Mark Glazebrook

Hockney’s controversial experiment

The artist is a great draughtsman but is he a great watercolourist? asks Mark Glazebrook

The last David Hockney show at Annely Juda Fine Art was in the summer of 1997. It was a large show of oils on canvas with the alliterative and rhyming title Flowers, Faces and Spaces. In one prominent, large painting called ‘Sunflowers’ no fewer than five different blue, purple or green vases containing these fiery yellow blooms, previously thought to have been patented by Vincent van Gogh, were arranged against a bright-green background on a plain, bright-red tablecloth. By out-Vincenting Vincent in the colour contrast department, these works seemed positively to court accusations of being over-the-top. Gone was the restrained but individualistic colour of Hockney’s early work. Gone was the magical colour of some of his stage designs.

Were we witnessing a deliberate attack on good taste? Or were these very bright flower paintings being thrown in as shock troops in Hockney’s extended love/hate battle against photography? Or is there another, unthinkable explanation? The most extreme and at the same time the most logical reaction of a painter who is disenchanted with the inadequacy of camera vision is to become an abstract artist. Hockney, however, remains stubbornly and admirably concerned with the difficult and arguably important task of creating original, legible images from what is in front of him.

Downstairs at Annely Juda there were smaller paintings; rows of pink and red faces (shockingly so at first sight) against green backgrounds. These were portraits of people whom David Hockney knows well. The self-portraits among them touchingly revealed a little introspective anxiety behind the extrovert aspect of a great performer. The intense, thoughtful, empathetic way in which the faces were observed provided a sort of foil to the flowers blazing away upstairs and in some ways the faces better rewarded return visits.

The ‘Flowers’ section of the catalogue was introduced by a classic Hockney dictum.

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