Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston
Image: © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Artwork: © David Hockney
A rolling landscape of sublime vastness, Garrowby Hill illuminates David Hockney’s unique, multi-perspectival approach to painting. Painted in 2017, it is a magnificent return to one of the most celebrated subjects of his oeuvre: the ever-changing East Yorkshire landscape. The composition of the present work is based on Hockney’s beloved 1998 painting of the same name, Garrowby Hill, in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: one of the greatest compositions of Hockney’s oeuvre. Indeed, in terms of iconicity Garrowby Hill is comparable to the dramatic pool paintings of the 1960s, the conversation pieces of the 1970s, and the meandering California landscapes of the 1980s and ‘90s. This painting further set the tone for the definitive Yorkshire landcapes of the 2000s and, crucially, inspired Hockney’s striking Grand Canyon panoramas. That Hockney returns to this composition again twenty years later attests to its utmost significance.
“Garrowby Hill is painted in oil on canvas 193 cm wide, slightly larger than Constable’s famous ‘six footers’. Despite its size, its success instilled in Hockney a wish to make an even bigger picture, to emulate the great painters of the American Sublime, and to confront in paint the Grand Canyon, which he calls ‘the biggest space you can look out over that has an edge.”
The present work is one of the most outstanding examples of a series of twenty late paintings executed between 2017 and 2018 during the artist’s major retrospective at the Tate Britain, London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The series is featured in a large-scale photo-mural now in the collection of Tate, which Hockney created the same year using an inventive combination of photography and 3D printing; the mural is the final work within a career-defining series that explores the nuances of perspective and colour, as well as the limitations and possibilities of photography. Reimagining and revitalizing The Museum of Fine Arts’ Garrowby Hill, the present work sees Hockney inverting perspective and widening the viewer’s panoramic view via the use of a hexagonal canvas. The shaped canvas is a hallmark of this recent series, throughout which he returns to the subject matter central to his early practice – the landscapes of the Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, the Grand Canyon, and East Yorkshire. Executed in 2017, the present painting therefore powerfully reinvents one of the most seminal compositions of Hockney’s oeuvre, refreshing the scene for an entirely new, contemporary audience.
Tate Collection, London
Image: © Tate
Artwork: © David Hockney
The unfurling road and verdant hills of Yorkshire are captured on the surface of Garrowby Hill in Hockney’s quintessential, high-keyed colour palette, imbuing in the bucolic English landscape the saturated euphoria intrinsic to the artist’s famed portrayal of California. Paying homage to his 1998 painting of the same title, Garrowby Hill recalls Hockney’s return to Yorkshire from Los Angeles in the summer of 1997, having travelled around California and the Grand Canyon earlier that summer. In August, Hockney spent a great deal of time driving through the Yorkshire landscape to visit his dear friend Jonathan Silver, who was, at the time, dying of cancer. The 120-mile round-trip journey between the seaside town of Bridlington and Saltaire engendered in Hockney a desire for painting the fleeting countryside as seen from his car; indeed this journey took him over Garrowby Hill, and such scenes would become the foundation for a new body of work dedicated to the rolling farmland of his native Yorkshire. The artist himself noted, “When Jonathan Silver, who ran Salts Mill, the museum of my work at Saltaire near Bradford, got really ill, I came over from L.A. simply because I could see he was dying... That was in 1997, and it was the first time I’d stayed in England for a few months since the 1970s. Jonathan lived in Wetherby, which is a very pleasant drive from Bridlington, via York. I was going there every couple of days to visit him, and I started noticing the countryside and how it changed. Because it’s agricultural land around here, the surface of the earth itself is constantly being altered. The wheat grows, then its harvested, then you see it ploughed” (David Hockney quoted in: Chronology 1937 – Today: 2010, The David Hockney Foundation (online)). As curator Helen Little wrote in the exhibition catalogue for Hockney’s major 2017-18 retrospective, “For Hockney, as for other artists of the English tradition, his engagement with the landscape came from a sense of familiarity with the land, from memory as well as observation” (Helen Little quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain (and travelling), David Hockney, 2017-18, p. 172).
