Hockney’s Cheeky Look at Today’s History

David Hockney bustled through galleries putting finishing touches on his retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An early visitor flapped a hand in greeting and the artist sauntered over.

“I’ve got it all up. Now I have to decide what to take down. Is it too much, do you think?”

The British artist has changed remarkably little since he materialized in Los Angeles back in the ‘60s. Same shock of blond hair, same owl-round glasses and ironically self-effacing manner supported by a jaw that somehow recalls a crab claw. At some level you don’t want to mess with this exceedingly nice man.

“I’m not hearing too well today. My little dog chewed up two of my hearing aids. Here look at this.” He pulls a lump of plastic from his pocket that looks like a small nut-meat or possibly a mouse’s brain. “Easy to mistake that for a chicken bone.”

He’s always been remarkably candid, modest and funny. A critic once praised a painting of his in a show of modern portraits in London. The artist squeezed his cheeks together in consternation.

“I saw that show. They hung me next to a Matisse. I said, ‘Good heavens. I can’t hang next to Maa-teese.’ ”

Funny, he pulled something out of his pocket that time too. He must like to show people things.

“I like to point things out to people and this makes a good pointer like a schoolmaster’s stick. Actually, it’s the aerial from a car. Telescopes right down and goes in your pocket.”

Usually his socks don’t match. A little eccentric and exceedingly quick.

Now Hockney is 50 and the subject of a full-dress retrospective accompanied by a fat catalogue notable for bright and readable essays and excellent and copious color reproductions. After the show closes here April 24, it will take the high road, appearing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Gallery, London. That’s pretty good for a kid from Bradford. It’s also rather grand for an artist who appeared initially as a minor satirist within the cheeky British Pop art movement making prints in variation of Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress.”

Hockney has evolved into an authentic celebrity, admired by kids who know no other artist’s name, courted by committees of society folk who want a poster for their benefit concert, memorialized in books and embalmed on film. His sets for operas--like the recent Music Center production of “Tristan und Isolde”--are as eagerly awaited and closely scrutinized as the singing. He has moved from portraits to theater design to photographic collages and prints made with a copying machine, not to mention reams of drawings and traditional graphics whose allusions loop through the history of art from ancient Egypt to Ingres, from Piero della Francesca to Picasso.

His sheer popularity and prolix production have caused observers to worry that he is somehow a lightweight dandy flitting over the surfaces of one enthusiasm after another, frittering away immense talent that rests lopsided on his head like a tipsy crown of golden laurel. He has seemed like some updated film biography of Franz Liszt surrounded by friends begging him to get down to serious composing while he gads about playing flashy concerts for the adoring masses.

Such impressions accumulate viewing an artist’s work in bits and pieces over time. Survey exhibitions are about putting it together and sorting it out. They are litmus tests where dense talent glows and tin gods tarnish.

Trooping the 150 or so Hockneys in LACMA’s Anderson Gallery is enough to make a believer out of the most fanatical hair-shirt art monk. (Everybody else is already convinced.) This is superb stuff. Yes, it is profoundly entertaining but so were Veronese and Tiepolo, Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. Yes, it has a light and digestible surface but looking at it is like listening to the Beatles or Randy Newman or Linda Ronstadt and realizing that the amusing surface floats in a concrete musical container the way Hockney’s funny water glimmers in Beverly Hills swimming pools.

If Hockney chooses to move from the extraordinary density and empathy of those double portraits beloved of traditional painting fans to the graphic panache of his opera sets, give him a break. Velasquez did not blink to turn from his spectral portraits to designing a festival for the king.

Hockney’s old friend, Henry Geldzahler, writing in the catalogue, confirms the hunch that there’s a big streak of teacher in Hockney. Like any serious pedant, he is also a student instructing himself in order to pass the learning on through his art. This show makes it clear that Hockney, for all his facets, has one consistent object of study--the history of art. No, take that back, it’s the history of vision . Virtually every object on view has a lesson to teach about art grammar. Early on, he was cheeky and sardonic in paintings like “Second Marriage” of 1965. It’s a Beatles-like social satire like “She’s Leaving Home” and it is based on a box-shaped canvas that is a metaphor of social convention and the conventions of Renaissance perspective.

