Hockney at Nottingham Contemporary, review

A fascinating new exhibition of David Hockney’s work at the newly-opened
Nottingham Contemporary shows the artist’s transition from British talent to
international star. Rating: * * * * *

By Richard Dorment
Published: 5:38PM GMT 23 Nov 2009

Hockney’s A Bigger Splash at the Nottingham Contemporary
Photo: RII SCHROER

Serviceable shed: Caruso St. John’s Nottinham Contemporary

What a bright idea it was to mount a show about David Hockney’s work in the
Sixties for the inaugural exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, the new
arts centre for yet another British city that crass urban development robbed
of its soul. Though I was underwhelmed by the serviceable shed Caruso St
John has designed for the awkward site in that blighted city centre, it was
a stroke of genius to bring these glorious pictures and prints from
Hockney’s finest period together for the first time.

Only 22 when he arrived at the Royal College of Art, it wasn’t so much that
the boy from Bradford set out to break the rules — it was that he didn’t
know there were any rules to break. In the faux-naïf, graffiti-inspired work
of the early Sixties, he revelled in his freedom to paint the figure
unfettered by the disciplines of drawing, proportion, composition or
perspective. The camp humour and high spirits of the earliest works go hand
in hand with the erasures, pentimenti, secret codes and in-house jokes that
are delivered with offhand defiance, as if to say to his elders, “So what
are you going to do about it?”

To paint (as opposed to draw) two young men in an amorous clinch wasn’t done
in 1962, but Hockney got away with it in We Two Boys Clinging because the
“boys” look like crudely painted strawberry and chocolate ice-lollies and it
is “love” in the form of Valentine hearts that the picture celebrates, not
illegal sex. But sex is what interested Hockney, and the rest of the show
tells the story of how he came to discard these early evasions and
circumlocutions to put it at the heart of his work.

He followed up his initial success with the series of etchings updating
Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress. Setting his story in a specific time and place
(New York, early Sixties) with extraordinary graphic fluency, Hockney tells
the familiar tale of drink, drugs, sex and death in a jokey visual language
that anyone could understand.

But here, and in many other pictures painted right after he left the Royal
College, it feels to me that Hockney introduces passages of surrealistic
whimsy as a tactic to avoid having to deal with naturalistic description. I
find paintings like Great Pyramid of Giza with Broken Head of Thebes (1963)
repellently slick and superficial. With their echoes of the cartoons of Saul
Steinberg, they are the reason the painter William Scott dismissed Hockney
at this period as a “colour supplement artist”.

And then it happened. The day he stepped off the plane at Los Angeles,
everything changed. In a moment that I would seriously compare to Vincent
Van Gogh’s arrival at Arles, it is as though the heat, light and colour of
southern California entered Hockney’s bloodstream. Overnight, a talented
British artist became a major international star. Seeing it happen in this
show is like watching a plane taxiing down a runway — on and on it trundles,
gathering speed and power and then, suddenly, when you come to first LA
pictures, whoosh —the wheels lift and one of the great artistic careers of
the 20th century takes off.

From the first picture, the mannerisms and the obscurities of the London years
begin to fall away. In the flourishing gay subculture in California, the
young artist could assert his sexual identity in a way that was not possible
under the watchful eyes of the British police and the Lord Chamberlain’s
office. Now he could paint the subjects that interested him, sun-struck male
bodies lying under blue skies beside rippling water. What’s more, he could
paint them in focus, using academic draughtsmanship and Renaissance
perspective without having to blur, erase, or otherwise disguise his imagery.

And so the nude in Man Taking Shower in Beverly Hills (1964) is painted from a
black-and-white photo Hockney found in a beefcake magazine. But now
Hockney’s brush describes the slow moving jets of water hitting the man’s
arched back and the light tan line on his buttocks so caressingly that the
three big black palm fronds in the foreground look carnivorous, like a Venus
flytrap about to eat him alive.

The Californian equivalent to A Rake’s Progress are his wonderful
illustrations to 14 poems by C.P. Cavafy. What before had only been implied,
he now spells out in elegant line drawings showing young men nude, or in
their underwear, or lying in bed together. The catalogue essay rightly
discusses all this within the historical context of the sexual revolution
that was taking place in these years. But though that is certainly true,
what struck me so forcibly in this show is not so much the explicit subject
matter of these pictures and prints as their formal perfection.

One small canvas shows the black and white street sign for Wilshire Boulevard
against a sky of light blue, with a few green palm fronds. Its not what
Hockney paints that’s interesting but how he paints it. Remembering the
insouciant way Hockney used to paint in his earlier work, what is so
striking here is that each brushstroke is laid on the canvas with a slow
deliberation that’s as ravishing as any patch of colour painted by Vermeer
or Mondrian. This quality is very hard to put into words, but it is covered
by the term “facture” which refers to the artist’s touch, or feel for the
paint —which in Hockney’s case is almost palpable. Forget spontaneity —
that’s a distant memory, the indulgence of his youth. As Hockney matures,
the pictures become quiet, measured, almost solemn – as if he realises that
what he is doing in them is too important to make light of.

Take the most famous of all, A Bigger Splash. For years, I looked at that
picture and all I saw was the meticulous way Hockney paints the two sprays
of water arrested in mid-air forever, dutifully noting the picture’s gentle
send-ups of abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction and post-painterly
abstraction. But now that I am more familiar with Ed Ruscha’s paintings and
photographs of LA, it’s clear that Hockney’s picture also captures the
emptiness, sterility and an element of the sinister in Los Angeles. Notice,
for example, the dark grey buildings and palm trees reflected in the sliding
doors in the middle distance. We often think of Hockney’s Californian
pictures as hymns to flesh and sexuality but this picture has none of that.
Instead, what it gives us is an element of film noir, a side of LA that all
this prosperity serves to keep at bay.

The culmination of the swimming-pool pictures came in 1966 with Peter Getting
Out of Nick’s Pool, that hypnotic masterpiece in which Hockney paints water
as a series of intertwined lines of white and mauve paint, rippling over
bands of light blue, dark blue, and aquamarine. At first, its hard to take
your eyes off the figure at the centre, the linchpin that holds the
composition together, But after a while, your eye starts to move over the
picture surface to discover the patch of radiant green Hockney uses for the
back of the deck chair, or the horizontal bands of yellow, white, and moss
green interrupted by evenly spaced black verticals at the top of the
picture, surely his homage to Mondrian.

With time, you notice that, as in a work by Josef Albers, the composition here
consists of a series of progressively smaller squares, beginning with the
“frame” of the bare canvas, and ending with the glass picture window
streaked with white diagonal lines that for some mysterious reason we read
as reflections. Hockney has found a visual language that combines geometric
abstraction with minimalism and naturalism. He plays off the straight lines
of the architecture with the curving ripples and round flesh, all in a
colours as pure and as vibrant as a Matisse.

With my head full of Hockney, it was hard to move on to a show of perfectly
banal collages by a completely unremarkable American artist named Frances
Stark, chosen, I can only suppose, because she happens to work in Los
Angeles. Seeing it after Hockney like drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola after
vintage wine.

• Until Jan 24. Tel: 0115 924 2421

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