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Image: Richard Schmidt
Artwork: © David Hockney
Although Hockney has spent a great portion of his life living in Los Angeles, he was born in Bradford, East Yorkshire and has continued to return to this corner of England throughout his life. The Yorkshire Wolds are thus profoundly significant to Hockney and his oeuvre, his compositions of its vistas taking on a highly emotive effect. As Marco Livingstone writes, “The East Yorkshire landscapes painted by Hockney in Bridlington in 1997 and in Los Angeles in 1998, triggered by friendship and by a voyage of discovery into a very special and private corner of England that he had known since his youth, are celebrations of life infused with love. Suddenly he saw he was able to convey the rich colours of Yorkshire with the same enthusiasm that he had formerly reserved for California” (Marco Livingston, “Home to Bridlington: Routes to a Private Paradise,” in Exh Cat., Kunsthalle Würth, Schwäbisch Hall, David Hockney: Just Nature, 2009, p. 183). Garrowby Hill is a quintessential image and vista in Hockney’s Yorkshire body of work. Its immense beauty and vibrancy speaks to the artist’s emotional homecoming in the late 1990s, a return that would inspire the original 1998 composition in The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the spectacular Grand Canyon paintings, such as A Bigger Grand Canyon in the collection of The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, also executed that year.
“He had enjoyed the sunlit landscape of California because of the strong shadows it enabled him to achieve in his painting; returning to the cold northern light of his native Yorkshire, he set himself the challenge of painting in different and often demanding conditions. The Yorkshire Wolds presented him with a pastoral paradise of unspoilt rolling chalk hills that became the source of a series of profound observations of the changing seasons and the ways in which light, space and nature are constantly moving.”
Garrowby Hill is evidence of Hockney’s career long investigation into the art historical genre of landscape, and his own placement within the canon of British landscape painting. His painterly analysis builds upon that of eighteenth and nineteenth century masters such as Joseph Wright of Derby, Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, all of whom sought to paint idealised scenes imbued with the spirit of the classical past, illuminating their individual visions of the natural world via dramatic, atmospheric panoramas. Hockney's investigation into the genre of landscape painting also draws upon the colourful vistas of the fauvists, not least Andre Derrain and Henri Matisse. Matisse's La Moulade from 1905 exemplifies a similar high horizon line to that in Garrowby Hill and employs a similarly vibrant colour palette. Yet, while Hockney draws upon such artists’ nuanced depiction of the sublimity of nature, his visual language stands in stark contrast: “Artists thought the optical projection of nature was verisimilitude, which is what they were aiming for. But in the 21st century, I know that is not verisimilitude. Once you know that, when you go out to paint, you’ve got something else to do. I do not think the world looks like photographs. I think it looks a lot more glorious than that” (David Hockney quoted in: ibid., p. 172). As demonstrated by the present work, Hockney’s recent paintings explore the limitations of photography, and aim to provide viewers with a perspective wider than that a camera lens can offer. His hexagonal canvases not only open compositional space up in a way that was not previously possible, they also allow the artist to play with perspective, in fact reversing the very perspective that such eighteenth and nineteenth century artists sought so valiantly to achieve. As Hockney explains: “The indented sides enforced the kind of reverse perspective that earlier painting was clearly striving toward… the indentations paradoxically widen the sense of space and invite all sorts of fresh lines of site. Still, though, as you can see, far from cutting corners, I was adding them” (David Hockney quoted in: Lawrence Weschler, “On Not Cutting Corners,” in: Exh. Cat., New York, Pace, David Hockney, 2018, p. 5).
