David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective Details
From Publishers Weekly British-born artist David Hockney has lived in L.A. since the 1970s. His luxuriant drawings of California, with their Mediterranean-like idyll of blue skies, palm trees and swimming pools, speak of alienation and spiritual emptiness. In this catalogue of a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hockney's diverse crayon, charcoal-and-ink drawings and watercolors include ruthlessly honest self-portraits, serene still lifes, nudes, street scenes, penetrating portraits and startlingly original vistas based on his travels in Egypt, Morocco, Paris and Hollywood. Also included are experimental works such as computer drawings, fax-machine images and Polaroid collages that combine photography with pencil sketches. In their accompanying essay to a rich, constantly new body of work, Luckhardt, a curator at the Hamburger Lunsthalle, and Melia, a British art historian, explore how drawing informs Hockney's approach to every medium, including painting and stage-set design. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Booklist No living artist is better known than David Hockney. His paintings of well-heeled people (his friends and collectors) in large, sparely furnished rooms filled with pastel light and of swimming pools outside those rooms are icons of Southern California that have influenced everything from display advertising to MTV. He is the best stage designer for opera in ages, and his male nudes are admired by more than just his fellow gay men. This survey's 165 drawings, dating from Hockney's British art school days to 1994, collectively show one reason for his long-lived success: he samples from throughout the history of art, stylistically (recently, from synthetic cubism) and technically (e.g., using van Gogh's tool, the reed pen, to draw as he did); this borrowing makes Hockney's work rich in cultural suggestion yet never overpowers his own artistic personality. The essays by Luckhardt and Melia help with appreciating Hockney's uses of older art but don't bog down in technical talk. A most rewarding art book, though some early colorplates are inexplicably out of numerical order. Ray Olson Read more
Reviews
Hockney is a master draftsman, as his work here proves: his drawings using colored pencil are particularly impressive. Reproductions are good (notice the yellow under-drawing on the cover) and the retrospective covers his work from 1954 (when he was 17) up until around 1994.Anyone involved in the practice of drawing will be inspired by both his prodigious output and his skill. On opening this book, his originality and humor become apparent. There is a more provocative range of subject matter contained here than I would have expected, but nothing outside the normal range of human behavior.I only wish I could have attended this exhibition and seen these works in person.