At the Swimming Pool (1972)
David Hockney is celebrating a twin event this year. As he turns 80 on July 9, he has also been painting now for exactly 60 years and is undoubtedly the greatest living British artist still in action.
Tate Britain was naturally the first museum to organise the event in one of its four galleries. But the Pompidou Centre in Paris went a step ahead and its top floor at the moment is displaying no less than 160 of Hockney’s works that include not only paintings but also sketches, photographs and, many moving images following the artist’s own singular perceptions. Next in the line is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Bradford-born Hockney began his career as a teenager in the early ’50s and quickly developed his talents as a landscape painter with an unusually sharp eye for details. His initial works represent distant views, mainly over factories, roads and industrial workers’ living quarters as those were the only scenes accessible to him in his youth. However, despite their grey skies and rainy backgrounds, even those early paintings remain particularly unusual.
The Pompidou Centre in Paris pays tribute to one of the greatest British painters still at work
No longer able to hide his passion from his parents, he painted their portraits thus convincing his father — a factory accountant who had expected his son to follow the same line — that he would be happier as an artist. By 1957, at age 20, the artist sold his first work at a modest price of 10 pounds.
Soon he would move on a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London where his creations would assume newer proportions. By the early ’60s Hockney had also become a tireless traveller to the United States and Italy. His wild landscapes of the American West and the Italian Tuscany vistas are proof of his weird 3D vision, hitherto unseen in paintings whether modern or classical.
By the late ’70s, he would permanently move to his Yorkshire studio where he would create his immense ‘Pool Paintings’ and many of the gigantic canvases of natural scenes such as ‘Elderflower Blossom’ and ‘Bigger Trees near Warter.’
One large canvas that attracts many visitors and makes them stand before it for unusually long periods is ‘Portrait of the Artist/Pool with Two Figures.’ Though the onlookers are fascinated by the character staring down at the figure in the pool, much as a modern Narcissus contemplating his own underwater image, the artist insists his real subject is transparency. He took one-and-a- half year to finish the work in 1977 and destroyed many of the earlier efforts, being unsatisfied with the results.
Even today he does not hesitate experimenting with modern technologies. His Pompidou show carries many a slow-moving projection of trees and flowers shot in his peculiar vision through a movie camera.