Word: hockney
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Geffen, whose romantic partners have included Marlo Thomas and Cher, now leads a privileged single life. (His estimated net worth, according to Forbes magazine: $240 million.) In his gallery-like apartment on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, the walls are covered with the works of David Hockney, Jasper Johns and other modern masters. From his Malibu beach house, he skims the Pacific in a 20-ft. speedboat. Like most self-made men, however, Geffen is consumed by his work. "My greatest fear is getting bored," he explains. "I'm always taking notes on the imaginary yellow scratch pad in my mind...
...ever begrudged the artist his success. Hockney is that rarity, a painter of strong talent and indefatigable industry who has never struck the wearisome pose of il maestro and has been grounded, throughout his career, in the bedrock of Yorkshire common sense. Self-mockery may not be his long suit, but Hockney is the least arrogant of men, and his achievement, uneven though it looks, is a distinguished one. It can be assayed in the retrospective of some 200 works -- paintings, prints, drawings, photocollages, stage designs -- that, having originally been put together by the Los Angeles County Museum...
...think of Hockney is to think of pictorial skill and a total indifference (in the work, at least) to the dark side of human experience. Does the latter make him a less serious painter? Of course not, any more than it trivialized the work of that still underrated artist Raoul Dufy. At root, Hockney is popular because his work offers a window through which one's eye moves without strain or fuss into a wholly consistent world. That world has its cast of recurrent characters -- friends, lovers and family. Hockney's portraits of his parents, in particular, are full...
...Hockney was by no means the first English artist to make his homosexuality a theme of his art, but he was the first to do it in a garrulous, social way, treating his appetites as the most natural thing in the world and not, like Francis Bacon, as a pretext for reflection on Eros' power to maim and dominate. His code for the subject in the early '60s was graffiti. Flattened scrawly figures with sticks for limbs and blobs for heads, much influenced by Jean Dubuffet, populate a whole set of images from 1960 to 1963 -- Doll Boy, The Fourth...
...could begrudge David Hockney his success when, as his retrospective shows, he creates a consistent world with such skill...