David Hockney: British National Treasure

Studies in World Art, Book 141

By: Edward Lucie-Smith

Narrated by: Charles Johnston

An essay by Edward Lucie-Smith on David Hockney's portraits exhibited at the Royal Academy's "82 Portraits and One Still-Life", and also "David Hockney and the Yorkshire Landscape" at RA in 2012.

David Hockney has, after a much reported domestic catastrophe in Bridlington - the untimely death of a young member of his entourage - returned to the peace and quiet of California. He nevertheless remains a British national treasure. No other British artist enjoys so much affection - combined with a real, solid, celebrity status - among his compatriots. The huge turnout for the private view of his new exhibition at the R.A. - an institution of which he is of course a member - offered ample proof of that, if any were needed. No hyped-up YBA could have matched it, though Damien Hirst is, one suspects, a considerable richer man, with a wider and hungrier international market.

The show was entitled "82 Portraits and One Still-Life". The still-life is there, laid out on blue bench, as a substitute for a sitter who at the last minute couldn’t come on the appointed day. All the sitters occupy the same armchair, placed at exactly the same distance from the artist. They are all seen full length. Sometimes the floor on which their feet rest is blue, while the wall behind them is green. Sometimes it’s the other way round. All were painted on canvases of exactly the same size, in, at most, three sessions. Sometimes only in two. The lighting is the same throughout - clear and shadow-less, though the chair is allowed to cast a small shadow now and then to emphasize its three-dimensionality. Hockney has no interest in the moodiness and mystery of Rembrandtian chiaroscuro. He also seems to have little interest in brushwork as such. There are none of the flickering brushstrokes - the little glittering dabs of paint - you find in high-fashion Edwardian portraits by Sargent and Boldini, to whom Hockney can now, in respect of his position within our society, be compared.

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