Page 48 - Studio International - January 1968

LONDON

commentary by
Charles Harrison

David Hockney at Kasmin —mid-January
to mid-February

Recently many of David Hockney's best works
have been painted, exhibited and sold in America.
This has been a considerable loss for London. A
series of very large canvases painted in California,
Hockney's second home, look particularly impres-
sive in photographs, and it would be good to see
them here one day. Meanwhile, the painting with
which he won the John Moores prize, and the
two paintings in the Stuyvesant Collection, in
particular the Rocky Mountains with tired Indians of
1965, remain to remind us of how good a painter
Above
Hockney can be. The Stuyvesant Foundation's
Rocky Mountains with tired
landscape illustrates beautifully his ability to
Indians 1965
express a vivid and generous reaction to a given
acrylic on canvas
situation in terms of visual preconceptions and 67 x 100 in.
ready-made images: the Indians are cardboard Stuyvesant Foundation
figures, the mountains were derived from a
geological illustra tion in a book about the Rockies, Left
the totem, typifying a certain mystique about Peter getting out of Nick's
Indians, from a photograph. The whole blend is pool 1967
unmistakeably Hockney, a strange mixture of acrylic on canvas
whimsy in its construction and disturbing reality 60 x 60 in.
in its effect.
In the paintings in Hockney's show of recent Below
Four different kinds of water
work at the KASMIN GALLERY the whimsy appears at
1967
first to be uppermost. In a long series of paintings,
acrylic on canvas
drawings and lithographs made during the last
4 times 12x 8 in.
three years Hockney seemed to be testing his
ability and his wit in a game of visual cliches,
deliberately exploring art in terms of its most super-
ficial aspects. Pictures like those investigating
different means of representing water appear at
first conventional and even academic, but the con-
ventions he is using are those not of the academy
but of the billboard or the glamorized photograph.
They are conventional, that is to say, only in a
non-art and highly contemporary context.
The self-conscious posturing of this period pro-
duced some very irritating and high camp works,
and a few fine ones: the Rocky Mountains was
painted partly because Hockney felt it was about
time he did a landscape.
The preoccupation with interpretation and con-
vention is still very much there in the recent works
at Kasmin. In three of the paintings the water
theme recurs: Four different kinds of water in four
small canvases mounted together, water sprinkled
on to A neat lawn, and A bigger splash in a Cali-
fornian pool. In the last two paintings Hockney
indulges another of his obsessions, the painting of
glass, 'painting the unpaintable', using ready-made
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