David Hockney

This is my dissertation for my Masters in Applied Theology completed in 2014. I explored the relationship between faith development (mostly using James Fowler's model but with reference to others) and the way people respond to images. I also propose a possible narrative model for faith development which I am continuing to explore.

– In this short paper I will consider carefully a number of Baroque canvases in order to evaluate the assumption that certain important Western European artists made use of projected images in the creation of their artworks. The paintings I have chosen act as documentary evidence in support of optical theories, as they can be properly interpreted as artists working in 'dark rooms', or camera obscura. I will also use a painting by Caravaggio to introduce the new theory that he made use of chemicals in the form of a primitive photographic process.

When, in November 2018, David Hockneys “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures)” is auctioned at Christies, it is likely to reach a world-record price for a work by a living artist. Why such artwork is usually sold using the “English auction” method (as opposed – for example – to some form of “sealed bid” auction)?

În Istoria Artei David Hockney este considerat un contributor important la mișcarea artei Pop din anii ’60, iar în anul 2000 a fost declarat unul dintre cei mai influenți artiști britanici ai secolului al XX-lea. Având 81 de ani și fiind încă remarcabil de activ în viața artistică internațională, se prea poate ca influența să i se extindă și în secolul nostru.

Articolul însoțit de imagini se gasește pe blogul meu:
https://emiliacernaianu.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/cui-i-e-frica-de-david-hockney/

Exploring the architecture of Pierre Koenig as part of the Los Angeles mid-century Case Study House program (1945-1966), alongside David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967), in relation to the civic and geographic topography of Los Angeles observed by Jean Baudrillard in his 1986 book America and explore how observations such as the ‘absolute horizontality’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 2) and ‘extensive banality’ (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 9) are reflected in these works from two decades earlier.

Арт-критик Валерий Леденёв поговорил с Мартином Гейфордом о том, зачем художники переписывают историю, как готовиться к длительным интервью с Хокни и Люсьеном Фрейдом и о том, почему критика сегодня выглядит фрагментированной, фотография умирает, а живопись приносит новые открытия, несмотря на затянувшийся кризис этого жанра.

Der Untersuchung liegt das Theorem zugrunde, dass dem Polaroid vier wesentliche Eigenschaften inharent sind, die je nach zeitlichem oder kunstlerischem Umfeld in unterschiedlichem Grad hervortreten, genutzt oder umgangen werden. Jene konstitutiven Merkmale des Sofortbildes sind mit Unmittelbarkeit (Zeit), Unikatcharakter (Original), spezifischer Korperlichkeit von hohem Wiedererkennungswert durch den immanenten Rahmen (Format) sowie bildimmanente Stilistika, wie Farbverfalschungen und Unscharfen (Bildasthetik) zu benennen. Es wird daher angenommen, dass das Sofortbild grundsatzlich einheitlichen funktionalen Bedingungen folgt, diese jedoch manipuliert, verandert, ausgeschaltet oder weiterentwickelt werden konnen. Das Polaroid steht dabei jedoch in kontinuierlicher Wechselbeziehung zu anderen medialen Phanomenen, geht Symbiosen mit Techniken wie der Collage oder Montage ein und offenbart sich daher nur in Ausnahmefallen als eigenstandiges finales Kunstwerk. Man ist beinahe geneigt zu...

This paper aims to give a queer reading of some mid-1960s Pop Art paintings, whose more or less direct subject is the brushstroke. Queer hermeneutical instruments, like the concept of performativity, can recount the strategies set up by Pop artworks in order to deconstruct the essentialist meanings associated with the image of the thick, gestural brushstroke typical of Abstract Expressionism. All along the Fifties and Sixties, details of abstract painting spread and got a centrality due to Rosenberg's and Greenberg's pervasive critical systems as regards painting. The former interpreted the brushstroke as the direct expression of the life and the action of the painter; the latter, as the "nature" of painting itself as pure color on a surface. Countering this critical rhetoric, Lichtenstein artificially constructed flat images of the Expressionist brushstroke; Dine called into question its status of representation or reality; Rosenquist formulated food-like metaphors of abstraction, stressing its popularization in the mass media, and overturned the rhetoric of "natural" expressionist creation; Hockney camouflaged photographic figuration as a form of "drag abstraction".

