Renaissance painters took pride in their intellectual mastery of the visible world: their management of perspective made them God’s surrogates, elucidating the laws that governed nature. David Hockney is the heir of this exalted tradition. The practice of making art in an array of media has never been enough for him; it has to be accompanied by theoretical conjectures, speculations about the metaphysics of vision, and a Leonardo-like enthusiasm for the aesthetic uses of the latest technology.
Paintings are silent, so Hockney has always needed an extra outlet for his effusive editorialising. In an earlier book of conversations, A Bigger Message, Martin Gayford served as Hockney’s enabler, a deferential Boswell who prompted the loquacious Johnson into making pronouncements; now the critic and the artist have teamed up to discuss the history of picture-making between the first daubs on cave walls and the latest Photoshopped images on computer screens.
The collaboration is unequal and a little uneasy. It purports to be the transcription of talk, but though we do seem to be listening to the chatty, whimsical, tape-recorded voice of Hockney – who has a tendency to repeat himself and to rely, as we all do, on vacuous adjectives such as “terrific” – Gayford’s contributions are obviously written not spoken, weighed down with dates, quotes and scholarly minutiae. Hockney is anecdotal, Gayford more academic. Hockney contributes impromptu and sometimes arguable insights, for instance about the reliance of painters on optical instruments such as lenses, or the inability of photographs to register space. Gayford’s task is to assemble the evidence that may or may not back up those cheeky assertions. The need for bibliographical back-up sometimes turns Gayford into a drearily discursive schoolmaster, as when he informs the dimmer-witted that “John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was one of the fundamental texts of 18th-century thought in the Anglo-Saxon world”.
The styles of the collaborators don’t match, and their minds don’t really meet. Their blocks of text alternate rather than intersect: maybe Hockney adjusted his hearing aids and tuned Gayford out. He prefers to ask himself rhetorical questions. “What makes a work of art?” he wonders at the outset. “I don’t know,” he disarmingly admits. Later, pondering graphic limitations, he asks: “How do I get around them?” and immediately, like the virtuoso he is, gives an answer: “If you’re told you’ve to do a drawing using only 10 lines or a hundred, you’ve got to be a lot more inventive with 10.”
The book in which Hockney propounded his much-contested theory about painting and optics was entitled Secret Knowledge, because the old masters and the lens polishers whose wares he believes they employed kept these professional mysteries under wraps. Hockney, less hermetic, shares his technical secrets as happily as he once exposed his amorous upsets in Jack Hazan’s film A Bigger Splash.
At their most vivid and vital, his stray remarks convey a sense of what it’s like to possess his manual and visual skills. He is eloquent about the primal act of making a mark, an offshoot of physical vigour. “Lines,” he says, “have a speed in them, which you can see.” He uses long brushes “so that the fulcrum of the stroke is at my shoulder”, but he also delights in the tactile pleasure of dabbing on paint, and thinks that the figures in Chardin’s paintings look solid because the painter patted the wet oil with the top of his brush, as if caressing them with an extra finger. Hockney praises the cubists for multiplying the points of view in a picture: we are binocular creatures, and our two eyes look at things from different angles. Arguing that nature is always three-dimensional, he even imagines himself inside the tiny head of a fly, which would see crinkles or crevasses in a surface that to human eyes remains boringly flat.
Ultimately, this survey of picture-making proves to be a one-man show, with Hockney irrepressibly popping up throughout the centuries. He jokes that he must be descended from the prehistoric painter of cave walls; he was an early adopter of gadgets such as the iPad that have turned all of us into artists. Somewhere between the troglodytic beginning and the electronic end, he claims that his designs for opera link him with the artists who devised spectacular festivities at Renaissance courts. And when Gayford places his modish tableau of the stylists Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell and their preening cat beside van Eyck’s portrait of the Arnolfinis, Hockney does not pretend to be bashful.
“All the great painters got looser as they got older – Rembrandt, Titian, Picasso,” says Hockney at one point. “All the great painters – Rembrandt, Titian, Picasso – got looser as they got older,” he reiterates later. All of us, it might be added, become stuck in self-quotation as we age. Because of its circularity, the book doesn’t really function as a history; perhaps it should be regarded as a portrait of Hockney as a sagacious, self-contented old man, who can surely be allowed his little vices. Having quit California to protest against the persecution of nicotine addicts, he remarks that Monet was almost 60 when he began to paint his lily pond at Giverny and adds with a gratified chuckle that “smoking and painting, he lived on to be 86”. One way or another, Hockney himself is far from being puffed out.
A History of Pictures is published by Thames & Hudson (£29.95). Click here to buy it for £24.56
