Hockney
Sarah Kent
David Hockney has a new toy, an app designed specially for him that allows him to work on an iPad with fine brushes. He spent the first five months of lockdown In Normandy making daily records of the coming of spring; the results are displayed in a large show at the Royal Academy (★★). Seamless animation turns his still images into a continuum. As you watch the gradual transition from bare branches to full flowering, it’s as if you were looking over the artist’s shoulder while he works, which is fascinating.Then come the inkjet prints of the iPad pictures; they have the uncanny luminosity of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Every now and then a book comes out that can change lives. If a survey like this had appeared when I was a student at the Slade, the struggle to make headway as a female artist would have seemed less daunting. We’d have had role models and names with which to counter the assertion that there had never been any significant women artists. And the recent explosion of female talent celebrated in this book might have happened a generation earlier.Phaidon’s latest offering is a revelation. The title is a response to the essay “Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?” written in 1971 by American Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world. It was around the time of his fortieth birthday when the wrecking balls drew near and, Bentley-owning but broke and generally neglected by the art world, his work began to develop into what is now known as late Freud. In relative obscurity eking out extravagance from precarity and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Sometimes you come across an artwork that changes the way you see the world. Tacita Dean’s film portrait of the American choreographer Merce Cunningham (main picture) is one such encounter. Occupying a whole room at the National Portrait Gallery, the installation consists of six screens each showing Cunningham sitting in his dance studio, listening. In some shots he is alone, in others Trevor Carlson, the executive director of his company, stands holding a stopwatch and counting down the final seconds of each session to signal that Cunningham can relax and shift his position. What is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions. But these documentaries, several supported or commissioned by the Arts Council, concentrate on the visual arts.The longest, Every Picture Tells a Story, is a 1983 biopic based on the early life of his northern Irish father, William Scott (1913-1989) who moved from Scotland to Enniskillen as a teenager, studied art in Belfast, then went on to London and a vastly successful career. The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dream or nightmare? Bay of Pigs, assassinations, Vietnam, space race, Cold War, civil rights, AIDS, legalised abortions, same-sex marriage, ups, downs and inside outs. From JFK to The Donald in just under 60 years, as seen in 200 prints in all kinds of techniques and sizes by several score American artists (although, shush, a handful are – shock, horror – immigrants).In The American Dream: Pop to the Present we are rushed through the isms from pop to agitprop, Conceptualism and Minimalism to figurative Expressionism and photorealism with a bow to geometric abstraction along the way Read more ...
Alison Cole
As the UK prepares for a particularly severe cold snap, the opening of David Hockney’s major retrospective at Tate Britain brings a welcome burst of Los Angeles light and colour and Yorkshire wit and warmth. The exhibition, which opens in the lead-up to Hockney’s 80th birthday, will be deservedly popular – for many people, Hockney’s work is simply bright and beautiful. But the show also seeks to reveal the serious and consistent nature of Hockney’s interrogation of the meaning of picture-making, and his preoccupation with the joyous and rather subversive business of “looking”.The curators Read more ...
Alison Cole
The opening image of this new David Hockney exhibition – a sketchily painted portrait of a seated man, slumping heavily forward, his head buried in his hands – could be a portrait of Brexit despair. In fact it is Hockney’s portrait of his close friend and studio manager J-P Gonçalves de Lima – painted at a time when Hockney was himself at a particularly low ebb, depleted by illness, the tragic death of a young studio assistant, and the gargantuan effort that had gone into making his 2012 Yorkshire landscape exhibition at the Royal Academy such a blockbuster success.In this sense, this opening Read more ...
fisun.guner
Since David Hockney entered his eighth decade (he is now 77), we seem to have witnessed an accelerated output of major exhibitions, biographies and documentaries. The public appetite has never tired of this most tireless of artists, but it’s an interest that’s been given fresh impetus by the exuberance and vivacity of his epic series of paintings of the Yorkshire Wolds. Bruno Wollheim’s TV documentary, Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2009), was a look at this recent period of renewed vigour and creativity, while Randall Wright’s cinema-released second film of the artist – the first, David Hockney Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital technology. Randall Wright's narration is set out in a series of short chapters in a montage-cum-collage of photographs, earlier films both amateur and professional, home video and recent interviews with the inhabitants of Hockney’s world today and in the past. We see a lot of septuagenarians and octogenarians, as well as film clips and photographs Read more ...
fisun.guner
David Hockney has been a printmaker for almost as long as he’s been a painter. From one of his earliest ventures into print, a self-portrait colour lithograph aged 16 while at Bradford College of Art (the black pudding-bowl hair emulates early hero Stanley Spencer, before Hockney went for the striking platinum-blond look), the two activities have been given equal weight throughout his career, though this, as it turns out, was mainly by accident. Being a penurious student at the Royal College of Art in 1959, and finding that he had to pay for his own painting materials, Hockney was drawn Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to imagine a bad documentary on David Hockney. Hockney always gives good Hockney: the quotable sentences come thick and fast; his enthusiasm for his craft is never less than exhilarating, and like that other great British artist of his generation – Francis Bacon – he’s always been better at getting to the crux of why and how he makes pictures than any of his commentators have. And yet… But we’ll get to the “and yet” in a moment.In last night’s Culture Show Special, the amicable Yorkshireman was gently quizzed by his friend, the journalist and broadcaster Andrew Marr. But what added Read more ...