This paper explores the historical, symbolic and performative elements of David Hockney's 1963 painting 'Play Within a Play' where Hockey celebrates theatrical, performative, illusionistic, symbolic and decorative elements of Painting in his early experimental period of oil painting.

David Hockney has spent his entire life painting traditional pictorial genres such as landscape with the help of different means: photography, computer design programs, digital photography, fax machines and, more recently, iPhones and iPads. During the 1980s, the use of technology allowed him to apply to painting what camera experimentation had taught him. He adapted photography’s medium specificities (capturing time, movement and stillness) to his landscapes. He smashed traditional
perspective and engaged in a new multifocal representation of space, setting his compositions in motion. Hockney seduces his viewer inside the canvas and offers him a space-time experience on which the perception and understanding of the painting are fully depended. Through the analysis of Hockney’s oeuvre, this paper explores how landscape continues its long tradition in the 21st century’s post-painting era, enriched and revitalized as a genre thanks to the contribution of different media.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) once described the terms objective and subjective as “the most objectionable words that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians.” He thought that thedivision created by these terms confuses how subjects and objects are designated. In the wake of thinkers such as French Rationalist, René Descartes (1596-1650) and German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), modern philosophy has generally embraced a metaphysical binary play between the subject and the object. As part of the humanities, art history has described the post-Enlightenment age as a time marked by these two “objectionable words” and tried to understand how subjectivity and objectivity have influenced art’s development. This chapter examines how the art-historical perception of the relation between the subject and the object has changed over time. Such a task inevitably involves a survey of the relation between art and science—the latter of which is a system associated with objectivity—with an emphasis on those historical moments when the two became closely interrelated. The architectural representation of perspective in Filippo Brunelleschi’s (1377-1446) lost painting of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence and the sculpture of his fellow Florentine Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) represent one such moment. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) offered a theoretical explanation of linear perspective in his treatise De Pictura (1435), while Brunelleschi and Ghiberti became its earliest practitioners. This development evinces cross-pollination between art and science but it would be inaccurate to characterize, as do some contemporary theorists discussed here, the artists’ interest in scientific knowledge as a misguided preoccupation with objectivity. As a matter of fact, such a description undermines the very notion of subjectivity that it purports to advance. An analysis of these artists’ works, coupled with a consideration of the theories constructed by later art historians and critics about them, suggests that both objectivity and subjectivity are integral to the structure of art, as “organic” as that structure may be. Furthermore, the rejection of one or the other, typical of aesthetic relativism, necessarily implies denying that meaning is relevant to the concept of art.

Italian Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi has been the focus of Gender research for about thirty years. This article (published 2005) was an early exploration of a more prosaic explanation for this female artist's head start on others who might not have had access to the technology under discussion, being the principles of art and optics, the use of the camera obscura and lenses first introduced by British artist David Hockney in 2001.

"Castellano: in viaggio tra restauro e pittura"

Presentiamo questa sera opere d'arte contemporanea dell'artista Maria Grazia Castellano. Con il mio intervento voglio offrire un contributo alla lettura dell'artista, allo stare di fronte alle sue opere e sentire il loro messaggio, le sensazioni e significati che l'artista vuole trasmettere.

Castellano, che ha accompagnato il percorso artistico della pittura a quello altrettanto importante del restauro, soprattutto per opere ancor più complesse per i materiali, spesso utilizzati, come quelli nel contemporaneo, il che richiede davvero, oltre che professionalità e preparazione, passione e amore per le opere stesse.

