Hockney’s people

DAVID HOCKNEY still recalls vividly the day, in his teens, when he first painted a portrait of his father. The older Hockney bought him the canvas, then set up a mirror to watch his son work. Although his father complained that “the colors were a bit dark,” Hockney says, “that was the first painting I ever sold.”

Hockney, now 68, captured his father many times over the years in sketchbooks, oil and in a monumental double portrait with the artist’s mother. On Feb. 19, 1978, the day of his father’s funeral, he drew his mother, her coat buckled up, eyes cast downward. “It was my way of sitting with her,” he has said.

The British artist, who has made his home in Los Angeles for much of the last 40 years, may be best known for his colorful landscapes and sun-drenched swimming pools, but portraits weave through his 50 years of art-making. Returning again and again to family and friends in paintings, photo-collages, drawings, watercolors and prints, Hockney examines and reexamines the face, the body and relationships.

More than 160 of those works, including his 1955 “Portrait of My Father,” will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in “David Hockney Portraits,” the first exhibition devoted exclusively to the artist’s portraiture. Included will be early photo albums and dozens of sketchbooks on view publicly for the first time.

“Every three or four years, I go back to portraits,” Hockney said Friday, dapper in a gray suit and white beret as he walked through the exhibition as it was being installed. “It’s a habit, I suppose.”

LACMA Senior Curator Stephanie Barron prefers to think of it as Hockney’s “ongoing concern.”

“Looking at the portraits over a span of years provides a window into the nature of the relationship between the artist and sitter,” Barron says. “The portraits also reflect the style and medium that Hockney is working in at that particular moment.”

In addition to Hockney’s late parents, there are self-portraits, portraits of his sister Margaret, brother Paul, lovers and friends. He may have drawn, painted or photographed a few literary and art world luminaries he didn’t know well, but the bulk of his portraiture, and the exhibition, highlights such Hockney regulars as British textile designer Celia Birtwell, the late museum curator Henry Geldzahler, friends and lovers Peter Schlesinger and Gregory Evans.

“It’s a visual diary of his life and his loves,” observes Sarah Howgate, contemporary curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery, which organized the exhibition with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with LACMA. “I find the exhibition incredibly moving.”

Hockney’s 2005 painting of Evans, for instance, was painted while Evans was waiting for the phone call that his seriously ill mother had died. Evans leans against a wall, eyes down and hands clasped in front of him.

“I was willing to pose because I trusted him,” he says. “It was a very intimate thing too, because it was a way of David being able to acknowledge my sadness.”

Art collector Leon Banks, a retired L.A. pediatrician who has known Hockney since the ‘60s, says they have often spoken about why Hockney doesn’t bring in professional models.

“He says he needs the interaction with the sitter,” says Banks, who has sat for Hockney many times over the years. “He likes to wait until he knows people.”

Banks is one of several friends Hockney painted in his Hollywood Hills studio last year. Some, like Evans and Banks, were painted alone, but the artist also used the canvas to explore relationships in works similar to the double portraits he did most famously in the 1960s and ‘70s. Large canvases included in the exhibition feature such familiar Hockney sitters as Gemini GEL’s Sidney B. Felsen with his wife, Joni Weyl, and photographer Jim McHugh and his daughter Chloe.

“The Photographer and his Daughter,” one of the 2005 paintings in the show, places McHugh in a chair looking at the teenage Chloe, who stands a few feet away.

“I’ve known Chloe all her life,” says Hockney, “and I’ve done quite a few drawings of her. She is just about to become a woman, and the way she posed is fascinating.”

That pose, with her hand on her hip, came in part from exasperation, confides Chloe, now 16. Never mind that the McHughs were at the studio for four days, six hours a day. That was only after Hockney had started painting.

“At the very beginning, we didn’t know if I’d sit or stand, and we tried a bunch of different poses,” Chloe says. “We put in different tables and chairs, and it took us two hours just to figure out how we were going to stand or sit.”

The LACMA show includes a number of photograph albums from the ‘60s used as memory devices in creating such iconic paintings as “Beverly Hills Housewife,” a 1966 portrait of Betty Freeman, a Los Angeles photographer and arts patron, and “American Collectors,” a portrait of Marcia and Fred Weisman. The photo studies, mostly Polaroids, are in albums in specially designed cases and open to pages that refer to adjacent paintings. Photographs of the Weismans, for instance, illustrate rejected poses as well as details from the pose Hockney chose.

About 40 sketchbooks from the last four decades are displayed in two contiguous galleries. “Every suit I have made, I have big pockets for the sketchbooks,” Hockney says, opening wide his gray jacket to reveal an enormous inside pocket. “If you carry sketchbooks, you start drawing things you’d never otherwise draw. You’ve got the equipment.” Fifteen of these sketchbooks, covering 18 months in 2002-03, are accessible via a touch-screen monitor installed in the galleries. Although the actual sketchbooks are open to just one page, viewers may leaf through the entire book on-screen. (In addition to the usual exhibition catalog, the LACMA bookstore will sell copies of the sketchbook DVD for $34.95.)

The sketchbooks and even the wall signs, which re-create Hockney’s distinctive script, were ways of personalizing the show, Barron says.

She also has placed throughout the show chairs and loveseats similar to those in Hockney’s 2005 paintings, and attempts to visually link newer and older works. Large openings from one gallery to the next permit viewers to look back and ahead. This is particularly noticeable in the last gallery, where, while standing amid the large-scale double portraits of his ’05 canvases, the viewer may look off to the right and see the ‘60s paintings. On the exit wall, in a sort of reprise, are photographs of about 60 images from the show.

As Barron took Hockney through the exhibition, where some works were still being hung, he spun about, looking behind him at his past, surrounded by his recent work.

There was no visible trace of jet lag, despite his having arrived in Los Angeles just the evening before. His arrival here had been postponed several times because of his continued work on landscapes near Bridlington, the Yorkshire seaside resort town not far from where he worked in the fields as a boy.

Back and forth he goes, between Los Angeles and Bridlington, portraits and landscapes. He is chronicling the hills, trees and sky of Yorkshire in every season, a project he thinks will take many more months.

Although he is clearly eager to get back to Britain, Hockney’s affection for L.A. is apparent: “I’ve been away from Los Angeles for nearly a year, and you realize why you’re here -- the marvelous light. You can get some lovely sunny mornings in Yorkshire, but they’re quite rare.”

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‘David Hockney Portraits’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; noon to 9 p.m. Friday; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; closed Wednesday

Dates: June 11 through Sept. 4

Price: $12 to $15; free for children younger than 17

Contact: (323) 857-6000; www.lacma.org