People, Places, Things (David Hockney at WAC)

 The Walker Art Center has dusted-off a number of works in its permanent collection made by the painter David Hockney and put them on display in a pleasant exhibition now showing (February 2022).  The show is called "People, Places, Things" and represents a small retrospective of Hockney's work  from the early sixties to the present.  It's a relatively modest undertaking, but certainly worth seeing if you are in the area and willing to inspect objets d'art through fogged glasses whilst wearing a surgical mask.  

I have a great affection for Hockney that arises from the fact that I happened to be in Los Angeles (my first time in California) at the time of one of the artist's first great retrospectives, a huge show at LACMA, probably around 1986.  Of course, I was smitten with southern California, having flown there from wintry Minnesota, and the palm trees, the mountains marinating in the mauve smog, and the smell of eucalyptus was bewitching to me.  I had traveled Mulholland Drive from Sunset Blvd to the place where the road ends as a pot-holed track in the mountains, a steep downward dive from the peaks to a zone of abandoned burnt-out cars and ruins (the sort of place where mobsters deposit bodies) and seen the mountains and the glorious views of the valleys  from the road and so Hockney's huge mural showing the course of Mulholland had a visceral impact on me.  The artist's images of aquamarine and turquois swimming pools and portraits of tanned art collectors on green manicured lawns,, handsome people luxuriating in Billy Wilder's pool, seemed to me to embody the very essence of Southern California.  And the current show at the Walker has a sunny radiance that commends it to people struggling through our cold, icy, and dark Minnesota winter.

The show is relatively small, just four galleries comprising about 40 objects.  There are a number of portraits in the first gallery, the so-called "people" part of the show.  These images show Hockney's ingenuity and versatility -- there are delicately limned pencil and ink pictures that showcase the artist's old master draftsmanship as well as cartoonish garish caricatures and exuberant cubist-style portraits.  One wall of pictures showing Hockney's muse, the beautiful willowy blonde Celia Birtwhistle, demonstrates the different modes in which the artist can work successfully -- the portraits range from Duerer-like delicacy and naturalism to raw images that remind me of Red Grooms or Robert Crump.  "Things" is a collection of pictures, several of them studies of swimming pools, sketches of interior decoration, pillows and couches, and a tour-de-force painting of one of Hockney's houses, a mural that stretches from a patio outdoors slashed with forceful parallel lines of orange, yellow, and honey-colored sunlight, then, inward to a room decorated with paintings (including an image Laurel and Hardy) where a bright cheery orange fire is burning in the hearth, this room also opening out into a scented paradisal garden.  The picture, "Hollywood Hills House" (1982 - 1983) reminds me of Matisse, but articulated through the lens of Los Angeles.  There's a gallery containing Hockney's early (1961) prints of "A Rake's Progress" in which the artist, visualized as an armless torso with a bad hair-cut and horn-rimmed glasses, encounters various temptations, all of this realized in witty schematically etched scenes -- of course, the poor Rake ends in Bedlam, portrayed as a row of speed-walkers seen from behind all identically drawn and wearing identical head-phones plugged into their right ears.  This room also contains some models of Hockney's sets designed for opera, including a Matisse-inflected but cartoonish Riviera landscape with blocky little personages like stelae crowding the proscenium -- this is Hockney's set for Poulenc's gender-bending opera, Le Mammelle di Tiresias.  The last gallery contains the most beautiful images in the show, a sequence of four conventionally drawn but radiant landscapes showing the four seasons in Yorkshire -- these pictures were made on an IPAD and, then, printed in 2011.  (Another of Hockney's works involves faxes taped together -- the artist is a technical innovator; I was disappointed that the show doesn't contain any of his Land Camera polaroid collages, marvelous cubist images made from assembled polaroids.)  The highlight of the show for me was a set of stunning engravings, "the Weather Series" made in 1972 after the example of Hokusai, showing "Wind", "Mist," "Lightning", "Rain" and the like.  These are large format engravings with tremendous presence.  "Mist" shows palm trees englobed in purplish smoggy haze -- an image very redolent of LA.  The last engraving shows fragments of the previous serious as wind-blown scraps on Melrose Avenue, also a wonderful picture.