Come molti della scuola italiana del restauro, con meriti riconosciuti nel mondo, Maria Grazia ha seguito gli insegnamenti e i consigli dei signori Paolo e in particolare Laura Mora, restauratrice di fama importante di ISCR, con l'influenza dei maestri Giovanni Urbani per la prassi e Cesare Brandi per la teoria del restauro: Castellano ha appreso l'attenzione alla cura e al dettaglio delle opere, così come l'attenzione alle indicazioni lasciate con le opere dagli artisti stessi.

In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, David Hockney opted for a particular application of primer in the ground layers of some of his paintings — that is, a partial or ‘selective’ type of preparation. By selectively preparing certain areas with one or more layers of (gesso) priming, Hockney introduced a slightly higher and white pictorial plane in selected areas while retaining the properties of raw canvas in others. In one of Hockney’s most discussed paintings, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), for instance, selective preparation divided the surface and set the stage from the ground up. This paper examines the impact of this highly original and hybrid formula on perception by the viewer, focusing on how the eye registers the change in properties of the paint layer. It outlines Hockney’s investigation of the primed/unprimed opposition through the use of selective preparation, and the variety of effects it allowed him to achieve in one canvas. From its anecdotal use in 1960s road trip paintings to its more pronounced use in pool paintings in which Hockney used unprimed canvas to convey the ‘wetness’ of water, selective preparation was a device for him to compellingly increase contrasts and tension. Far from producing mere formal effects or serving solely as citations (of stain paintings for instance), the perceived technical oddity produces meaning. From the ground layers up, it deeply influences the perception, and thus the interpretation of the discussed paintings.

According to Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser, the meaning of art in the digital culture depends much on the very concept of digitalization. Vilém Flusser's theory establishes a division in mankind's History, that of alphabet-oriented societies (from first written civilizations) to number-oriented society (the digital world). According to Flusser, alphabet was invented in order to describe the world, to represent it, in a form less mythical than images (that created idolatry). Differently from images, alphabet creates a lineal sequence of events, a discourse. History is thus discursive. But like images, discourse, despite being composed by discrete elements (letters, phonemes), creates continuity, because it aims the representation or interpretation of the world. In an opposed sense, the process of digitalization of nature (and culture) imposed by natural sciences-and lately by Silicon valley IT professionals-operates with discrete elements not in order to interpret the world, but to change it-in other words, to synthetize the world inside "black-boxes". What is the role of art in this new discrete-synthetized world? This is the question I want to arise and discuss following Flusser's "philosophical fictions" and with the works of some modern artists

On the eighteenth century gallery walls, paintings are "hung like sardines". The Salon of 1787 at the Louvre, engraving by Pietro Antonio Martini, shows how paintings were presented at the Salon in the Louvre's salle carrée: no less than four rows of paintings cover the walls, from top to bottom. The room is filled with hundreds of paintings of all sizes, "the "best" pictures stay in the middle zone; small pictures drop to the bottom". As O'Dorothy points out, traditional painting reveals an image that creates an isolated entity in a perspective system. The perspective gives the illusion of the painting-window, "a portable window that, once set on the wall, penetrates it with deep space". The heavy frame around the painting is enough to create a discontinuity of space: "there is no suggestion that the space within the picture is continuous with the space on either side of it". Landscape painting is the first to disrupt this tradition. It gradually cancels perspective and thus creates "an ambiguous surface". Turner, Monet and later, Kandinsky are the first to break with the past. Monet in particular not only changes the pictorial space but also modifies the exhibition space where the work is located (such as his Nymphéas, 1914-1926, in the musée de l'Orangerie). This example was followed by the Americans. Americans' abstract canvas, a field filled with colors all over, grows in size. The pictorial space is flat, without illusion of depth (spacelessness) or weight (weightlessness). The painting is reduced to a wall decoration. Abstract expressionists understand the picture plane as an integral part of the gallery's architecture. This new conception of the easel painting influences the real space in which the artwork is exhibited. The picture's space is not to be found only within the limits of the canvas, it also includes the place where the picture hangs. Painters are interested in the area around the painting. Abstract Expressionists "followed the route of lateral expansion, dropped off the frame, and gradually began to conceive the edge as a structural unit through which the painting entered into a dialogue with the wall beyond it". Rothko's painting leaves the impression that his squares float in an open and infinite space. The effect of each canvas continues in the canvas next to and in the gallery. Pollock's painting has no beginning and no ending. In contrast to the "autonomous" painting of the nineteenth century , what matters is the continuity between paintings as an ensemble. Seventeenth century's presentation can no longer exist in the twentieth century. Traditional museum galleries stifle abstract expressionist painting. The installation photographs of the Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Betty Parson Gallery in 1950 show how inadequate the gallery is for the new American painting. Rooms are too small, paintings touch the floor and ceiling causing a glare effect (see the illustration of Peter Arno, New Yorker, September 23, 1961). Museum galleries have to adapt to [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

