ENTERTAINMENT&ARTSWill Gompertz Arts editor16 January 2012David Hockney: Why art has become 'less' David Hockney thinks that over his lifetime art has become "less". He blames the art establishment (museums, galleries, art schools) for becoming over- enamoured with conceptual art: "It gave up on images a bit" the artist laments. By which he means t hat the artworld ignored figurative art: paintings, sculptures, videos and installations that aim to represent the known world: the sort of work Hockney makes: landscapes, portraits and still lifes. Instead he feels, museums and galleries have jumped too willingly into the unmade bed of conceptual art where lights go on and off in a game of philosophical riddles.
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He makes the point that a photograph documents only a split second in time.
Whereas a landscape painting, portrait or still life might appear to be a moment
immortalised in a single image, but it is in fact the culmination of days, weeks and in
the case of many artists (Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Hockney), years
of looking at a single subject.
It is a result of vast quantities of stored information, experience, jottings and spatial
sensitivity that has eventually appeared in the colours, composition and atmosphere
of a final finished artwork.
For all his outspokenness David Hockney is a canny man. He twinkles when talking
about why he chose to tackle the English landscape, seeing it, I suspect, as an
opportunity to make another big splash: a great subject overlooked by most other
artists.
When people told him that the "landscape genre was worn out" he thought it illogical.
"The way of looking at it [the landscape] might be worn out, but the landscape can't
be," he said. "It needs re-looking at…[to] look at it afresh."
Which is exactly what he has done. And it looks like Hockney on Yorkshire will be a
hit with the public as advance bookings are already at the upper end of the Royal Academy's expectations. But I wonder if the show will have a more lasting impact
than simply to re-assert the general feeling that the Bradford-born painter is the
country's greatest living artist.
I think it is possible that it could mark the moment - together with the Lucian Freud
exhibition that will be opening shortly at the nearby at the National Portrait Gallery -
when figurative art once again starts to become the dominant genre in the
contemporary exhibitions and displays mounted at the likes of Tate, Paris's
Pompidou and New York's Museum of Modern Art.
The paintings of urban Coventry by George Shaw were shortlisted for last year's
Turner Prize. He didn't win. But maybe this year will be different, and an artist who
produces landscapes or portraits or still lifes will carry the day?