Word: hockney
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...foreign painter alive today is more genuinely popular in America than Hockney. Certainly none has achieved such popularity with less compromise in the essential quality of his work. That work has its ups and downs, like any other oeuvre, but one would need a flint heart and a glass eye to resent Hockney's success. The bleached-blond thatch, the square face like that of a cubified owl, the schoolboy spectacles, the togs (blazers, cricket caps, candy-striped odd socks) that suggest the house captain of some imaginary...
...Hockney is that unusual combination, a consummate stylist who (almost) never allows his sense of style to stereotype feeling. His work has graces, but not airs. Landscapes, friends, erotic encounters, historical parody, memories of travel, all are distanced, rendered down into epitomes, laid before the eye with a sweetly honed line...
...feels that things are happening on the other side of the frame, which is a virtual proscenium. It is exactly this removal that equipped him so well, at the outset, as a stage designer. As Friedman argues at some length in his text (and as a group of Hockney's easel paintings, included in the show, makes clear), theater has never been far from the core of his art. His shallow space quotes the conventions of the stage: flats, curtains, wings. There is a taste for exotic figures (red Indians, ancient Egyptians) and stage figures (conjurer, hypnotist, hierophant). Well...
...first major production he designed was the 1975 Glyndebourne version of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, its libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Hockney, never embarrassed about paying homage to his aesthetic hearth gods, did the whole thing in the manner of Hogarth's engravings of that moral phantasmagoria set in 18th century England, stylizing the sets into crosshatched black-and-white etchings. Their graphic wit and punch reached a memorable climax in the final scene, where poor Tom Rakewell, insane at last, finds himself in Bedlam. The wall is covered with graffiti, each...
...since then, Hockney's main contribution to the stage has been as a colorist. Through the '60s and '70s, opera audiences got used to an intimidating degree of abstraction in sets and costumes-sweeping bare stages with a significant prop or two, or else labyrinths of neo-Bayreuth gloom where spotlights jabbed accusatory fingers through banks of theatrical fog. This design orthodoxy, based on texture, shadow, "sublime" cavelike space, was a necessary reaction against older conventions of the painted background: the unenchanted tempera forest with every stale leaf in place. But it left out color...