Retrospective David Hockney.

His paintings fetch record sums at auction, like the $90.3 million prize Portrait of the artist (Pool with two figures) In 2018, David Hockney, born in Great Britain in 1937, crossed the avant-gardes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, not deviating from the rules of figuration taught at the Royal Academy of London. Today, he no longer paints naked young people in California swimming pools, but the landscapes of his adopted Normandy. The Granet Museum retrospective charts his career in 103 works, mostly from the Tate Gallery, from the late 1950s to the present day. It reveals that David Hockney, as Bruno Ely, chief curator of the Aix-en-Provence museum explains, relaxed without losing his audacity.

In the video: David Hockney in a few words

Miss Figaro. – After Belgium, Austria and Switzerland, this traveling exhibition ends in Aix. Is there a special connection between David Hockney and this city?
Bruno Eli. – We were supposed to open this exhibition in 2021, but Covid decided otherwise. As in Brussels, Vienna and Lucerne, we present six decades of Hockney’s work, from his earliest paintings to his latest digital creations. But we are adding a room designed around two artists who lived in Provence and are part of David Hockney’s sources of inspiration: Van Gogh and Cézanne. To the former, from whom he preserves the simplification of line and the vigor of color, he pays homage by painting; Vincent’s chair and pipe, takes the subject of the second Card players. But David Hockney doesn’t just depict two players, he went for a version with three players and a standing man watching the scene. It’s more than a wink, it’s a mise en abyme, a real link within a link.

We often quote Picasso or Matisse about a David Hockney painting. What did he borrow from these masters?
From Picasso, he borrows the “cubist” way of getting out of one point of view. Matisse: Valuing the object with color. He prepared a book from his great knowledge of art history. Secret knowledge. The lost techniques of the old masters (Éd. du Seuil, 2006), where he analyzes optical devices, mirrors or camera darkwhich was used by artists of the XIV century^e on the 19th^e century. It shows the persistence of one-sided vision in Western art, and how a patent filed in 1839 by Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype, led the Impressionists to reinvent themselves. His use of the camera, with which he creates “photographs”, i.e. electronically controlled photocollages, stems from this. David Hockney’s strength is to fit into a painterly tradition and to be able to give it a personal touch.

series of Pictures of the pooluses pop art codes: subject matter (everyday objects) and technique (acrylic painting, bright colors). Why does David Hockney refuse to be associated with this movement?
This work is more interesting than it seems at first glance, it is a criticism, almost a satire. It is a representation of reality, but it goes further: it depicts social facts. Here it shows the symbol of the American dream, the prosperity of the USA, its economic supremacy. during pool pictures, abstraction is the dominant artistic movement. David Hockney goes against the grain. It is not considered bad, it is not considered at all. He is so attached to this mode of expression that he even goes so far as to write to condemn Tate for not paying attention to metaphor. By making a decision to go to America, he will free himself from the yoke of abstraction. He became famous because the figuration allows the general public to immediately recognize the subject, but the subject allows David Hockney a form of subversion.

In his portraits, the sharpness of Hockney’s gaze is a severity that reaches almost brutality.

Bruno Ely

What are the characteristics of his work?
his homosexuality claim. In the early 1960s, homosexuality had not yet been decriminalized in the United Kingdom. He expresses this in a coded way by adding numbers corresponding to the letters of the alphabet to his pictures. The 23rd is a western by gay poet Walt Whitman. His arrival in the US in 1961 is a real breath of fresh air. He creates a series of engravings inspired A Rake Progression,By William Hogarth, a pretext for telling his life, the life of a young gay artist in New York. He then dedicates another series to Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933), whose poems fascinated him so much that he never returned the work he had borrowed from Bradford Library, from which he… Another characteristic of David Hockney is undoubtedly his desire. to translate reality without ever embellishing it. In his portraits, we see his loved ones develop over time, like Celia Birtwell, represented in all the vigor of her youth until today, aged, emaciated… The sharpness of her gaze is a severity that reaches almost cruelty. He is unyielding, even to his mother, the woman he surely loved most in the world.

Is he still an avant-garde, while he has mostly painted landscapes since the 2000s?
With his taste in figuration, he could be an academic painter, but he never is, because he is capable of renewing himself. He worked with the first copiers, the first fax machines. he sent unfinished works to his friends to reconstruct as soon as he received them, and from the age of 70 he started using an iPad, and he became a digital virtuoso. The way he painted, watercolour, engraving, drawing… Like Picasso. The comparison would please him, I think.

“David Hockney. The Tate Collection’, from January 28 to May 28, at the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence. museegranet-aixenprovence.fr: