Hockney biography lacks artistic analysis and integrity
By Deborah Solomon |
August 19, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
DAVID Hockney is often described as England's most popular artist, but in his youth he dreamed of Los Angeles. He moved there in 1963, at age 26, unable to drive and believing he would get around the city by bus. This did not prevent him from traveling in his imagination to another California, one that bore little resemblance to the surfer-girl paradise enshrined by the Beach Boys.
Soon after moving here, Hockney proclaimed, in a telegram to a friend, "Venice California more beautiful than Venice Italy." Irreverence intended. Young artists in search of enlightenment were supposed to sojourn to Rome and crane their necks to take in Michelangelo's ceiling. Hockney went in the reverse direction. He was less interested in being monumental than in being himself, a gamble that has resulted in a singularly varied output of paintings, prints, photo collages, theater designs and iPhone landscapes that together range from the serious to the helium-light, ideally in a single work.
Christopher Simon Sykes' "David Hockney. The Biography, 1937-1975: A Rake's Progress" is the engaging if breezy first volume of a projected two-part book. Sykes, an Englishman, is an architecture writer and photographer who has produced about a dozen books on British country houses. His book on Hockney is a semi-authorized biography, with all that implies about a tone of blanketing admiration. It covers the first half of Hockney's life, and is largely the story of a precocious artist who became famous in the 1960s as an exponent of Britain's newly ascendant Pop Art movement.
Hockney is still inclined to appear in public in mismatched socks, bright red ties and stripes that go in every direction. Well-read, gregarious and intensely inquisitive, he has the sort of innate cheerfulness that is widely regarded as a professional liability.
His childhood, as portrayed by Sykes, was a spartan working-class affair overshadowed by war and shortages and his family's eccentric politics. Sykes opens his book in August 1940, when three-year-old David huddles with his parents beneath a staircase in their home as sirens blare and German bombs whistle through the night. The artist's father, a social activist and a pacifist, refused to join the fight against Hitler, and his status as a conscientious objector made him a pariah. He lost his job, and neighbors spat at him.
Unfortunately, the book fails to provide a full accounting of the larger artistic and political milieu in which Hockney flourished. And art is treated perfunctorily. Sykes has a grating habit of describing paintings as "iconic," offering them instant upgrades without explanation. In general, the book has the chatty tone of a magazine profile, perhaps because it is difficult to write honestly about an artist who is still alive and capable of responding to your arduous labors with either a dinner invitation or a death threat.
Soon after moving here, Hockney proclaimed, in a telegram to a friend, "Venice California more beautiful than Venice Italy." Irreverence intended. Young artists in search of enlightenment were supposed to sojourn to Rome and crane their necks to take in Michelangelo's ceiling. Hockney went in the reverse direction. He was less interested in being monumental than in being himself, a gamble that has resulted in a singularly varied output of paintings, prints, photo collages, theater designs and iPhone landscapes that together range from the serious to the helium-light, ideally in a single work.
Christopher Simon Sykes' "David Hockney. The Biography, 1937-1975: A Rake's Progress" is the engaging if breezy first volume of a projected two-part book. Sykes, an Englishman, is an architecture writer and photographer who has produced about a dozen books on British country houses. His book on Hockney is a semi-authorized biography, with all that implies about a tone of blanketing admiration. It covers the first half of Hockney's life, and is largely the story of a precocious artist who became famous in the 1960s as an exponent of Britain's newly ascendant Pop Art movement.
Hockney is still inclined to appear in public in mismatched socks, bright red ties and stripes that go in every direction. Well-read, gregarious and intensely inquisitive, he has the sort of innate cheerfulness that is widely regarded as a professional liability.
His childhood, as portrayed by Sykes, was a spartan working-class affair overshadowed by war and shortages and his family's eccentric politics. Sykes opens his book in August 1940, when three-year-old David huddles with his parents beneath a staircase in their home as sirens blare and German bombs whistle through the night. The artist's father, a social activist and a pacifist, refused to join the fight against Hitler, and his status as a conscientious objector made him a pariah. He lost his job, and neighbors spat at him.
Unfortunately, the book fails to provide a full accounting of the larger artistic and political milieu in which Hockney flourished. And art is treated perfunctorily. Sykes has a grating habit of describing paintings as "iconic," offering them instant upgrades without explanation. In general, the book has the chatty tone of a magazine profile, perhaps because it is difficult to write honestly about an artist who is still alive and capable of responding to your arduous labors with either a dinner invitation or a death threat.
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