Hockney Makes an Inroad With ‘Pearblossom Hwy.’

In a surprising move for an institution known for lavishing its fortune on Greek and Roman antiquities and European masterworks from bygone eras, the J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired a monumental work of contemporary art by an internationally renowned British expatriate who lives in Los Angeles. The latest addition to the Getty’s collection is David Hockney’s “Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, #2,” a mosaic of 750 color photographs depicting a Southern California desert road in the Antelope Valley, complete with litter.

The museum purchased the unconventional landscape at an undisclosed price from the artist’s personal collection, through Los Angeles dealer Peter Goulds. Measuring about 6 1/2 feet by 9 feet and combining elements of Cubist space with a Pop attitude, “Pearblossom Hwy.” is a seminal work, representing the culmination of Hockney’s four-year exploration of illusionistic space in large photocollages. It will go on view Dec. 16, in the opening exhibition of the Getty’s new museum in Brentwood.

Although the acquisition is an abrupt departure from the museum’s pre-20th century holdings of paintings, sculpture and decorative arts, the Hockney fits perfectly into the photography collection, Weston Naef, the Getty’s curator of photographs, said. Among its 65,000 photographs, the museum owns works by living artists including Duane Michals and Jo Ann Callis. The Getty also has purchased photographic works by Sigmar Polke, Andy Warhol and other artists who, like Hockney, are better known as painters. Works by additional contemporary photographers have been featured in Getty exhibitions.

“Our photography collection is our window into the 20th century and the 21st century,” museum director John Walsh said. “What’s astonishing about the Hockney is how big and how compelling the picture is. It’s one of the great landscapes.” Continuing earlier painters’ exploration of the genre, Hockney has manipulated scale “to make the picture work better, to make it more real,” Walsh said. “It’s more real than any view you can have standing there in the desert. That’s what hits you in the stomach.”

Depicting the Pearblossom Highway (Route 138) disappearing into snowcapped mountains, the colorful photocollage contains images of a stop sign, a crushed beer can, a Bud Lite box, Joshua trees and other desert plants. The sparkling blue sky and vast space appear fractured because Hockney has pieced the picture together to accentuate the disconnected, fleeting nature of vision.

The artwork is ideal for the museum, Walsh said, because it is both “very sophisticated and it will probably be very popular.”

Hockney was traveling and could not be reached for comment, but a museum press release quotes him as saying the picture is “far and away the most complex and most successful of the photocollages I have done, and I do not expect to make more in the future.”

Naef said he had tried to purchase “Pearblossom Hwy.” since the moment he first saw it, in 1988 in Hockney’s retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The ambitious work was a must for the Getty because it relates to other photographers’ interpretations of Southern California’s landscape, it incorporates trademark elements of Pop art, and it merges Cubist notions of space with realism, the curator said.

Hockney didn’t want to sell the photocollage, Naef said. But he eventually changed his mind when Naef showed him the new museum and its conservation facilities, which will enable the Getty to care for the picture and keep it in cold storage to preserve its color when it is not on display.

Declining to state the price, Naef said the work cost “less than a Hockney painting of comparable size, but we didn’t buy it with petty cash.” One of Hockney’s large paintings, “A Grand Procession of Dignitaries,” was sold for $2.2 million at auction in 1989, at the peak of the art market; however, a major Hockney photocollage sold for $17,250 at Christie’s in New York in 1996.

The artist began to experiment with photocollage in 1982. He created “Pearblossom Hwy.” over a nine-day period, in which he took hundreds of photographs in the desert and had them developed at an ordinary processing facility in nearby Palmdale. In preparation for the large piece, he made a quarter-scale maquette, “Pearblossom Hwy., #1.” Hockney has donated the smaller version and his negatives to the museum.