing his End Bossiness Soon pin

Figure 1. Pieter Athmer wearing his ‘End Bossiness Soon’ pin

Another penpal, Susanne Olson from Berkeley, was in France with her group of choristers. I attended their concert at the Eglise de la Madeleine. Sitting in that fabulous space listening to Fauré’s Requiem, all was good. The next day, we met up at the Musée Carnavalet. Susanne is from Germany, so I wore my Stop and Go pins - the sole ‘thing’ that made the ‘cut’ when East and West Berlin were unified. In recognition of my pèlerinage on the Camino, Susanne wore her scallop shell necklace. (Figs. 2, 3)

Figure 2. Ampelmann Stop and Go pedestrian figures in Berlin

Figure 3. Susanne Olson wearing her Camino scallop shell necklace

Ah David Hockney! (Fig 4) There are some artists to whose work we are, each of us, immediately, viscerally, drawn. The artists aren’t the same for everyone, of course. For me, they include Matisse, Bonnard, Vuillard, Hockney. I don’t need history or iconography (my bread and butter) I am joyfully sated by the beauty of their work.

Figure 4. David Hockney, *Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette* (2025)

David Hockney was born in Bradford, in Yorkshire, England, in 1937. After studying at the Royal College of Art in London, he moved to Los Angeles when he was 27 years old. (Figure 5) He more or less captured and defined the LA lifestyle - slender men in pastel jackets and slacks; wide expanses of swimming pools filled with the bluest of chlorinated water. As Deborah Solomon so succinctly noted, “Hockney’s scenes of American leisure capture the eternal sunshine of the California mind with an incisiveness that perhaps only an expatriate (or Joan Didion) could muster.”

Here’s a lamentable fact with troubling repercussions. One of Hockney’s early (now iconic) paintings, Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), (Figure 6) sold in 1972 for $18,000. Hockney probably received something closer to half that. Over the years, the painting exchanged hands several times before it was sold at auction 8 years ago for $90.3 million. As Lawrence Weschler wrote in the Atlantic, “…(W)hen it comes to assigning a fair and just monetary value to a work of art, (that value) is somewhere between worthless and priceless”. According to Weschler, there are several levels of scandal operating when works of art are sold at such prices. Firstly, the bidders are all private (no museum could afford these prices), so once these works are sold, they disappear from public view; secondly, artists rarely profit from the increased value of their own work; and finally, how is it that so much money is in the hands of so few people while so many people, including those sleeping on heating grates outside galleries and auction houses, don’t have any money at all. Update: This painting is now owned by the Yageo Foundation, a non profit organization founded in 1999 by Taiwanese entrepreneur, Pierre Chen, the man who purchased this painting in 2018. It’s now accessible to a wider public.

Figure 6. Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), David Hockney, 1972

Since life’s injustices seem to be careening out of control at the moment, let’s lose ourselves in the art. Here’s something that particularly pleases me about David Hockney. He studied the art of the old masters, especially how artists like Jan van Eyck and Vermeer created pictures of such intense realism. When I studied art history, it was explained to us this way. Jan van Eyck, an artist from Belgium, invented (rediscovered) the recipe for oil painting in the 1420s. (Figure 7) That invention permitted van Eyck and his fellow northern European artists to depict scenes with such breath-taking detail that every flower and tree and bird can be identified. Italian painters, like Masaccio, who mostly painted frescoes, strove for naturalism in expression and gesture. (Figure 8) The hallmark of Italian naturalism was the discovery (or rediscovery) by Brunelleschi (who designed the Duomo on Santa Maria del Fiore), of single point perspective. (Figure 9) This discovery allowed Italian artists to create three dimensional space on a flat, two dimensional surface. When the German artist Durer returned north from his trip to Italy, he brought single point perspective back with him. When the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes (Figure 10) arrived in Florence, the Italians got realism.

Figure 7. Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, Jan van Eyck, 1434

Figure 8. The Trinity Fresco, Masaccio, Santa Maria Novella, Forence, 1427

Figure 9. Rediscovery of Single Point Perspective, Filippo Brunelleschi, 1415

Figure 10. Portinari Altarpiece, Hugo van der Goes, 1475 (Uffizi Museum)

David Hockney wanted to know more about Northern realism and Italian naturalism so he began amassing photos of paintings from the 12th-19th centuries, from Byzantine mosaics to van Gogh, pinning them up in chronological order on a wall in his studio. He called it his Great Wall. (Figures 11, 12). For me, the Great Wall was a Great Pop Quiz. How many of the images could I identify? Most of them!

