The newly opened exhibition at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, “David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed,” provides a comprehensive overview of the distinguished British artist’s lifelong production of prints and multiples. The exhibit, featuring 145 works sourced from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation’s expansive collection, represents Hockney’s six-decade printmaking career from 1954 to the present.
The artworks displayed throughout the museum’s five galleries are organized intuitively rather than chronologically, touching on recurring themes and subjects that have interested Hockney throughout his creative life. His subject choices are diaristic: images of intimate acquaintances, environments and objects in his immediate vicinity. What chronology there is, centers around Hockney’s virtuosic experiments with emerging print and photographic technologies. He engages each as it emerges, exploring its properties and limitations, then restlessly moves on.
Two self-portraits, one very early and another more recent, anchor the exhibition’s entrance on the main floor of the museum. The first, a 1954 hand-colored lithograph of a barely post-adolescent, bespectacled Hockney, shows him sitting, arms crossed, in a pale yellow interior. The adjacent “Self-Portrait II” from 2012 was created on an iPad and portrays the artist fifty-eight years later.
“In the Studio, December 2017,” installed nearby on a sun-gold wall, provides a key to Hockney’s deeply personal preoccupation with how we see pictures. The artist gazes from the interior of his studio at the viewer, surrounded by irregularly shaped canvases. These are placed in a larger overall composition that has, in turn, a visual logic of its own. The bespoke space in each picture, rather than moving toward a single vanishing point, expands outward as our eye delves into the interior. A small painting of a twisty road traveling into the countryside (second from left in the top row of paintings), is repeated in the opened book that occupies the foreground. To make a musical analogy, the multi-faceted composition is visually polyphonic.
Much is made of Hockney’s adventurous adoption and adaptation of technical innovations—and they are impressive. But it should be noted that all of these experiments, from Polaroid composites to photomontages to photocopier prints and iPad drawings, are built on a solid foundation in traditional printmaking. His deep knowledge of each technical element—the ink, the printing process, the paper—comes from expertise he acquired during his art education in the U.K. Beginning with the Bradford School of Art from 1953-57, he was mentored by the eminent British painter Stanley Spencer and continued his studies at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962.
In 1961, Hockney’s world expanded radically during his revelatory visit to New York. In response to the openness and energy he observed there, he decided that his future lay in America, where he could live in an environment free of British social conventions and (not coincidentally) allow full expression of his gay identity. In his sixteen etchings, “A Rakes Progress,” sales from which financed his migration to the United States, in 1963, Hockney humorously identifies with the main character in William Hogarth’s print series of the same name. Though not strictly identifiable as autobiography, some images recount his personal experiences: dyeing his hair blonde for the first time, visiting Madison Square Garden, going to a gay bar. He registered a strong impression of the city’s chaotic social pathologies, corresponding in his own mind with eighteenth-century England. He observed, “I saw this and I thought this is like eighteenth-century London—it’s Hogarthian.”
In the main-floor gallery, a rare 1982 photo assemblage by Hockney features his mother in an interior composed of collaged snapshots. (His snapshot and Polaroid montages are infrequently displayed due to their sensitivity to light.) The fragmented space pictured in “My Mother, Los Angeles, Dec. 82” expands outward, requiring viewers to piece together the individual images into a perceived whole. Each photo presents a separate viewpoint, highlighting both Hockney’s technical artifice and our own process of seeing through glancing, scanning and gazing.
Jennifer Wcisel, curator of collections and exhibitions at the museum, has organized and installed the extensive collection with intelligence and sensitivity, using occasional saturated wall colors at intervals to enhance the effect of individual artworks and to guide visitors throughout the galleries. “August 2021, Landscape with Shadows,” composed of twelve iPad screen drawings assembled into a single printed image and set against a brilliant ultramarine blue wall, is a showstopper that demonstrates how large fields of saturated color can capture visitors’ attention and lead them through the exhibition.
At the entrance to the second floor of the exhibition, we are again confronted by two self-portraits. Larger than life and originally drawn on an iPad, one giant Hockney gazes out at the viewer with a cigarette dangling from his lips, while the other David puckers up. iPad portraits of family and friends—his favored subjects—occupy one side of the gallery while scenes from places he has lived, from California to Norfolk to his current home in Normandy, line the opposite wall.
Ever the documentarian of his own life, Hockney portrays his loving relationship with his two dachshunds in fifteen etchings that hang on a dark green wall in the center of the gallery. Stanley and Boodgie provided companionship and solace during the emotionally fraught period of the AIDS epidemic, when Hockney lost many intimate friends and acquaintances to the disease. The prints describe his pets with apparent affection in various states of repose. He says, “I notice the warm shapes they make together, their sadness and their delights. They are a wonderful subject—two little creatures that you love. We see images of hell lots of times. Heaven is much harder to picture.”
The sunlight and openness of California, where he lived from the 1960s through the 1990s, freed Hockney to make bigger gestures and use brighter colors in his work, as he recounts in a video that accompanies the exhibition. “Gregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4),” 1978, is typical of the artist’s embrace of the sybaritic and sunny California lifestyle. In Normandy, where he currently resides, his fascination with the light and movement of water in the landscape continues, as evidenced in his composite iPad drawing “25th July-7th August, 2021, Rain on the Pond.”
In the exhibition’s last gallery, we come to a finale of sorts. A large photographic montage, printed on paper and entitled “25th June 2022, Looking at Flowers,” features two images of a seated Hockney positioned at either end of the artwork, his back to us, observing the twenty still-life prints inside the picture. Simultaneously, we stand outside the frame, looking inward while turning our backs on the same twenty still life pictures behind us. We have become part of an improvised installation.
Visitors to the exhibition “David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed,” on view until November 2, have Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation to thank for a remarkably complete appreciation of work by a modern master. The art collectors’ evident enthusiasm for Hockney’s oeuvre is possibly best expressed by Schnitzer himself:
When I look at Hockney’s paintings, prints, videos, Xerox prints or iPad art, I am always drawn to the way he takes me on a journey filled with amazing colors, themes, images and challenging perspectives… Like the best of all artists, each time I look at his work, no matter how many times I have seen it, I am always able to find new visual messages that make looking at it again and again interesting and exciting.
“David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed” is on view at Grand Rapids Art Museum, 101 Monroe Center Street Northwest, Grand Rapids, Michigan, through November 2.