Having returned from a defining trip to America, in
the year in which he met Andy Warhol, he presented
"Renaissance Head", an imaginative subversion of
Renaissance iconography depicting a profile under
an arch and a background landscape punctuated by
Tuscan cypresses. The work is an artificial and somewhat
sardonic evocation of the portraits created
four centuries earlier by Piero della Francesca, a
decisive theoretician of linear perspective whose
highly rigorous and detailed paintings obeyed complex
mathematical and geometrical structures.

The writer François Jonquet first met David Hockney nineteen years ago in his house of Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. This time, he visited the painter in his native England, in Yorkshire, to discuss his latest works, drawings done on iPhone and iPad, and the way he has always appropriated new technologies (rememberer the faxes ans Polaroids) to stimulate his painting.

Der Tagungsbeitrag stellt zwei deutsche Ausgaben der Gedichte von Konstantin Kavafis vergleichend gegenüber, um an ihnen exemplarisch zu verdeutlichen, wie etablierte Anschauungen nationaler bzw. individueller Identität bei der Konstruktion und Kanonisierung eines literarischen Werks zum Einsatz gelangen: Zunächst wird Kavafis oftmals als Autor gehandelt, der eine historische Kontinuität innerhalb des griechischen Kulturraums und dessen zentrale Position im geistigen Entwicklungsprozess des Abendlands reflektiert. So lässt sich an der von Jörg Schäfer übersetzten und kommentierten Ausgabe seines Hauptwerks (2003) ablesen, wie die Gedichte als Zeugnis einer solchen geschichtlichen »Akkulturation [...] unter der Dominanz des hellenischen Geistes« inszeniert werden; dabei versucht der Band, die diachrone Spanne und den zivilisatorischen Hintergrund der vorgestellten Texte durch zahlreiche Abbildungen antiker Bildnismünzen zu veranschaulichen. Dadurch aber – so die These – gerät die Ausgabe bereits durch ihre Gestaltung zum Indiz für die (durch sie mit betriebene) Verschränkung von kulturellem und ökonomischem Wert. Im Sinne Pierre Bourdieus, der im Bereich nicht-materieller und also symbolischer Ordnungen einer Kultur Analogien zu den Tausch- und Zirkulationsprozessen der Geldwirtschaft hat ausmachen können, wird das Werk Kavafis’ hier nicht nur als kanonisches Kulturgut, sondern auch als »symbolisches Kapital« dargestellt. Es ist – keineswegs nur metaphorisch – eine Währung innerhalb der gesellschaftlichen Zeichenökonomie, insofern es sich wie die Geldwährung durch seinen allgemein anerkannten, das heißt einwechsel-, aber unverwechselbaren Wert auszeichnet. Das Buch selbst, welches den Wert enthält und verteilt, dient derweil als Medium, das den symbolischen Verkehr der Zeichen in der Gesellschaft und – etwa durch Anthologisierung und Übersetzung – über deren Grenzen hinaus gewährleistet (Hartmut Winkler: Diskursökonomie).