Figure 11. David Hockney photographed in front of a portion of his Great Wall

Figure 12. The Great Wall, 1500 and 1550

As Hockney studied these reproductions, he identified a rise in realism around 1420. That was the germ of what came to be called the 'Hockney–Falco Thesis’. Falco is Charles Falco, a physicist who stated what seems to be obvious, if curved mirrors were available to scientists in the 15th century, artists had access to them too. The Hockney-Falco thesis contends that advances in realism and accuracy in Western art since the Renaissance “were primarily the result of optical instruments such as the camera obscura, camera lucida and curved mirrors.” (Figure 13)

A 2001 book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, and the BBC program that followed, visually demonstrated that the level of accuracy in the work of the Old Masters was impossible by "eyeballing it” alone.

I remember reading about their theory in the New Yorker. I didn’t find any of it surprising. But they got a lot of pushback. Maybe what art historians objected to was the theory’s reductivism. That Hockney and Falco seemed to be suggesting that with the right equipment, aka a curved mirror, (convex, concave, whatever) the right environment, aka a darkened space, the right equipment, aka paint brushes and paint, anyone could do it, like painting by numbers. In a way it confirmed the contention of the Ancients, that painting is a mechanical art, not a liberal art. That it requires skill, not intellect. Hey, come to think of it, that IS disconcerting!

This is even more disconcerting. Tim Jenison, a computer graphics and 3D modeling software inventor, influenced by Hockney and Falco, decided to prove that Johannes Vermeer used a camera obscura. The way Tim did it was to reproduce Vermeer’s The Music Lesson, (Figure 14) using only the techniques available to Vermeer. After seven months, Jenison had his copy. (Figure 14a) Hockney and Falco were vindicated. Vermeer had used the same (or similar) tools to create his paintings. There’s a film documenting Jenison’s experiment called Tim’s Vermeer, (2013). Yes, but… Is being able to copy a painting the same as creating a painting? Of course not.

Figure 14. Tim’s Vermeer, the film, directed by the magician Penn Gillette, 2013

14a. Tim with his Vermeer and Penn and Teller

The goal of Italian Renaissance painters was to create a convincing world for the viewer to look into, as if through a window. Hockney isn’t a fan, for him single point perspective isn’t enough. He wasn’t the first person to question its significance. In an essay called “Reverse Perspective,” Pavel Florensky, a Russian polymath who got caught up in one of Stalin’s purges, contended that correct perspective, when objects look smaller the farther away they are, is overrated. He advocated for simultaneous planes and reverse perspective, in which objects further away from the viewing plane are larger and closer objects are smaller. According to Floreneksy, the absence of perspective in Russian icons, Egyptian art and Chinese art, is not because those artists couldn’t master perspective but because they weren’t interested in recession into space, the cornerstone of perspective. I remember reading about Catholic missionary artists going to China and Japan in the 16th century. They demonstrated single point perspective to Japanese artists who happily began experimenting with it. The Chinese artists were indifferent, even hostile to what they perceived to be a mechanical trick.

Hockney decided to take the window away and put the viewer into the work. Because our eyes don’t see everything everywhere all at once, Hockney plays with multiple perspectives, following in the footsteps of Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist experiments. (Fig 15) Hockney took photographs of one scene from many angles. The result is an image in which space, multiple perspectives and time co-exist. As one author notes, such images challenge the viewer's perception by inviting them to actively engage with the work and explore its multidimensional qualities. (Fig 16)

Figure 15. Girl with the Mandolin, Pablo Picasso, 1909-12

Figure 16. Nude, 17 June, 1984, David Hockney

At first glance, these works look like one photograph cut into hundreds of pieces. But when you look again and more closely, you see that the pieces are actually hundreds of photos of the same scene taken from many different angles and then assembled. Hockney’s collaged compositions create a powerful three-dimensional effect, like you’re careening down the highway in California or hanging onto the railing overlooking the Grand Canyon. (Figs 17, 18) Hockney said, “It takes time for the eye to move around the scene, just as it does in real life. You can’t sweep quickly across the view of the Grand Canyon: you’re forced to look at it slowly. There are as many pictures as your eye would find by looking across the canyon.”

Figure 17. Grand Canyon Collage (photographs) 1998

Figure 18. A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998 Sixty (60) canvases assembled in a grid (National Gallery of Australia)

Hockney links these photographs to Cubism, “It’s directly related to cubism, I know that..Cubism is difficult to grasp, even for me. I’ve looked at some cubist paintings for 25 years without understanding them. People said cubism led to abstraction but that’s another art-history swindle…What I’m only starting to grasp (is that) cubism is about another way of seeing the world, a truer way…And this is my own thought, one which I’ve never read: that cubism has to do with identity. Obviously it does, because when you look from more than one point of view the shape of things change as you move. It’s to do with you. My picture is not about the Grand Canyon but about you looking at the Grand Canyon.”

