HOCKNEY SHOWS A NEW PERSPECTIVE

There are certain advantages to living at the end of the line. In the case of “Hockney Paints the Stage,” one of them is having the benefit of the artist’s hindsight.

The exhibition of seven theatrical environments and more than 200 related paintings, drawings, prints and models by British painter David Hockney recently checked into the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art--after sojourns in Minneapolis, Mexico City, Toronto, Chicago and Fort Worth. The presentation (through May 26) gives Californians a belated opportunity to catch up with the theatrical phase of Hockney’s career--and an up-to-date consideration of how this work has directed his subsequent art.

The news isn’t all startlingly fresh because Hockney--an immensely popular artist who has become one of Los Angeles’ favorite adopted sons--is very closely watched. But this lively exhibition provides a perfect stage for hearing about his latest thoughts on the theater and its impact on his work.

The exhibition catalogue and the show itself make much of connections between Hockney’s early painting and his recent designs for the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, near London, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Without denying these, Hockney says that now he has moved into a different sphere and that it’s the theater that propelled him there.

What began quite innocently as a visual extension of his lifelong love of music sent him on an odyssey into pictorial space. Through the gentle means of photography and painting, he has now launched an all-out attack on scientific perspective--a way of seeing that has dominated Western art since the Renaissance. This infinitely approachable artist, who is probably as well known for his bleached blond hair, mismatched socks and Bradford accent as for his gracefully amiable art, says he is “gripped” by the possibility of turning perspective inside out.

“I think (my experience with) the theater did a lot that I didn’t at first realize. I’ve looked back at a lot of things and realized where it’s taken me. It’s very strange,” Hockney said in a interview at his studio high in the Hollywood Hills, where the exhibition versions of the stage sets were made.

“My paintings done just before my theater work were about perspective. The first thing I did when I finished ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (a 1975 production at Glyndebourne, which is particularly well represented in the show) was to make a painting with reverse perspective called ‘Kerby.’ It’s done from a Hogarth engraving that amused me because all the perspective is reversed. Hogarth is telling you it’s wrong, but I knew it worked pictorially.

“I painted the picture and then didn’t follow it up. Then I went back (to Glyndebourne) and did ‘The Magic Flute,’ which is deeply about all kinds of perspective chopping up the space. Perspective is always the subject in the theater. The Italian theater is deeply about perspective--the proscenium--the Shakespearean theater is the reverse. The stage comes out at you.

“I’d always thought there was something wrong with perspective, but it’s built into the photograph,” he said. What’s wrong with that pervasive way of seeing, according to Hockney, is that it keeps the viewer at bay. He’s for a more “intimate,” less static kind of art that allows the audience to participate in constructing an image from multiple parts. He believes this approach is more compatible with our experience of the world than are images that present a set point of view and keep us “stood outside.”

Hockney has already tackled his self-prescribed task in widely exhibited photographic collages that present multiple views of the same subject simultaneously. In newer paintings, he takes his audience on a tour of friends’ houses, leading them through rooms and letting them look out windows to absorb the entire feel of a place.

Leaning close and lowering his voice as if to divulge a secret, he suddenly said: “I devised a very strange theory, actually. See if you can follow this. It’s a weird idea, but it’s about why one-point perspective occurred. It’s triumphed now, hasn’t it? The photograph, the television picture, the movie are deeply perspective pictures. And those are not neutral images. There’s a history to why the world is seen that way.

“In ‘Art and Illusion,’ Gombrich asked why it took until 15th-Century Italy for perspective to be discovered since it is such a natural way of seeing, but it isn’t natural. It’s an abstraction--putting space onto a flat surface.”

Hockney has deduced that this unnatural way of seeing developed through artists who painted the Crucifixion in one-point perspective to instill a static image with weight and volume, thus intensifying the feeling of suffering they wanted to convey. “Once you’ve got one vanishing point, you have one moment in time. Time is fixed, and space is solid. That would be an expressive gain for artists, but the moment they would discover that, they would start looking at the world through a hole.

“That would lead to the camera obscura, and that is (essentially) the camera that we see now. That way of seeing, devised in the Renaissance, makes us nothing. It is connected with the old scientific way of saying, ‘The world is out there, and it goes on without you.’ Now science does not say that because scientists have found difficulties in measuring things without accounting for us.

“The (standard) photograph is that old way of seeing. How do you change it? I tried and found a more intimate view of the world because it’s about one person looking. In that desk,” he said, pointing to a large photo collage of a wooden desk that reveals its top and three sides, “I finally got reverse perspective, and that’s about movement, your movement, the viewer’s movement.”

Hockney’s attack on the conventional way of seeing is the most striking development of his move to the stage, but it’s not the only one. He says that he had to be talked into doing theater designs, just as he had to be urged (by Martin Friedman, director of the Walker Art Center) to assemble a survey of it for “Hockney Paints the Stage,” but both efforts were gratifying. He liked the challenges of compromise necessitated by musical productions and the “fun” of creating visual equivalents of music he admires. Stravinsky’s score for “The Rake’s Progress,” for example, is “linear and spikey,” a feeling echoed in the cross-hatched sets inspired by Hogarth’s engraved illustrations of the story.

He tossed out an idea of borrowing sets actually used on stage for the museum show because the scale would be wrong and the painting too “crude.” Instead--in six months flat, working right up to opening day--he created seven new sets, condensing ideas and creatively editing to present representative environments.

“The main problem was to make the exhibition interesting,” he said. “I realized that in a museum, you’re going to be close and so you’ve got to find a scale that’s right. The scale I chose is actually just under human size. You’re a bit away, yet you’re close to it. Originally, there were just going to be stuffed animals and replicas of the figures in costume. Then I realized that would be very dull. I had to animate them in some way.”

He accomplished that feat rather playfully by constructing cutout figures and animals of painted foamboard or simply depicting characters on small canvases. Two sets for “The Rake’s Progress” are alive with heads popping out of cubicles and curiosities (stuffed alligators and mummies) hanging from the ceiling.

Each set is individual in color, form and mood. Visitors provide their own movement as they walk under a vast spreading tree in a set for “L’Enfant et les Sortileges” and imagine themselves as the child in Colette’s fable about growing up. The whole story of “Le Rossignol,” a Hans Christian Andersen tale, is told in panels against a backdrop in an all-blue set. Music for all the productions cycles throughout the show so that at any one time, a single set is accompanied by an appropriate recording.

With the exhibition installed in its next-to-the-last museum (a July 31-to-Sept. 29 appearance at the Hayward Gallery in London will be the last), Hockney is determined to stay in Los Angeles and paint. He wants to get on with the job of giving “a human being’s account of seeing,” something he considers an “important job.”

If he appears to be alone in his quest, he doesn’t let on. He says he draws sustenance from such people as Picasso, who “took us in closer” to experience; from Fellini, whose film “And the Ship Sails On” deals with “the difficulty of depiction,” and even from early Disney animators who “really knew how to draw.”

“I think that the journey from Cubism to abstraction is the easiest journey yet. We’ve now to make a harder one,” he said. “The idea that we’ve reached the ultimate view of reality is very naive of us, actually. For one thing, perspective in painting made narrative absurd because everything is fixed at the same time. Cubism can reintroduce incredible narrative. I think it will happen. In that sense, I’m an incredible optimist.

“There’s a current idea that says art can’t make a difference. I totally disagree. Art makes the world of difference. It’s art that makes us see things. If we forget that we are misunderstanding its power.”