Während einerseits eine solche Ausstellung des im Bild der Münze manifestierten kulturellen Kapitals der Lyrik Kavafis’ auf deren allgemeine Anerkennung und Gültigkeit im gesamten Wertsystem zielt, scheinen andererseits Werk und Person gerade dieses Autors der symbolischen Allgemeingültigkeit gleichzeitig das Bild des Anderen entgegenzustellen. Auf den ersten Blick steht die weite künstlerische und gesellschaftliche Akzeptanz des Dichters zu seiner Alterität im Gegensatz, indem seine Homosexualität eher dazu tendiert, die freien Bewertungs- und Austauschverfahren zu hemmen. Sie führt in die Zirkulation des Werts und in die Verbreitung des kanonischen Status’ eine Grenze ein; zugespitzt formuliert, ist der symbolische Verkehr durch den relativen »Minderwert« wenn nicht gar die absolute »Systemlosigkeit« der sexuellen Abweichung gefährdet. Bemerkenswerterweise ist es jedoch eben jenes Andere, das im Zentrum der von Michael Schröder übersetzten und mit einem Nachwort versehenen Sammlung ausgewählter Liebesgedichte von Kavafis steht (Um zu bleiben. Liebesgedichte, 1989). Dass sich die Ausgabe auf einen vom Liebesthema bestimmten Ausschnitt des Werks beschränkt, in der Übersetzung den verschleierten Aspekt der Homosexualität bewusst in den Vordergrund stellt und die Texte schließlich mit 13 Radierungen David Hockneys illustriert, deutet auf eine Dominantenverschiebung im Vergleich zu der von Jörg Schäfer besorgten Ausgabe hin: In den kulturweit geltenden Kanon und die in ihm grundgelegte historische und transnationale Positionierung des Dichters, wie sie Schäfer betreibt, wird nun ein Moment der Irritation eingeführt; das Allgemeine sieht sich durch das Besondere abgelöst, das geschichtlich Übergreifende durch den Gestus der Zeitlosigkeit des erotischen Motivs – die Alterität mag so als Angriff auf das symbolische Kapital erscheinen. Allerdings unterstützt eben diese in der Gestaltung der Ausgabe implizierte Überzeitlichkeit auch deren Klassikerstatus (desgleichen die Tatsache, dass der Band in einem überaus renommierten Verlag erschienen ist); und die Illustrationen Hockneys assoziieren Kavafis nicht lediglich mit dessen sexueller Neigung, sondern sichern seine künstleri-sche Stellung in der modernen Kunst. Letzten Endes lassen sich also die Elemente der Alterität, die in Schröders Ausgabe akkumuliert sind, als Gegenstand einer Rückführung des Anderen in die Wirkkreise des symbolischen Kapitals verstehen. Die Homosexualität erfährt ihre Normalisierung (Jürgen Link) und wird als Wert in die Ökonomie der gesellschaftlichen Diskurse der Kunst und Literatur aufgenommen.
An den beiden Ausgaben der Gedichte Kavafis’ lässt sich daher mustergültig demonstrieren, inwiefern einerseits die hellenische Identität und ihre Überlieferung an das Europa der Neuzeit zu Ideologemen innerhalb der Literatur und zu kulturellen Werten werden, wie andererseits die Einführung des Anderen, der Abweichung und der Grenzmarkierung jenen Gründungsgedanken hellenisch-abendländischer Einheit scheinbar zu destabilisieren sucht und wie sich die Alterität schließlich doch wieder als Subdiskurs zu erkennen gibt, der in den Bereich des anerkannten symbolischen Kapitals zurückkehrt. Kavafis dient in beiden Fällen der Konstruktion kultureller Werte, ein Phänomen, dass sich unter Umständen anhand der gesamten Übersetzungs- und Editionsgeschichte seines Werks in Deutschland veranschaulichen ließe und neben der Frage nach einem vielleicht »verstellten Blick« Mitteleuropas auf Griechenland auch diejenige nach der Konstitution bzw. Konstruktion von Identität und Wert in Griechenland wie auch anderswo gerade durch derlei Blicke aufwirft.