Just as Hockney proved that historically artists have embraced the technologies of their time, Hockney happily embraces the ever-changing technology of ours. Maybe what art historians perceive as ‘outing’ his predecessors, was a way of putting his use of contemporary technology into perspective (but not single point perspective!) He has been sketching directly onto his computer since 1985. He has used an iPad to create New Yorker covers. (Figures 19-21) He has painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes using an iPhone and iPad application called Brushes. (Fig 22) He took his iPad to Yosemite National Park (Figure 23) He used an iPad to design the stained glass window at Westminster Abbey which celebrates Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. (Figure 24)

Figure 20. 'Tall Dutch Trees After Hobbema,’ The painting from which the New Yorker cover was taken, 2017

Figure 21. The Hobbema painting that inspired Hockne, called “The Avenue at Middelharnis,” 1689

Figure 22. Some self portraits, iPad drawing printed on paper

Figure 23. *Yosemite I, October 16th 2011.* iPad drawing printed on paper

Figure 24. Queen’s Window, Westminster Abbey, 2018

From 2010 to 2014, Hockney lived mostly in Yorkshire. He created multi-camera movies using between three and eighteen cameras to record a single scene over time. Enlivened occasionally with jugglers and dancers, the incremental, glorious change of seasons was the star of the show. (Figs 25, 26) I saw an exhibition of those films in San Francisco in 2013, the cyclical nature of nature is a comfort. I understood the appeal of seasons for Hockney after all those years in season-less Southern California. If there’s anything that anyone can complain about living in San Francisco, it’s the absence of seasons. I especially miss the satisfying crunch of stepping on fallen leaves in the fall.

Figure 25. Yorkshire Landscapes, (12 screens)

Figure 26. *Woldgate Woods, Winter* *2010* (nine screens)

The seasons conspired again for Hockney’s series of paintings, Ma Normandie (Figure 27). It happens that when he was in London for the dedication of that stained glass window, he decided he needed a break. So, off he went to Northern France, to Honfleur for a few days of wandering in the footsteps of the Impressionists and to Bayeux to see the tapestries, which he hadn’t seen since the 1960s. Next week, I’ll tell you more about Hockney’s Bayeux epiphany and his paintings of Normandy. Gros bisous, Dr. B

Figure 27. Beuvron-en-Auge, David Hockney’s Normandie

Thanks to those of you who sent Comments, they are much appreciated.

New comment on A lot of Anderson and a little bit of Hockney:

A wonderful article that has inspired me to watch Grand Budapest Hotel again. I did not know that Zweig's works were an influence and will look at the film in a new way. And I did not know that there was a statue of Zweig int he Luxembourg Gardens! Which proves, if need be, that I always learn something new from your brilliant columns. Merci! Harriet Welty Rochefort, Paris

Hello Beverly ,

Your articles are always such a delight and so instructive. I’ve shared the last one about West Anderson with a dear friend of mine. She is hooked. Is there any way she can sign up to get the articles directly from you without my forwarding them to her ?

Many thanks and I look forward to Your next musings ! Rita

Dear Beverly,

Thanks for another wonderful email - I love all the Wes Anderson details and I never knew of his connection to Stefan Zweig! Pieter, Amsterdam

New comment on Merry Month of May, Deux:

I missed the Worth exhibit during my April trip to Paris, so thank you for covering it! As for art and fashion's symbiotic relationship, my own background in fashion history + cultural politics aside, I've always loved Western art history in large part due to its exquisite depictions of dress. Obviously, displaying individual wealth + status through dress became a primary aim in painting once the Dutch middle class arose, but one of my favorite paintings ever is Da Vinci's Ginevra de'Benci. :)

P.S. I'm surprised that the Worth exhibit did not mention that Worth is also thought to have invented the clothing label. Before him, there was the rare famous dressmaker such as Rose Bertin for Marie Antoinette, but he wanted to 'sign' his works in the manner of Renaissance artists, affixed a cloth label to his dresses with his signature et voila - the designer label is born! Elena

New comment on Berlin Beckoned, II:

Is there any relationship between the Barberini in Berlin and in Rome? Thanks!P.S. There's a fabulous documentary online of Helmut Newton's works. I've yet to find a documentary on his French counterpart, Guy Bourdin, however. Elena