A Shadow Hunched - Hockney in Tokyo

The Maturity of a Modern Master

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There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,

In the museum of the sky.

(From “The Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens)

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On Wormholes

We all have them: Moments of serendipity, wormholes into our past, a pattern suddenly glimpsed, unlooked for. I had such a moment recently while at the wonderful David Hockney exhibition in Tokyo. I walked into one of the galleries and saw Hockney’s etchings of “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, a tribute to Wallace Stevens’ sequence of poems which were inspired in turn by Picasso’s harrowing painting, “The Old Guitarist” (in which the only non-blue object is the guitar…). I hadn’t been expecting to see these works - I try never to read much about an exhibition beforehand, preferring to concede to the artist and the curators the element of surprise.

The wormhole first took me back to to my very recent reading one of Helen Vendler’s magnificent essays on Stevens. In her essay “Hypotheses and Contradictions”, Vendler uses the beautiful quote above to indicate Stevens’ frustration as he “yearns for truth and a stable poetic”. I guess we’ve all been there, too. Anyway, it came as a pleasant surprise to find myself face-to-face with Hockney’s tribute to Stevens/Picasso at that moment.

Pearl of the Pacific

I tried to remember when I had last seen those etchings. And then I remembered - not when (exactly) but where, which for me, after decades of slowly wandering the earth in pursuit of my own “museum of the sky”, is usually the same thing. It was in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Pearl of the Pacific as it is called in Spanish. I was then in day-to-day charge of the short-lived office of the British Council there, who had sent the exhibition there in 1992.

1992! The abrupt transition in time made me feel a little dizzy. But also left me happy to think I had connected another dot in my life. To make use of another phrase from Stevens in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, it allowed the “hunched shadow” of the past that we carry around with us to be briefly rescued from its lightless oblivion. That year, that city, were important to me, so the memory set off many thoughts. I am sure I will return to that period in a later post.

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Meanwhile, back in Tokyo

Back to the new Hockney exhibition.

A few random observations. One is how much his work has changed in the decades since I first saw his work (in London in the 1980s, I think). I used to think of Hockney as the painter of “A Bigger Splash” - all those straight lines and blue skies. And of “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” - a painting I now greet in Hockney exhibitions almost as an old friend.

But, as this exhibition makes clear, he has more recently become a formidable landscape painter. I don’t know if this is ‘growth’ or ‘development’ on the part of the artist, or simply nostalgia for the countryside he grew up in, or even a felt need to compete with the likes of Constable or Claude. But for me, the increase in range makes him a more interesting painter.

But… chairs?

Another thing I noticed is that Hockney seems to have a thing about chairs. He has painted an awful lot of them. They come in all shapes and sizes - from armchairs to stools, from wicker chairs to office chairs and there’s also a Director's chair. There’s even a piece called “Walking Past Two Chairs”. An interesting title - not sitting on chairs - just walking past them… You know, like you do.

There’s also a lot of water in his work. Yes, in paintings of the swimming pools or water sprinklers of California, but also in showers and, especially in paintings of England, rain. The muddy puddles in his large iPad drawings of the seasons in Yorkshire are a wonderful contrast with the limpid azure of the swimming pools. Perhaps Hockney is suggesting that life gets a little muddied as we grow older? or maybe it just happened to have rained when he turned up, tablet in hand.

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The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

David Hockney

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A Year of Magical Painting

However, this exhibition’s star attraction is a recent addition to the Hockney ouevre: “A Year in Normandie”. Inspired by the famous Bayeux Tapestry, this 90-metre frieze created on an iPad is a colourful and joyous depiction of the changing seasons. I have spent some time in the French countryside and the landscape seemed familiar to me. One oddity, though, is that there are no animals in the fields (which doesn’t really look like arable land, which might otherwise explain it).

Which makes me recall that, apart from Percy the cat, there aren’t many animals at all in Hockney’s work. Perhaps there might be time for a late flourish of depicting four-legged subjects? or has he drawn the line at chairs?

Anyway, I found the frieze impressive and even moving. Indeed, the rich portrayal of summer in the work reminded me of WS Merwin’s lovely poem, “Youth of Grass”, which perfectly captures that time of year in France and ends:

“and so the youth of this spring all at once is over

it has come upon us again taking us

once more by surprise just as we began

to believe that those fields would always be green”

The poem is, among other things, about aging, about coming into full maturity.

And it’s Hockney’s full maturity which is on full display in these once-green fields. The monumental frieze leads us to autumn and looks ahead to the frigidity and bareness of winter, but, for now, the warm sun of summer seems to be shining on this remarkable artist.