Randall Wright’s docu-portrait of David Hockney, arguably Britain’s greatest living artist, is an amiable, agreeable study – as engaging and undemanding as a magazine profile with a great photo spread. It’s an attractive introduction or reintroduction to the man and his work, and to his remarkable experimentalist curiosity and readiness to pioneer new media. I knew about Hockney’s Polaroid mosaics, but until now I had never seen what you might call the 2.0 upgrade: he drives along, videotaping the countryside with nine digital cameras in fixed positions, producing a mesmeric chequerboard collage of moving pictures in fractionally misaligned frames. Hockney has used fax machines, colour photocopiers, iPhones and iPads to create art. It is fascinating.
The film reminded me of the thrilling boldness and scale of Hockney’s work, from his pop-art classic A Bigger Splash from 1967 to his colossal landscape Bigger Trees Near Warter from 2007. Although his art is accessible and exciting, I would have liked to hear more in-depth critical study or even a few dissentient voices. For example, my colleague Adrian Searle, who has been agnostic about the later, spectacular canvases.
Wright does not dwell on Hockney’s various opinions about smoking and the like, perhaps for fear of cliched discussions about national treasuredom. But it might have been interesting to interview artists with a similar background and career arc. Alan Bennett, perhaps?
Hockney’s California swimming pools look sexy. This is not just because of the bodies in them, or coming half out of them, but also because of the shimmering blueness of the water itself – so different from the endless blue of the sky, and exquisitely depthless and artificial. Some studies are, for me, mysterious, with a weird unawareness; they do not look posed or even observed, but arbitrarily captured with a shutter click, perhaps as a result of the photos Hockney took as the basis for the painting. A picture of his one-time partner shows him standing on the edge of the pool, looking down at the swimmer’s refracted image below the surface, but his eyes are closed. Perhaps he has been caught in mid-blink, or he has closed his eyes in some kind of reverie, or maybe he is in a somnambulistic state. Or is this a still from Hockney’s own dream?
His famous image of Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark with their cat – I had it in my student room for years – now seems to me strongly, even ferociously, posed and formal. They look alienated from each other and the artist, and I agreed with suggestions by some interviewees that there is a blankness and a dislocation in these compositions that hints at a loneliness in Hockney himself.
The picture of his mother emerges from this film as one of his most striking portraits, with the great china-blue eyes and bony, gnarled hands that are abstractions, more like tree branches. I would have liked to hear something more about exactly what his mum and dad felt about Hockney’s success. (The film, probably rightly, does not feature an anecdote I heard Michael Caine recently repeat: that Hockney’s mother came to visit him in California, and said it was amazing that with all that lovely sunshine no one had put any washing out. Now I suspect that this is an invention, and a rather mocking, derogatory one, at that.)
But this film does not reflect deeply on any pain in Hockney’s heart; it only acknowledges it in the sense that the pain has now subsided and been safely absorbed into what we understand to be the value of his work.
What does come through is Hockney’s dissatisfaction with how figurative painting renders space. Perspective is tyranny. That is why he was attracted to the collages, and to the bendy “panorama” photos you can take on your iPhone with a steady, sweeping movement. (If he did but know it, that framed widescreen group photograph he hangs over the fire in his Malibu home, showing all the boys at Bradford Grammar School in 1947, was probably taken with similar technology.) Hockney is out of sympathy with the flatness, or the monocularism of conventional representation. Unfortunately, that is, in fact, how a documentary camera is going to represent him here, and it is frustrating to be shown his works briefly, in ways that withhold some of their meaning and impact.
It’s an engaging and garrulous film, and Hockney is now a cheerful, grandfatherly figure, and an object lesson in taking the boy out of Bradford, and not the other way around.
