Word: hockney
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Fischl country is a place of shag carpets lit by the desolate glare of TV sets, of king-size beds seen as altars of suburban promiscuity, and blue swimming pools that slyly parody David Hockney's less tainted vision of a Californian Eden. It smells of unwashed dog, Bar-B-Q lighter fluid and sperm. It is permeated with voyeurism and resentful, secretive tumescence -- a theater of adolescent tension and adult anonymity. Fischl paints this world of failed intimacies with conviction and narrative grip: at best, his drawing is beautifully concise (though marred, at present, by too many botched...
Elsewhere, Boyd chooses to speak in the flat tones of people who seem quite foreign to him: the California pieces feel as if they have been patched together from David Hockney prints, late-night movies and a dictionary of American slang. Their sudden, destructive conclusions ultimately seem less forceful than forced...
...this with a vengeance in 1978, with a production of Mozart's The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne. From the moment the curtain rose on Hockney's version of an early Italian Renaissance landscape, complete with a dragon quoted from Uccello, the audience was saturated in color: deep purples of the night sky, the green and pink of formal gardens in Sarastro's domain on the yellow Nilotic sands, blue cataracts and blazing gold art deco sunbursts...
...subsequent designs, Hockney used diverse sources, balancing eclecticism against hedonism: Tiepolo's punchinello figures and Picasso's own designs for Satie's Parade; the paintings of Dufy and Matisse for the imaginary seaside town of Zanzibar in Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias; Matisse again for the blazing and mysterious red-and-blue moonlit garden in Ravel's L 'Enfant et les Sortilèges; Chinese vase painting for Stravinsky's Le Rossignol...
Drawings for the theater are usually felt to be in a subclass of their own. They are incomplete notes. Who could deduce from Hockney's brisk studies for the mechanical bird in Le Rossignol, for instance, the surprise of its actual intrusion on the stage of the Met, a blazing vermilion-and-gilt apparition in that gauzy, lyric ambiance of K'ang-Hsi porcelain blue? The drawing just looks like a canary on a toy red cart. Yet ingenuity can bridge many gaps, and Hockney is nothing if not ingenious...