Text addresses the problematics of diffused boundary between personal and impersonal in artist’s experience with visual language, which he adopts and accepts as his own, even if it precedes him in the form of tradition. On the example of figurative production of Peter Jánošík and his relation to David Hockney as well as on example of Hockney’s relation to William Hogarth I consider how are possible the changes of perspective to oneself and own outer-artistic experiences through language of fine-art – painting or drawing.

Introduction for a publication of Anthony Burgess's poem An Elegy for X, originally written in 1991 for the book David Hockney's Alphabet. This introduction covers the genesis of the poem, the publication history and its cultural, biographical and literary significance.

By discussing some composite photographic collages by Joyce Neimanas, David Hockney, and Robert Frank from the 1970s and 1980s I investigate how the three artists transform their experiences with the perception of our world into visual interplays. They deal with the limits of the “program of the camera” by tearing the fabric of reality, fragmenting it into photographs and using them as building blocks to assert
their artistic autonomy from the apparatus and photographic conventions.
American photographer Joyce Neimanas sews Polaroids together like a patchwork quilt to give an impression of a comprehensive situation. British painter David Hockney takes a situation apart photographically,
his Joiner Photographs appear to be multiperspective, fragmented, and animated. And Swiss-American photographer and documentary filmmaker Robert Frank´s photo compilations construct narrative
sequences and blocks, he uses them like storyboards, as visual diaries.
These artists show three concepts of how to bring to the fore the process of shaping an image over time that reflects the quality of a dynamic whole. The partial meaning offered by the visible parts of the photographic ensembles encourages beholders to complete what they see, to transform it into a coherent and meaningful image, to build patterns, time-images and narratives.

Isabelle Schwarz: Das Schöpferische als Versenkung, Selbstvergessenheit und angestrengte Entspannung in Werken von Hockney, Picasso und Beckmann, in: Dörthe Wilke (Hg.): Auszeit. Vom Faulenzen und Nichtstun, Ausst.-Kat. Sprengel Museum Hannover, o. O. 2015, S. 33-50.

Paul Gauguin finished the 19th century with his primitivist paintings, whose interest awakened in all the other arts an enthusiasm to look for something vernacular, with purest, simplest and more popular forms, stripped of any link with western culture. Gauguin tried to inculcate all kinds of vernacular art, and for that, after him Picasso appeared, influenced by this new vernacular aesthetic, and painted Las Señoritas de Avignon, the painting that would give start to the Cubism movement.

The contemporary artist David Hockney is well known as a painter of nature. However, what is the focus of his art? What is his self-appointed purpose as a painter? From a critical review of his numerous publications the answer arises naturally: humanity. David Hockney abandons abstraction and excessive naturalism, criticizes and uses photography (and other new medias) to find a way to better understand and express his humanity; to communicate his personal vision of the word. The subjects of his paintings – present or not – are humans and their peculiar way of looking, which is very different from that of a camera. Human vision takes place over time, and it carves the space. It is close to its object, and it is influenced by memory. Human beings are not only the subject but also the recipient of his work, he draws for humanity. He aims to educate himself on a more human perception and communicate it to others. Art education is visual education. Art sharpens the visual sense and makes it see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious. Thus, by changing perception, it can change the world. If we look at the world more closely, if we allow ourselves to truly perceive the beauty of the ordinary, we can better love and care for our environment. This is Hockney’s duty as an artist, to paint humanity and its visual perception in order to make the world more human. In this overstimulating era of new media, he indicates to his anesthetized contemporaries a possible way to fight against their many distractions and emerging depressions and, perhaps, even to address major environmental issues.

David Hockney and British art scene of the 1960s (Дэвид Хокни и британская арт-сцена 1960-х годов) // Western Art. The Sixties of ХХ Century / ed. A. Bartoshevich, T. Gnedovskaya (Западное искусство. XX век. Шестидесятые годы: сборник статей. Отв. ред. А. В. Бартошевич, Т.Ю. Гнедовская). М.: BooksMArt, 2021. P. 99-117.  ISBN 978-5-907267-51-0