Changing Your View of the World Through Art

by Kenneth Baker

October 26, 2013

The answer to a single question can confirm the significance of an art exhibition: Do you see the world differently - even for a moment - after visiting it?

"David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition," opening Saturday at the de Young Museum, passes that test. Golden Gate Park, half steeped in fog, never looked as symphonically green to me as it did after I exited the Hockney show.

Not only does he make vivid a startling range of green hues in landscape paintings, but his drawings - even those made on an iPad - continually probe for marks, textures and patterns to register nature's details.

That, at one level, may be the essence of observational drawing. The show's last rooms contain charcoal landscape drawings Hockney made outdoors, and inkjet enlargements of them, describing from five woodland vantage points "The Arrival of Spring in 2013 (twenty thirteen)" in Britain's East Yorkshire, where he has lived intermittently in recent years.

In making these images, Hockney worked without color - "of course, the Chinese thought you could get every color from black and white," he said in conversation at his Los Angeles studio - finding graphic equivalents not only for physical detail but for the changing play of light and shade across shifts in weather and time of day.

Careful viewers will find their eyes taking up that challenge unconsciously as they study the drawings. And responsive visitors' minds will carry the search for adequate graphic notation into the de Young's park surround. For a while, every branch and leaf will seem to trigger it.

The quandaries of pictorial representation have driven Hockney's whole career, of which "A Bigger Exhibition" samples only the past decade.

The confident execution of the first works we encounter makes it seem that Hockney never struggles. But he has included here something that deliberately contradicts that impression. The second large room at the de Young opens with a wryly labored watercolor on seven connected pages titled "The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction" (2003). The top six sheets, framed together, include a remake of Picasso's frankly terrible 1951 Korean War protest picture and backfired homage to Goya, "Massacre in Korea."

Abutting the watercolor at the bottom, almost like a label, is a separately framed watercolor image of a man shrouded by the tent of an antique camera pointed at "The Massacre." Hockney has somehow made the faceless photographer figure suggest a self-portrait.

The first-referenced "problem of depiction," of how to picture something, was Picasso's: He could not make style and sentiment connect in his politically motivated "Massacre" - he didn't even come close.

The second was Hockney's. He has not made his satirical picture justify the effort, no matter how facile, spent on it.

The third and fourth problems: how to reprise another master's work - as Picasso failed to do in this case. Hockney has made no secret of his competitive feelings toward Picasso. Having tried to undo pictorial art's obsession with illusions of deep space based on perspective geometry, Hockney naturally hopes to supersede Picasso, who did it first through collage and cubism.

Camera as symbol

Finally, the camera symbolizes yet more "problems of depiction," having resolved automatically certain difficulties of transcribing appearances and thus, in Hockney's view, locking us into a limited understanding of how seeing is experienced, as if we saw everything with a single eye, like a camera lens, rather than two.

He has tried by various means to unsettle that understanding - most dramatically through four nine-screen videos, "Woldgate Wood" (2011), which enfold visitors at the center of "A Bigger Exhibition."

But Hockney's main tactic in trying to break the complacency of vision and our thinking about it has been shifts in emphasis. These appear throughout the de Young survey.

Watercolor works

The show opens with a string of notional watercolors - self-portraits, still lifes, window views, followed by a chain of deft watercolor portraits.

Watercolor technique can become precious - think of John Singer Sargent at his most florid - but Hockney's is practical. He seeks the most resourceful solution to every descriptive challenge.

He shows us, incidentally, that a portrait succeeds not by being a good likeness of someone but by being a good likeness compared to other portraits whose truth we accept, for whatever reason.

Yet no trace of caricature enters the show until you round a second corner inside the entrance and see a series of landscapes Hockney painted in Iceland. Here he has resorted to all sorts of abbreviation and exaggeration to communicate the impact of what he saw, as if only overstatement could convey it.

The almost Fauvist color that enters many of Hockney's paintings of East Yorkshire may owe something to the blatant palette of the iPhone and iPad apps that he used to produce drawings.

Some of the iPad drawings displayed on large screens show us something truly new: computer playback of a drawing's formation, color by color, line by line. The decisions guiding the process may still remain mysterious, but seeing the process playing out - seemingly by itself - is even more like seeing through someone else's eyes than looking at finished representational art.

Hockney might seem an odd choice for the largest exhibition ever in San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums. But on at least two grounds it makes sense: The Bay Area has a deep history of interest in and production of figurative art, and Hockney's work has much to teach us about observation and depiction that links to the long history of art.

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition: Paintings, works on paper and video. Through Jan. 20. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600.www.deyoungmuseum.org.

Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle's art critic

Is Music the Key to Success? An Opinion Piece

OPINION

Is Music the Key to Success?

By JOANNE LIPMAN

Published: October 12, 2013

Some Excerpts from the longer piece:

CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard.

Enlarge This Image

Anna Parini

Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields?

The connection isn’t a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements.

The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously.

Look carefully and you’ll find musicians at the top of almost any industry. Woody Allen performs weekly with a jazz band. The television broadcaster Paula Zahn (cello) and the NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd (French horn) attended college on music scholarships; NBC’s Andrea Mitchell trained to become a professional violinist. Both Microsoft’s Mr. Allen and the venture capitalist Roger McNamee have rock bands. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, played saxophone in high school. Steven Spielberg is a clarinetist and son of a pianist. The former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn has played cello at Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Todd says there is a connection between years of practice and competition and what he calls the “drive for perfection. . . . . .  He adds that his cello performance background helps him work collaboratively: “Ensemble playing trains you, quite literally, to play well with others, to know when to solo and when to follow.”

For many of the high achievers I spoke with, music functions as a “hidden language,” as Mr. Wolfensohn calls it, one that enhances the ability to connect disparate or even contradictory ideas. When he ran the World Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn traveled to more than 100 countries, often taking in local performances (and occasionally joining in on a borrowed cello), which helped him understand “the culture of people, as distinct from their balance sheet.”

It’s in that context that the much-discussed connection between math and music resonates most. Both are at heart modes of expression. Bruce Kovner, the founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates and chairman of the board of Juilliard, says he sees similarities between his piano playing and investing strategy; as he says, both “relate to pattern recognition, and some people extend these paradigms across different senses.”

Mr. Kovner and the concert pianist Robert Taub both describe a sort of synesthesia — they perceive patterns in a three-dimensional way. Mr. Taub, who gained fame for his Beethoven recordings and has since founded a music software company, MuseAmi, says that when he performs, he can “visualize all of the notes and their interrelationships,” a skill that translates intellectually into making “multiple connections in multiple spheres.”

Woody Allen:   Still, he practices the clarinet at least half an hour every day, because wind players will lose their embouchure (mouth position) if they don’t: “If you want to play at all you have to practice. I have to practice every single day to be as bad as I am.” He performs regularly, even touring internationally with his New Orleans jazz band. “I never thought I would be playing in concert halls of the world to 5,000, 6,000 people,” he says. “I will say, quite unexpectedly, it enriched my life tremendously.”

“I’ve always believed the reason I’ve gotten ahead is by outworking other people,” he says. It’s a skill learned by “playing that solo one more time, working on that one little section one more time,” and it translates into “working on something over and over again, or double-checking or triple-checking.” He adds, “There’s nothing like music to teach you that eventually if you work hard enough, it does get better. You see the results.”

That’s an observation worth remembering at a time when music as a serious pursuit — and music education — is in decline in this country.

Consider the qualities these high achievers say music has sharpened: collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile conflicting ideas. All are qualities notably absent from public life. Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of view — and most important, to take pleasure in listening.        

To read more, try this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/is-music-the-key-to-success.html?pagewanted=2