Word: hockney
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There are artists who remain boy wonders in the public eye until the gates of the geriatric home clang shut behind them. This threatens to be the fate of David Hockney. He was still a 25-year-old student at London's Royal College of Art when his work began to attract notice in 1962. In the decade since then he has remained one of the most conspicuous figures in the English art world. The Clairol-bleached thatch, the Yorkshire accent and the owl-like stare through horn-rims the size of old Bentley headlights have become almost...
Part of the attraction that Hockney's work exerts is its mixture of unusual guile and apparent naivete. He is a painter of frozen pleasures, held in ironic parentheses as though behind glass-the artificial but absorbingly hedonistic blue of Los Angeles swimming pools, the plastic palms, the flat glitter of light on a shower stall or a street facade. It is all painted deadpan, and Hockney's poker-faced style, coupled with his liking for artifacts as subjects, has given rise to the illusion that he is an English Pop artist. But unlike Pop, his work...
Humor. In Hockney's most recent painting, even the elaborate ambiguities have dropped away, leaving an exhibition of (almost) normal genre painting and landscape. Some of the humor remains. One painting looks like an orthodox New York abstraction, with a plane of blue punctuated by a red geometric circle; not until you consult the catalogue do you find that it is a view from above a swimming pool, with a rubber ring floating on the surface. But in general, Hockney's new scenes are as visually straightforward as anyone might wish. So where does their odd presence come...
...part, from their stillness, which is -if such a combination can be imagined-both bland and maniacal. Hockney's enormous Still Life (Glass Table), 1972, is played down almost to silence; none of the spidery, wandering and quirkish line of his graphic work survives in it. Object answers object, bowl to lamp shade to vase of tulips, across an expanse of plate glass that seems as large and expectant as a De Chirico piazza. Everything is given extreme distinctness but deprived of weight, and the effect is decidedly eerie...
...instant stardom before a Warhol camera. His role: smoking a cigar for an interminable hour and a half. "I have a certain unusual look," says Henry, and who would dispute him? Marisol carved his rumpled pants and big black shades (now replaced by granny glasses) in three dimensions. David Hockney portrayed him as a prim, vested, bearded presence on a purple sofa. George Segal cast him in the ghostly, ghastly plaster that is his specialty, a dilapidated figure who looks for all the world to be waiting for Godot...