Later, here in Los Angeles, the extraordinary atmosphere that makes everything so clear seems to have inspired Hockney to tap Piero and Vermeer for ways of representing things in light. It comes to pervade works like “Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures)” with its whiplash water reflections, solid standing figure and hilly landscape fading in the atmospheric distance. It all seems at once incredibly stylized and utterly true to life. Hockney searches to distill visual grammar to shorthand like his Pointillist lawn sprinklers and shaved-down interiors.

His renowned visual wit is nothing more than the shock of pleasure we always feel when something is described with curt accuracy. For all his panache, there is a streak of cautious traditionalism in Hockney, skepticism that mistrusts what cannot be verified. Clearly, Hockney verifies the world through observation. When he first began doing photo-collages, they seemed a tricky and pointless way of reinventing Cubism, acting out an idea that every visually literate photography student has and discards as irrelevant. For cautious Hockney, however, the exercise now looks like it was a way of teaching himself something--proving something--namely that Cubism was not a pure stylistic invention but something that could be proven through actual observation.

Eventually, he came up with collages like “The Desk,” which has the reality of a Chardin and the elegance of a Juan Gris. There is nothing of the autodidactic exercise in the tour de force, painting-size collage “Pearblossom Hwy,” with its hallucinatory desert, deep and barren, littered with man’s bright signs and empty beer cans.

Like a modest student, Hockney has always worshiped Picasso as an invisible mentor, emulating his mastery and tireless creative exploration. With the photo-collages he seems to have convinced himself that Picasso’s greatest stylistic invention is real and verifiable. He cracked the code of Picasso’s grammar, and the most recent work in the show is in Picasso’s sometimes-scorned late manner.

Impersonation then? Is Hockney an incredible mimic like the young Sammy Davis Jr. who could sing in any voice in the world? It’s more like absorption. Hockney learns at such a deep level he is able to paint original works by dead artists like a Beat poet writing convincing verses in the style of a 12th-Century Japanese woman. That’s more than a trick. Hockney’s image of an ‘80s boy in red tennies watching TV in late Picasso style is downright unnerving in the way it jerks time askew.

Fine. So Hockney is a protean stylist of penetrating intelligence. What has he invented? All this stuff about entertainment and education sounds a bit dull and suspect.

History only offers so many opportunities, and it just may be that Hockney’s only chance was as an absorber and re-creator of history up to his time. That was Raphael’s chance too and he did pretty well by it. But nobody now living can answer that one.

By temperament Hockney is an intimist like Bonnard. For all his stylistic sweep, he really only makes art about his life, portraits of friends like Nick Wilder, travels to Japan, tea at the British Embassy and the hill where he lives with Stanley, the devourer of hearing aids. He is a lyricist who is candid but not especially forthcoming emotionally. Or maybe he is subtle and somehow well balanced. There is a kind of Mozartian inner harmony about this refined, intimist-baroque Pop Classicist and he only has to blink to go from the poignant love in his portrait of his parents to the mordant affection in the image of Geldzahler enthroned like a tacky culture-sultan on an Art-Deco couch. It only takes one crushing wrench of circumstances to change his laconic images of gay lovers from icons of careless sensuality to memento moris of AIDS victims. There is always that sadness that laces comedies of manners.

What has he invented? A Hockney look that is unmistakable. He colonized the tulip and by extension invented Los Angeles.

No observer since Alexis de Tocqueville has so accurately observed a place that his vision of it seemed more real and truthful than the place itself. For all his love of Picasso, Hockney seems to have brought Matisse’s eye to this city. He captured the perfumed joie de vivre and sensual refinement of an Upper Bohemia for whom it is like Tangiers. And he’s added the cruel objectivity and comforting anonymity of Formica counters and midnight-blue street signs that somehow turn to poetry even when you are stuck in traffic in West Los Angeles.