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Image: Richard Schmidt
Artwork: © David Hockney
The very same year the present work was executed, Hockney discovered a ground-breaking essay from 1920 entitled Reverse Perspective by Pavel Florensky, a mathematician, art critic and aesthetic theorist: “Florensky, like Hockney after him, pointed out that we ourselves never ever see in rigorously abstracted perspective (the way a camera does) because, for starters, we look out at the world binocularly, from two eyes simultaneously, and for that matter, our eyes and bodies are always in motion, as we construct our actual sense of the world across time from all those multiple vantages” (Lawrence Weschler cited in: Ibid., p. 11). Hockney’s reimagining of his 1998 painting Garrowby Hill thus problematises the use of one-point perspective while presenting an enduring interrogation of the issues of representation. The artist himself asserts, “If you’re going through a tunnel, when you get out, everything opens up. That’s reverse perspective. The problem with perspective is this: you’re an immobile point, here, outside the picture. But, with reverse perspective, you can be a moving person – you can see all sides of things from a single point. And we’re always in movement. The eye is always in movement. It’s never still. Cubism, for example, was really an attack on perspective” (D. Hockney cited in: ibid., p. 5). The present work and its 1998 precedent are remarkably similar in composition. The horizon line remains high, the sky overcast and the winding road seems to traverse the canvas in the same winding path. Yet in Garrowby Hill from 2017, Hockney pushes the colour saturation, the grey-blue road in the earlier composition becoming a striking high-keyed purple, the grasses and fields vibrant lime green and chartreuse. The composition of the present work becomes increasingly abstracted and geometric, and the cut canvas corners give the viewer a wider, panoramic view of Garrowby Hill and its surrounding farmlands. On the surface of the present work the lavender road unfolds and unwinds in a way that makes the viewer feel that they are moving through the picture plane; while the viewer stands apart from the scene in Hockney’s 1998 version of Garrowby Hill, they are completely immersed in it in the present 2017 iteration. The cut corners may even evoke the East Yorkshire vista as seen through a windshield of a moving car; indeed, this is how Hockney would have viewed the rolling landscape of Garrowby Hill in the late 1990s when driving to see his close friend Jonathan Silver.
CELEBRATED NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURY LANDSCAPES
A pivotal moment in Hockney’s early investigations into the power of reverse perspective occurred in 1985 when travelling by car between Milan and Zurich. Hockney and a friend drove by way of the Gotthard Road Tunnel, and in the tunnel Hockney described his view as, “unobstructed all the way down to the tiny pinprick of light in the far far distance, all the lines of sight converging relentlessly on that tiny dot, endlessly, for minutes on end… suddenly I realised how that is the basis of all conventional photographic perspective, that endless regress to an infinitely distant point in the middle of the image, how everything is hurtling away from you and you yourself are not even in the picture at all. But then, as we got to the end of the tunnel, everything suddenly reversed, with the world opening out in every direction. The effect was fantastically invigorating, you suddenly felt yourself at the focal point of vantages spreading out in every direction. And I realised how that, and not its opposite, was the effect I wanted to try to capture” (D. Hockney cited in: L. Weschler ‘On Not Cutting Corners’, in: Exh. Cat., New York, Pace, David Hockney, 2018, p. 5-6). By subverting the superiority of one-point perspective, Hockney found he was able to more vigorously explore the viewer’s experience of binocular looking, and seemingly integrate the viewer into the scene.
Image: © Max Lankner/BFA, Courtesy of Pace Gallery
Artwork: © David Hockney
Depicting the lush fields of East Yorkshire on a warm summer day, Garrowby Hill sees Hockney rejecting the laws of perspective, instead catching space, light and time in breathtaking movement. The result is a thrilling and immersive scene captured in the kaleidoscopic hues integral to his celebrated portrayal of sun-drenched Californian vistas. Paying homage to his 1998 canvas in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – a work that led to some of Hockney’s greatest painterly achievements, not least the panoramic landscapes of Yorkshire, such as The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate East Yorkshire in 2011 or the magnificent Grand Canyon paintings – the present work pushes the boundaries of representation, illuminating the incredible vision of an artist finding new ground in the genre of landscape painting in the eighth decade of his life.