David Hockney

David Hockney stands as one of the most highly publicized British artists since World War II. Being the most ebullient personality of his class, he represents a generation of British artists that emerged from the Royal Academy in London, where he studied between 1959 and 1962. Whilst at the Royal Academy he experimented with and developed an edgy form of figurative art, one that was fuelled by the artist’s coming to terms with his sexuality. Discussions with fellow students R.B. Kitaj and Derek Boshier resulted in a rudimentary form of figuration (which was indebted to Jean Dubuffet’s primitive style) that also included passages of text or numerals that served to humanize these contemporary hieroglyphs. The popular and prominent Hockney was soon included in numerous exhibitions, none more significant than the Young Contemporaries Exhibition of January 1961, which marked the emergence of the Pop Art movement in Britain, and heralded Hockney as one of its chief protagonists.

Hockney very quickly became a successful artist and, as early as 1963, started to make trips abroad, making graphic journals of his visits. His first adventure abroad was to Egypt, at the invitation of London’s The Sunday Times, where he sketched numerous drawings in graphite and colored pencils, of the city of Cairo and the various hotels in which he stayed. This desire to visually record the fruits of the artist’s wanderlust has remained with the artist, and is as potent today as it was over forty years ago. Hockney’s move to Los Angeles at the end of 1963 resulted in a series of shifts in his style, technique and a more ‘open’ embrace and declaration of his own predilections and lifestyle. Hockney now started to use the more elastic medium of acrylic paint, rather than oil; he started to use photography for purposes of documentation (whether cataloguing portraits, male nudes, shadows or swimming pools). He became much more sophisticated in his attention to playful composition and, especially, the way light and shadow served to actually flatten rather than give dimension to his deliberately flattened surfaces. His paintings of California life catapulted the artist onto the international art stage, to the extent that he was celebrated with no less than five solo exhibitions in 1966. It was in 1966 that Hockney met Peter Schlesinger, a young Californian art student who would become Hockney’s closest companion and favorite model.

In 1968 Hockney and Schlesinger returned to London, where Schlesinger was enrolled at the Slade School of Art. Peter Webb notes, though, that by October 1968 “… the couple were traveling again, this time to the film director Tony Richardson’s home in the south of France … [Hockney] discovered that they shared not only common roots and a northern sense of humor but also a love of sunshine and the clear light of the south”. (Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, New York 1988, p. 100). Hockney traveled all around the area of Richardson’s home (near St. Tropez), and began to use photography in earnest, not merely for snapshots, but for visual information that would help him with his compositions. He voraciously photographed whilst on a quick cruise of the River Rhine, and also in the nearby town of St. Maxime, the inspiration for the present work.

Upon his return to London from this sunny sojourn in France, Hockney began work on four paintings based on these holiday photographs. The present work reveals the hotel L’Arbois in St. Maxime almost completely hidden by a large tree. The other three depict a sunrise on the harbor of St. Maxime (Early Morning, Sainte-Maxime, 1968-69); another study of trees, this time in front of a car park and office building (Parking Privé, 1968) and a medieval castle among trees on a rock that he came across whilst on his trip on the Rhine (Schloss, 1968). Whilst a preparatory drawing exists for the trees in the present work, all four of these compositions are direct transcriptions of squared-up photographs the artist took. For Hockney, such a process had an effect on his subsequent paintings. He notes that “… in a way [that] was when the naturalism in the pictures began to get stronger … In America, it was the period when photo-realism was becoming known, and I was slightly interested in it … it was similar to using a photograph from Physique Pictorial, doing an interpretation of a photograph”. (David Hockney in Nikos Stangos, ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, 2^nd ed., New York 1988, p. 160).

The acute precision of line that belongs to the draughtsman and the photographer is aligned with the painter’s sensitivity to color, here flattened to the point that color becomes an abstract building block in itself. L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime is a painting that majestically declares Hockney’s embrace of three artistic disciplines which, in isolation, he stands commended but, in terms of his synthetic process and unification of photography, painting and drawing, he is almost unique in post-war art. However, above all else, the present painting explores the relationship between painting and photography – a pursuit which propelled much of Hockney’s own painting in the later 1960’s. As Marco Livingstone notes, the present work reveals Hockney's fascination with the technical possibilities offered by the camera, and that he “… did allow himself for a moment to be seduced by what he discovered with it.” (Marco Livingstone, David Hockney, 3^rd ed., London 1996, p. 116). Here, shadows are conspicuously missing, serving to flatten the surface, allowing Hockney to emphasize the effects of strong sunlight on pure planes of color. This is clear in his description of the trees which resonate visually much like an abstract painting would, as opposed to a concrete rendition of this cluster of trees. The artist has also removed certain street signs, leaving them empty, so that the focus becomes solely on the trees and the way they obscure the hotel (whose sign towers above all at the top center of the composition). Hockney makes a connection between his paintings and photography as both being exemplary of ‘coordinated patterns of form’ and also both serving to illuminate a very specific moment that drew him (back) to this exact image.