As a keen reader of Marcel Proust, David Hockney likes to play with time.
Photography captures the moment, nothing else.
Painting (like music, theater or the novel) relies on time.
During his visit to Normandy, in October 2018, the artist's first gesture was to go and see
The Queen Mathilde Tapestry again,
in Bayeux.
I accompanied him on this visit, I saw how Hockney examines a work in its smallest details, learns about the historical context, and in a short time knows as much as the best specialists.
“How is it,” he remarks, “that official art history ignores this work?”
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As if, because it is embroidery, it belongs to a minor discipline.
It is, however, essential because, by its very structure, it brings time into the history of art.
This is the foundation of narrative painting: a political and military event that lasted literally two years is unfolding before our eyes.
Strengthened by this rediscovery, David Hockney hastened to use it to his advantage: he borrowed its form from the tapestry, and produced, under the title
A Year in Normandy,
a vast frieze 90 meters long which represents the passage of seasons in the park of the Norman house in which he moved in spring 2019. Bare branches under a gray sky with the first flowers, then the summer sky and the fruits in the trees, the hay harvest and the river below swollen with autumn rains, falling leaves and soon snow.
“It's an animated drawing, but it's up to you to do the animation by walking along the frieze,” Hockney says.
This work was the subject of an exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie, in Paris, in 2021. The choice of this museum was obviously not a coincidence.
L'Orangerie is Monet,
Les Nymphéas,
cinemascope avant la lettre.
Hockney always loved these connections with his great elders.
This is also what led him recently to accept the invitation from the Museum of Fine Arts of Rouen to participate in the Normandy Impressionist Festival, which this year celebrates the 150th anniversary of Monet's painting
Impression, soleil levant
, which was to give his name to impressionism.
It is from his London studio, where he has returned for several months, that David Hockney is actively preparing this exhibition.
This is where I visited him on a beautiful January day: Pembroke Studios, two small adjoining houses on a private drive in Kensington, a quiet and protected place.
The London workshop is not as spacious as the Norman workshop, there is already not a free wall, the new paintings are hung one above the other up to the ceiling.
At 86 years old, David Hockney continues to pay attention to the smallest detail regarding his exhibitions.
He had a three-dimensional model built of the rooms allocated to him by the Rouen Museum, and he has thumbnails of his works at the right scale, in order to simulate the hanging.
I found paintings there that I had seen in the Norman workshop at the beginning of last year.
A sunset where we see the light of the setting filtering through black clouds above the house.
“The Impressionists painted the Norman landscape extensively, but not the typically Norman houses,” he points out.
These cob and half-timbered houses can be seen in Rembrandt and Van Gogh, but not in the Impressionists.
They only wanted to paint the modern, the bridges, the factory chimneys, the stations… and not these houses which seem to have come out of a fairy tale.
For me, he says, they are neither ancient nor modern, they are the present.
I live in the present, and I paint the present.”
In the footsteps of Monet
David Hockney likes difficulty, he likes to paint what resists representation: transparency, reflections, these blurry and uncertain shapes.
In front of his house, as in all the old properties in the Pays d'Auge, there is a pond where a few moorhens splash and water lilies float.
He takes particular pleasure in painting this pond, the sky and the clouds reflected there, the trembling image of the tree branches on the surface of the water.
In this painting, which is entitled
Wind on The Pond,
he studies the effects of the breeze on the surface of the water, he renders them with a curl of white paint of surprising freshness.
Monet's shadow is not far away.
Hockney makes no secret of it.
10th September 2020, iPad painting,
“Without even needing to turn on the light (the iPad has its own light), the painter can capture the spectacle in the moment.”
Copyright David Hockney
From his Norman residence, he went to Giverny.
He had taken with him the iPad which he never parted with.
During a long morning, he drew Monet's pond, the reflections on the water, the water lilies... And, returning to the studio, he transposed the drawing initially done on iPad to acrylic on canvas.
It is undoubtedly the most beautiful and most significant painting in this exhibition in dialogue with the masters of impressionism.
There is a clarity there, a luminosity of colors which prove that the emulation felt by the painter in this chivalrous duel with Monet bore fruit.
Hockney, like Picasso before him, knows that a painter has every interest in confronting the great masters of yesteryear.
Picasso, when he diverted the old ones, relied on them to assert his singularity.
Hockney doesn't even need that;
he just has to paint what he sees, he is singular without having to force himself.
Snapshot truth
During the almost four years spent in Normandy, David Hockney also gave in to his passion for portraiture.
Hockney likes to quote this anecdote: the art critic Clement Greenberg, mentor of a generation of artists in the 1960s, told Willem de Kooning: “Today, it is impossible to paint a portrait.”
To which De Kooning reportedly replied: “You are absolutely right, but it is also impossible not to do it.”
Hockney has just watched the film adapted from James Lord's book on Giacometti on television.
We see at work this obsession with portraiture which gripped the artist.
Hockney shares that portraiture is an essential and recurring part of his work.
Sooner or later he comes back.
He never made portraits of convenience or on commission.
Hockney is not Warhol, who painted celebrities or those who dreamed of being part of the club and for that paid the price of vanity.
Like Giacometti, Hockney only paints his relatives, his friends, his gardener on his tractor or the nurse who came to vaccinate him against Covid.
