What was top Hockney? I’d say the energetically rough early work of sexual self-discovery, the Californian pools and landscapes, and the large double portraits. Here’s one of those last, bringing together the painterly control, art historical insight, visual invention, intellectual enquiry and psychological insight that were his primary qualities.
‘My Parents’ can be taken as an account of what made Hockney. First, obviously, Kenneth (1904–1978) and Laura (1900–1999) Hockney, who lived in Bradford where David, the fourth of five children, was born in 1937. Both had strong views: he was an accountant who had been a conscientious objector in the Second World War, she was a devout Methodist and strict vegetarian. They appear disconnected: he is intently engaged in his reading, she stares out at her son. Perhaps the children were what held the marriage together.
Kenneth is reading not the newspaper one might expect, but the 1968 Penguin edition of Aaron Scharf’s ‘Art and Photography’. That explores the historical relationship between painting and the invention of photography, an ever-present interaction in Hockney’s art and something he opined on provocatively with his account of the use of the camera obscura by great painters of the past. Two other books are identifiable: a six volume set of the English translation of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’, indicative of Hockney’s literary interests and perhaps, to the contrast between Proust’s closeted and his own joyfully open homosexuality. And there’s a monograph on Chardin, one of three painters acknowledged as key influences as art pulled Hockney away from his parents’ provincial world.
The second painter is Piero della Francesca, the first to write a treatise on perspective: a reproduction of the National Gallery’s ‘The Baptism of Christ’, c. 1437–1445, is reflected in the mirror. The third, less directly, is Fra Angelico. Hockney sneaks his own work in via a reflection of his Invented Man Revealing Still Life, 1975. That combines the photographic with the abstracted and includes a table in subtly reversed perspective. The invented man has just pulled back a curtain as if to uncover the tricks involved in visual depictions – and that curtain is based on that in Fra Angelico’s ‘The Dream of Deacon Justinian’. The curtain gets a colour refresh, one of several greens masterfully deployed to give the painting its unusual overall hue. Hockney’s own subsidiary still life – of his beloved tulips – is suitably close.
What’s the other book, no details of which are visible? I like to think it’s ‘David Hockney by David Hockney’, published the year before the painting was made, the cover’s portrait image turned down. So, while ‘My Parents’ may not include Hockney’s own image – as an earlier abandoned version did, via a reflection – it does act as a meticulously planned account of what made him who he, as of last week, was.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD. A collection of previous gallery columns, ‘Paul’s Galleries To Go’, is available from FAD Bazaar.
