Some artists spend their careers relying on chance as the foundation on which their work is built. For David Hockney, an infamously programmatic and intentional British artist, the art of chance is out of the question. Hockney is known for having developed a visual language for us to speak about the Californian landscape and domestic spaces. More importantly, Hockney has given us an imagery through which we can begin to understand the white gay male experience in 1970s Los Angeles. To honor Hockney as he turns 80, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has welcomed a traveling retrospective spanning over six decades of work.
This is the first time in a generation that Hockney’s work is exhibited so massively in North America. Museum-goers are given access to Hockney’s world, from his early work, where he cheekily addressed his difficulties grappling with the Formalist art movement, to his most famous swimming pool and male nude paintings, to his later, more technology-driven productions. Hockney was an artist who defied generally-accepted social structures and led his life as an openly gay man in a world that systematically oppressed and silenced those who did not conform. The exhibition looks back at Hockney’s legacy, one that gave voice to so many of us and provided aspiring artists with the tools and confidence to explore their own vocations. Ultimately, Hockney looked at oppression not as a threat, but as a challenge to shock, subvert, and shake up heteronormative structures.
When Hockney first started his career in late 50s/early 60s England, the art world was concerned with finding ways to bridge the gap between the rising impact of Abstract Expressionism and the fading (though it never really will) glory of Formalism. Hockney loved to nestle himself at the intersection of the two, though his version of Abstract Expressionism had less to do with gestural spurts of color than it did with the intentional and calculated accumulation of color to form an explosive whole.
Quickly, Hockney also sought to incorporate allusions to his own homosexuality in his paintings, inspired by the texts of Christopher Isherwood and Alan Rechy, which revelled in the exploits of their homosexual characters. At the time, homosexuality was illegal in England, so Hockney painted self-portraits. He was gay and painted himself, effectively creating gay art, but flying under the radar. It was a genius move and roaring middle finger to his opposition. But Hockney also started his Love Paintings, which celebrated homosexual love by incorporating phallic elements in tandem with fantastical colors and imagery. This was his attempt to fuse the individual, the real, and the imaginary to provide a homosexual space of pleasure and actualized desire. Of course, he knew when to be subtle and when to scream loudly.
He took this irreverent attitude and moved it to Los Angeles in 1964, where California dreaming was going strong. Bohemian lifestyles were the new fad, artists were welcomed with arms wide open, and the gay scene was bubbling with possibilities. In countless interviews with Hockney, he looks back at those days with impenetrable nostalgia. In an interview with The Telegraph, Hockney said: “They want to be ordinary – they want to fit in. Well I don’t care about that. I don’t care about fitting in. Everywhere is so conservative.” Hockney wanted to celebrate just how different the gay lifestyle is from the heterosexual one. It has to do with extravagance, treating the world as a playing field for daredevils, and, most of all, leading an unapologetic life.
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It is out of this need to portray gay life that Hockney started formulating his hedonistic, sun-bathed image of California. He painted men sleeping near/entering/leaving swimming pools, naked men showering, and friends going about their lives. Most notoriously, in 1971, he painted Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which captured Peter Schlesinger, his partner at the time, swimming to the surface of a pool and Hockney looking down at him. I remember going to the Stahl House, staring at the pool, and imagining all of Hockney’s boys pulling themselves out, tan, shimmering. It’s an aesthetic that to this day still exists in Los Angeles. The house in the hills, with a pool and staggering views. Today, it’s hard to look at the reflections of the sun on water without Hockney in mind.
Hockney never accepted any commissioned portraits, so his works were by nature intrinsically personal. This was Hockney’s way of fusing art and reality to focus on a formal analysis of his immediate world. He returned to sensuality, focused on shower scenes, and started working with double portraits, including some that have now become iconic trademarks of Hockney’s oeuvre. His most significant double portrait was that of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Hockney has said that, while he was working on the portrait, he couldn’t help but ask himself what kept them together, what happened to the couple after the painting was done. This was a perfect excuse for a psychological study.
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From the moment he arrived in California, Hockney made it a point to produce explicit paintings and never hide their signification. He was blatantly vocal about the symbolism in his paintings, his varying lines of inquiry, and to that effect, has provided a theoretical framework for artists that came after him. In Man in Shower in Beverly Hill, Hockney explicitly portrays the male body in all its sensuality, blatantly exclaiming his proximity to his subject. Hockney doesn’t choose to show the man’s face. Rather, his focus is on the body — the ultimate object of desire. For instance, artist Jordan Casteel paints portraits of black men to consider issues of masculinity. While not exactly related, Casteel’s work borrows from Hockney’s ability to take a community that is often misrepresented by the general public, give it a visual language of its own, and a platform onto which it can grow. Other queer artists, such as Doron Langberg, have expressed that Hockney helped them draw the line between queer art and representations of queer life. These are crucial distinctions both from an aesthetic and formal perspective.
Hockney named water, pools, bare butts, golden locks of hair, the Californian sun. He named leisure, nature, bohemia. With an ever-expanding lexicon, Hockney is now a prolific “iPainter,” creating digital paintings of his environment. He continues to experiment with a combination of perspectives, extreme abstraction, all the while holding onto to what he knows best: his reality. But, more importantly, Hockney continues to carve out a vantage point from which viewers can intimately witness (and participate in) queer life, and to open up a space for queer artists to inhabit. From his time at the Royal College of Art in England to his iPad in his California studio, the Met’s retrospective is not just an ode to a cherished artist, but it is a call to action. If his newer, technology-driven works push us to consider the abstract immensity of landscape while his earlier work asks us to look at concrete instances of daily life, then there’s no territory that queer life cannot infiltrate.
David Hockney is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 25th, 2018
Michael Valinsky is a writer from Paris and New York. His work has been published in i-D Magazine, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, OUT Magazine, and BOMB Magazine, among others. He is the author of .TXT, Zurich: 89plus/LUMA Publications, 2014. He currently works and lives in Los Angeles.