And these portraits are made without the slightest prior drawing.
Lucie-Lune Lambouley and Louis-Martin Lambouley, 2022.
“Hockney only paints those close to him.”
Copyright David Hockney
The model poses, and the painter captures it directly on canvas with his brush.
There is an assumed risk there.
“It gives me an extra tension, an extra energy,” says Hockney, “and that’s why the portraits are so alive.”
Starting without the slightest sketch or set-up requires increased vigilance, and the few proportional errors that a preparatory drawing would probably have avoided bring a freshness and truth that a more elaborate drawing would not have.
There will be around ten of these portraits in the Rouen exhibition.
“After all, they are all locals, Normans,” says Hockney, “it makes sense to show them in Rouen,” he says.
And when he doesn't have a model on hand, the artist paints himself.
No complacency there either.
Sophie Gaugain, 2021. “
The portrait is an essential and recurring part of Hockney’s work.”
Copyright David Hockney.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Wilkinson
All his life, he made self-portraits in painting or drawing.
The painter is therefore present in effigy in this exhibition: an old gentleman with a mischievous look, in a tweed suit and cap,
very British,
who looks at himself in the mirror, paintbrush in one hand and smoking cigarette in the other.
He looks us in the eye, and seems to say: “Yes, it’s me, I paint and I smoke, I’ve done that all my life, and I intend to continue doing it, whatever the flappers say. joy who like neither cigarettes nor paint.”
In the rooms of the Rouen Museum, Hockney's portraits will interact with two magnificent portraits by Gustave Caillebotte and Auguste Renoir.
Monet, Manet, Van Gogh painted moonlit landscapes.
The chiaroscuro that the subject imposes is in itself a challenge for the painter.
Painting on the pattern at night is not easy, how can you simply recognize its colors in the dark?
Always up to date with the latest advances in technology, David Hockney found a solution: the iPad.
He wakes up in the middle of the night and sees a majestic full moon from his window.
A self-portrait of David Hockney, in 2021: “When he does not have a model on hand, the artist paints himself.
Without complacency.”
Copyright David Hockney.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Wilkinson
It looks bigger and brighter than ever.
It is the famous flower moon, which, at this time of year, is closest to the earth.
The painter grabs his iPad, which is never far away, and his bed, without needing to prepare a canvas, looking for his tubes of colors, without even needing to turn on the light (the iPad has its own light), he can capture the spectacle in the moment.
I said that Hockney was a reader of Marcel Proust.
He read it very young and has regularly reread it since.
But he is a great reader overall and of a wide variety of books.
When he moved to Normandy, he had no books in English. I asked him what he would like to read, he answered without hesitation: the great French writers who described Normandy.
As if he wanted to better understand the essence of this new landscape that he was about to paint.
Full moon and technology
I went to Galignani's, rue de Rivoli, in Paris, where I found the excellent translation of
La Recherche du temps perdu
(Proust's Balbec is only a few kilometers away),
L'Éducation sentimentale
and
Madame Bovary
(which take place between Pont-l'Évêque and Rouen), and, finally, the tales of Maupassant.
Now, at the precise moment when he made this series of paintings with the full moon, Hockney was reading this wonderful little tale called
Moonlight
.
Maupassant describes like no other the countryside under the moon, the line of poplars, this muffled and silvery atmosphere, the glistening mist... For the Rouen Museum, David Hockney therefore wanted to reserve a special place for Norman moonlight.
About fifteen paintings on this subject are brought together in what Hockney, with his infallible sense of titles, called
The Moon Room
.
Highlight of this exhibition, two paintings painting the fog in the countryside in counterpoint to two paintings by Monet, a view of Rouen bathed in the glowing mist of the sunset and a view of the Seine at Port-Villez, where the water barely distinguishable from the misty dawn sky.
I live in the present, and I paint the present
David Hockney
Painting the fog is again a challenge.
In the mist, the perception of depth fades, the contours become blurred, and this very particular light is not easy to render.
The more difficult a subject is, the more it excites this man who never tires of looking at the world.
He says: “To really see, you have to look intensely, few people take the trouble…” David Hockney is a constantly alert mind, perfectly aware of new technologies.
To conclude the exhibition with an unexpected touch, he chose two videos.
On the big screen, we see the first rays of the sun shyly emerging from the horizon, then growing, rising, and shining intensely.
For this work, he borrowed the title from La Rochefoucauld:
The sun nor death can be looked at fixedly
.
And, last but not least, a self-portrait on the iPad is composed line by line before our eyes, as if by magic.
26th November 2020, n°2
, iPad painting.
“Painting on the pattern at night is not easy… David Hockney found a solution: the iPad.”
Copyright David Hockney
The iPad allows this since each added line is recorded separately, the memory is kept, it is therefore easy to reconstruct the composition of the drawing as if it were being done in front of us.
The artist looks slightly over his glasses, as he so often does in real life, and seems to be inviting us to an upcoming adventure.
In fact, this new adventure is already planned: a large retrospective in a major Parisian museum is planned for spring 2025. But it is too early to say more, David Hockney has not finished surprising us.
Latest published book by Jean Frémon:
The Whiteness of the Whale
, published by Éditions POL, February 2023.
David Hockney. Normandism
, from March 22 to September 22, at the Rouen Museum of Fine Arts.