"I had always felt the one thing a photograph could not do was give you a feeling of space, but the moment I began to realize you could alter perspective in photography…the first thing I did was photograph the unphotographable thing: the Grand Canyon."
A striking panorama and iconic example of David Hockney’s mastery of the American landscape, Grand Canyon II is an all-encompassing example of the artist’s career-long experimentation with perspective. Hockney’s landscapes are one of his most celebrated works and many of his best-known derive from his adoration of the American west as an émigré. From his concentration on photo-collaged compositions as of 1982 to his vibrant interpretations of Hollywood Hills, Hockney has continuously pushed the limitations of artistic perspective through landscape painting throughout the evolution of his many series—the artist’s shaped canvas series represents an artistic breakthrough in this evolution. Through the inspiration of the canon of American landscape painters, particularly Thomas Moran, Hockney’s determination to harness the transcendent experience of the Grand Canyon has installed his Grand Canyon works firmly within that same canon of the greatest depictions of the American landscape from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Grand Canyon II is a career-defining culmination of advances in perspective that David Hockney has challenged throughout the span of his artistic output. Executed in 2017-2018 as the artist’s blockbuster traveling retrospective opened at Centre Pompidou, Paris, the shaped canvas series revisited some of the artist’s most notable subjects including Nichols Canyon, East Yorkshire, and of course—the Grand Canyon. Hockney’s iconic Hollywood Hills landscapes—beginning with Canyon Painting in 1978, when the artist was first settled in his L.A. studio, and followed by Nichols Canyon and Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio in 1980—are emblematic of the artist’s rejection of single-point perspective in pursuit of the illusionistic, even dreamlike, depiction of his newly adopted home in California. Hockney’s kaleidoscopic paintings of the sun-washed hills depicted space in a manner not unlike that of ancient friezes—the picture planes receded with faraway, patchworked details stacked towards the horizon line. His Fauve-inspired palette similarly eschewed naturalism for the vibrant vistas to be revisited and reinterpreted for years to follow.
Hockney’s abandonment of single-point perspective would be pushed further with his photographic collages the following decade. Hockney’s first visits to the Grand Canyon coincided with his increasing interest in photography as a medium, a process which revealed a new way in which one could look at the expansive panorama with a sense of layered depth. While photography had been an integral part of his artistic process, Hockney’s foray into photographic collages began with his experimentation with using Polaroids to create larger images in 1982. In Grand Canyon with Foot, Arizona, Oct. 1982, Hockney’s juxtaposed individual photographs of specific elements of the canyon create an illusionistic interpretation of the artist’s viewpoint. The cheeky glimpse of Hockney’s brogue at the edge of the collage is a reminder of his presence, as well as his agency in assembling the multiple-perspective view of the canyon. The artist explained: “I had always felt the one thing a photograph could not do was give you a feeling of space’ but ‘the moment I began to realize you could alter perspective in photography…the first thing I did was photograph the unphotographable thing: the Grand Canyon.” (Tate) Just as Hockney had rejected single-point perspective in his famed Hollywood Hills landscapes, he specifically intervened with the depiction of the landscape of the Grand Canyon through photography. This artistic intervention is present in different forms throughout his many landscape series and is evidenced in his act of creating the later shaped canvases.
David Hockney’s Grand Canyons Held in Museum Collections
In 1998, more than ten years after Hockney’s experimentation with photo collages began, he saw a major exhibition of works by Thomas Moran, a fellow British expatriate, particularly the artist’s series of works created after a lengthy expedition through Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Moran’s paintings relied primarily on grand scale, atmospheric perspective and glowing, naturalistic color to create sublime compositions which reflected the unfathomable majesty and spirituality of experiencing the natural beauty of the Canyon. Just as Hockney had turned to the American natural wonder to defy the limitations of photography, he was again inspired by Moran’s ability to portray the grandeur of the space. Hockney used multiple canvases arranged together to create Colorado River and A Bigger Grand Canyon, the latter of which was painted on 60 canvases. The overall perspective of A Bigger Grand Canyon was not unlike that of the artist’s earlier photographic collages, but the smaller canvases did not allow for the same unique multitude of vanishing points throughout the composition. Hockney’s use of the grid formed by the assemblage of smaller canvases into the larger panorama did act as something of an imposed, architectonic Modernist and Minimalist form which played a similar role to that of the artist’s foot in his photographic collage—the artist’s role in the creation of the image must be acknowledged, and the painting is not simply Hockney’s vibrant, but naturalistic contemplation on the Grand Canyon. The motif of the artist’s assertion of perspective would only be pushed further by the imposition of the shaped canvas in relation to the same familiar composition.
In 2017, in the months preceding the opening of his landmark retrospective which traveled from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to Tate Britain in London and finally to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Hockney began a body of work on shaped canvases—particularly with the lower left and right corners cut on a diagonal to create an irregular hexagon. While the 1998 works used both grand scale—inspired by the grand tableaus of Moran—and the multiplicity of canvases to create the larger image, the shaped canvases further demonstrate Hockney’s unfaltering fascination with the agency and manipulation of artistic perspective.
The atypical canvases emphasized the multi-dimensionality of the painted space and lent themselves well to the viewer’s experience of ‘reverse’ perspective, or an inversion of the single vanishing point where lines diverge against the horizon. The hexagonal shape of Grand Canyon II recalls the historic form of an amphitheater, an apt metaphor for the viewer standing on the precipice of a canyon with the expanse of the landscape laying before them—as if standing on the world’s natural stage—a metaphor that is no surprise, given Hockney’s early work with theater sets. The imposing shape of the canvas and the freewheeling sightlines Hockney uses within the composition of the work create a spiraling, decentralized canvas. This psychological perspective furthers the metaphor of the stage: the viewer is drawn into the painting out onto the central precipice jutting into the stylized, geologic amphitheater, but is also left reflexively looking at their perspective of the view, particularly as Hockney directs it. The act of looking and the insertion of oneself into the painted space is as much the subject of the work as the Grand Canyon is.
The evolution of Hockney’s artistic process through experimentation with media and with the depiction of space is well evidenced by the evolution of his portrayal of the Grand Canyon. The artist’s earliest photographic collages allowed for the artist to break the confines of traditional perspective with the confluence of many collaged viewpoints to create a multidimensional image. Grand Canyon II expands the viewer’s perspective while simultaneously drawing them out onto the precipice overlooking the sublime and vibrant panorama before them.
As with other works from the series, such as Garrowby Hill, Hockney’s coloration of the landscape is composed of colors that reflect the joyous reflection of sunlight on the canyon. Hockney’s Grand Canyon landscapes can be seen as the Hockney’s response to harnessing the sublime in a way which matched and defied what was so paradigmatically captured by the Romanticists. Just as Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea Fog reveals the perspective of the painting’s iconic, anonymous figure, Hockney’s Grand Canyon II invites the viewer to assume the perspective of the Wanderer, which is a perspective shared with the artist himself. Through Grand Canyon II, the viewer is invited to share in Hockney’s revelation and translation of the sublime through the depiction of the most iconic American landscape.
