David Hockney (b. 1937), Lawrence Weschler, 1988, oil on canvas, 16 1/2 x 10 1/2 in., courtesy of the artist, © David Hockney, all rights reserved. Downloading, transferring or otherwise making copies of this image without prior written permission is strictly prohibited.

Essay by Lawrence Weschler

DAVID HOCKNEY PORTRAITS: ON STAYING TRUE TO LIFE

At LACMA, the member’s magazine, asked Lawrence Weschler—renowned writer and friend of David Hockney’s—to give his unique perspective on the artist’s relentless, artistic pursuit of love and life. An abridged version of the resulting essay appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of At Lacma. Here is the complete essay.

The current retrospective of David Hockney’s portraiture affords an exceptional opportunity for viewers to suss out what may in retrospect prove the signal overriding theme of the artist’s entire career—an ongoing, at times almost defiant, affirmation of life and the lively in the face of the relentless rampages of death and the stultifying.

This is evident, for starters, in a literal sense. So many of the friends and family so lovingly rendered along this show’s walls have since died—and so many of those, so hideously prematurely. Hockney, one of the first artists (or public figures of any sort, for that matter) to treat his own homosexuality as merely a given (at the time, in the late fifties and early sixties, a bracingly radical life-affirming stance in and of itself), was to live on, across the seventies and eighties, to witness the depredations of the AIDS plague, as it cut its jagged swath across his most intimate cohort. He was occasionally criticized for not taking on that plague as an overt subject in his work, but this show puts the lie to such obtuse contentions: reeling from blow after blow and yet still, still on the far side, willing himself back into the fray of life, being willing, in Orwell’s words, “to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals” and yet not being defeated—that was Hockney’s response. (After it became too painfully fraught to go on portraying young men in languorous repose, Hockney found a way to continue portraying the loving gaze, which had in any case been the true subject of those earlier works, by launching into a charming series of portraits of his beloved pet dachshunds in their own languorous repose.) Later on, into the nineties and the new millennium, when three of his closest friends and daily interlocutors—Henry Geldzahler, Jonathan Silver, and Jeff Berg—died one after the next (the first two of pancreatic cancer, the last of a heart attack)—the pattern was always the same: a staggering momentary retreat into abject mourning followed by an ingathering of the rest of his cohort (Hockney often responded to intimate death by launching a fierce new series of portraits of still living intimates) and an assertion once again, of the abiding hold of love and life and the love of life.

But that theme of the assertion of the lively in the face of the stultifying also made itself felt from the very start of Hockney’s career (long before he needed to start facing up to the actual deaths of actual friends) in a more subtle way, and indeed one that in itself took some decades to fully clarify into the virtual core of his entire creative enterprise. From the earliest instances of juvenilia in this show, his teenage self portraits, one notes, on the one hand, an astonishing capacity to capture a near-photographic likeness, while on the other a delight in straying from that facile, illusionistic, as-if-photographic (one-point perspective, etc.) style into the freeform breezy sort of thing one sees, for example, in his immediately post-art-school Rake’s Progress series. Back and forth he goes over the next several decades, perfecting the protophotographic style (as in the portrait of his friends Ossie and Celia Clark and their cat Percy), works in which he indeed has frequent preparatory recourse to photographic studies, but then coming to feel straight-jacketed by that mode of representation’s (to him) increasingly stultifying strictures. Presently he comes to feel that photography itself is the problem (that photography, as he famously parses matters, “is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops, for a split second, but that’s not what life is like”), and launches into a concerted assault on the photographic, one that initially takes the paradoxical form of a veritable blizzard of photographing and photo-collaging, all in an attempt to show all the sorts of things ordinary photography cannot capture, all of the ways in which ordinary photographs fail to evoke the lived reality of looking and seeing. Under thrall to Picasso, whose cubism he comes to see as the greatest concerted refutation of the deadening hegemonic claims of mere photography to represent the actual world, Hockney returns to a more freeform-style painting, only to be drawn back once again, toward the end of the nineties, into a fresh confrontation with what he now takes to calling “the optical,” through his growing conviction that Old Masters, starting with Ingres but presently wending all the way past Caravaggio to Van Eyck in 1430s Bruges were having recourse to optical aids in their work, projections of one sort or another which helped them to “more realistically” capture the three-dimensional world in two dimensions.  Hockney himself experiments with some of those possible methods, including the concave mirrors and, most energetically, cameras lucida (as in his Ingres-inspired pencil portraits of guards at London’s National Gallery), but again primarily as a way of debunking their claims to being able to capture a “more realistic” representation. And within a few years, he once again swears off the optical and returns, first through watercolors and presently by way of oil paintings, to the works which round out the current show, lively freeform portraits of vibrantly lively friendships . . . .

And time and again, these last few years, as he himself approaches age seventy, to portraits of gloriously pregnant women: life itself unbowed and resurgent—true.