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
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