Some 43 paintings by British artist David Hockney are being exhibited in the Paris Modern Art Pompidou Museum until April 26th 1999. Hockney, who was in Paris for the opening of the exhibition, told journalists that he had nothing special to say and was surprised that they were more interested in him than in his paintings.
David Hockney with Polish
painter - Zbigniew Wieckowski, february 1999
Hockney added that he was pleased about the selection of his paintings for this exhibition and stressed that he considered himself as a researcher always going ahead.
«I am always interested in images, in advertising, in television and all medias. I spend a lot of time looking at them though one must not trust them entirely. I think there is a decline in photojournalism while painting must be a medium made to provoke questions. In my recent paintings the question is how to see».
He added : « In my paintings of the Grand Canyon, it is not the Grand Canyon that is the subject but the way of seeing it. What happens when one wants to take a photo ? Well, there is only one focus but in reality there are many focuses. The human eye does not work like a camera ».
David Hockney, who made extensive use of photographs to produce his paintings, said he assembled photos in the 1980's with the idea of defragmenting vision. «For me this work is purely cubist in style and the Grand Canyon landscapes are also cubist paintings however not in the sense of pure cubism as in Picasso's or Braque's works. Still, the word cubism has been badly chosen. In fact it includes multiplicity and diversity as the era in which we live. Take television as an example. If there is one channel everybody will be tuned to it. Therefore there would be only one focus. When there are several channels, you are then in a cubist situation », he stressed.
Hockney pinpointed that painting lasted more than cinema. «When one asks who were the movie stars of the 1930's only specialists can give us the good answers while others think about Mickey and Donald.
Cinema is an ephemeral art as most movies disappear and if someone tells me that television gives cinema an immense audience and guarantees its survival I will reply that this is untrue as the public wants something else the next day », he told the daily Le Monde.
«All I want is to produce strong images that people will remember of. Everything in it must contribute to this effect. Think, Vermeer's colours will last longer than those of the MGM film company. Think of the Egyptians, Francis Bacon used to say that the best artistic era had been Egyptian and he was right as his thinking is confirmed by what you see in the Egyptian aisle of the Louvre Museum. Egyptian painting has a visual power that will forever last ».
Hockney said that in his view there was no threat to painting. «We will see new things soon and these will be quite astonishing. Still the idea of death in painting is typically French because some philosophers gambled too much with cameras », he said.
Two other exhibitions of Hockney will be held in Paris in two weeks time, at the Musée Picasso and at the European House of Photography whereas the one organised at the Musée Pompidou is not a retrospective as only landscapes are being shown there.
The first paintings relate to Hockney's first years as a painter when he caused some scandal admitting he was a homosexual in 1962. Two years later he discovered California and its swimming pools, which made him one of the most celebrated artists of his time.
In his landscapes Hockney included so many elements deriving from geographic books, comic books, primitive arts and industrial designs that the final result appeared somewhat funny.
Considered as a Pop artist, whereas he does not like to be classified as such, Hockney has been trying to depict daily events and contemporary clichés as if he had been at first a photographer eager to capture his images in another way. Still, he is not a great hyperrealist painter as Malcolm Morley was and neither a good artist as Picasso, Matisse or some others were. Still, he is a researcher who has taken advantage of photography to pave his way in the world of painting and to achieve his goal, that is to say find many focus points.
His recent anguish has been to deal with the Grand Canyon and his works are now somewhat reminiscent of those of Felix Valloton and Hodler. A Closer Grand Canyon reunites 96 canvasses in a panorama measuring 7,5 metre long and 3 metre high with a clear blue sky and white clouds, orange, purple and red rocks and green vegetation but overall, Hockney only achieved a panorama similar to those produced during the 19th Century.
In fact, the British artist has simply been at his best with his portraits and erotic nudes of much smaller sizes.
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