Marlene Dumas, in the caption to one of her own works, simply described Hockney as ‘one of the great painters of the 20th century’. His reach and impact, too, have been international.
Hockney photo montage movie#
In conversation, within a few minutes he may move from how a Hollywood movie was lit to, say, the cubism of Juan Gris, or Egyptian tomb painting. His inner reference bank – the images of remembered pictures he draws upon – is correspondingly wide. That is, the entire repertoire of ways in which human beings have tried to depict the world around them from the time of the cave artists 30,000 years ago to digital drawing techniques of the 21st century.
More deeply, Hockney’s tradition – the line he springs from – is nothing less than what he likes to call ‘the history of pictures’. He has been an artist-traveller in the manner of Turner, with his range extended by the use of jet aircraft, rather than stagecoaches and sailing boats. A selection of titles, chosen almost at random from the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain makes the point: The Great Pyramid with Palm Tree and Car 1963, Place des Canons, Beirut 1966, Kasmin in his Bed in his Chateau Carennac 1967, Study of Water, Phoenix Arizona 1976, Mountains and Trees Kweilin from China Trip 1981. He has wandered over the globe, visiting and working in an astonishing number of different places: Iowa, Lucca, Colorado, the Arctic north of Norway, rural France, New York and Kyoto, for example, as well as Paris, London, Bridlington and Los Angeles. It is hard to think of a comparable figure who has ranged so far in space – and time. But the remark also applies to Hockney himself. There are no frontiers, just art.’ We were talking about links between East and West – the links, for example, between the woodblock prints of Japan and the paintings of van Gogh or the films of Walt Disney. ‘I don’t think there are any borders when it comes to painting,’ David Hockney said recently, ‘I’ve always thought that. Central to this approach has been the artist’s fascination for people and places as well as his ongoing enchantment with the art of the past. For more than 60 years he has been breaking boundaries in the media he has used, including painting, drawing, print, photography and video. David Hockney (b.1937) remains one of the most celebrated and popular British artists of the 20th century.
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