David Hockney Research Articles

Considerations on Genuine Synesthesia in Art and Music

This essay focuses on the phenomenon of synesthesia. In an attempt to differentiate between genuine synesthesia and metaphorical synesthesia, I have searched for shared traits among synesthetic visual artists, as well as among composers and performing musicians. The field of synesthesia has been rife with misunderstandings. Though ever increasing numbers of exhibitions, books, and articles have used the title or subtitle, “Synesthesia in art and/or music”, few of these adequately define synesthesia. The major cause of the problem is that art and music historians and curators, as well as artists and composers themselves, have confused the desire to intermingle various art forms with the phenomenon of genuine synesthesia. I show the existence of recurrent patterns of artistic response to synesthetic experience, the evidence of shared characteristics, by taking the examples of Carol Steen, Marcia Smilack, Joan Mitchell, David Hockney, Messiaen. I also present the results of my investigation on the synesthetic perceptions of the pianist Joyce Yang.

Cut-outs and ‘silent companions’: theatricality and satire in Lubaina Himid’s ‘A Fashionable Marriage’

The article discusses Himid’s first cut-out series A Fashionable Marriage, a remaking in life-size cut-out figures of William Hogarth’s Marriage a la mode. The author draws links between Himid, David Hockney and Hogarth, and especially their shared love of the theatre. An extended analysis of the work shows how Himid uses satire to stake a place for Black and British art; reflective of the politics of the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s. The cut-out form is then discussed in relation to later work by Himid and linked to 17th-century Dutch ‘dummy boards’ or ‘silent companions’.

The Most Lupine of the Wolves of Wall Street? Jeff Koons and Artistic Practice as Hedge Fund Capitalism

Peter Schjeldahl corrects the perception of Jeff Koons being the Devil – ‘he is really only a subaltern demon: Beelzebub, Satan’s minister without portfolio at large. Koons attends to details of the Evil One’s plan.’ Why does Koons attract such opprobrium, however tongue-in- cheek its expression? Holding the title of the world’s most expensive living artist is sure to attract envious detraction but, despite his paintings garnering similar prices, David Hockney, in his homeland at least, is considered a ‘national treasure’. Koons may be well-off for an artist, but his wealth is modest in comparison to the value of the deceased estates of artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg or Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose reputations seem to be untainted by greed. Artists, including Salvador Dali and Damien Hirst, who have openly sought wealth through their artistic practice offend the lingering Romantic sentiment of great artists being above the lure of Mammon. Koons not only seeks super-profits for peddling kitsch commodities, he does so in a way analogous to hedge fund capitalism. As hedge funds are parasitic on the business of making things and providing services, so Koons’s artistic practice includes infringing others’ copyright and exploiting workers, while generating inordinate profits for himself and his investors. Koons was, once a commodities trader on Wall Street, this paper, which is a draft work in progress, considers whether he is perhaps the most lupine of them all and, therefore, a paragon of our time.

A Bigger Splash to the Narrative

The objective of this article is to offer an example of a work of art identified with what Paul Ricœur named polysemy or linguistic density. Some works of art exemplify a metaphoricity in their constitution and the metaphor would be a privileged model for the analysis of figurative art and of allusive figuration. I believe that the painting A Bigger Splash by David Hockney has an image game that is also a language game: the aesthetic figuration as semantic link between the verbal and the non-verbal, between the poetic and the pictorial. I argue that figuration through metaphoricity also exemplifies an ambiguity in Ricœur’s philosophy of language, and the distinction between the field of the pre-narrative and the narrative of the artwork clarify the aesthetic aspect of his theory of metaphor. The advantage of my example is that the immanent analysis of the metaphoric constitution of the work of art is compatible with the isolation of its narrative elements. The metaphoric redescription in painting should not be automatically extended to the narrative refiguration.

'A Play within a Play’: Why Hockney Still Matters at 80. A Review of the <i>David Hockney</i> Exhibition at the Tate Britain

This is a review of the recent Hockney retrospective held at the Tate Britain in London.

La pasta de papel como material de creación artística

En la creación artística el papel es uno de los materiales más utilizados como soporte por su enorme versatilidad. Por ello, existen infinidad de artistas trabajando con este material en sus variadas configuraciones. En este sentido encontramos obras artísticas que no solo consideran el papel con material de estructura, sino como materia de construcción de la obra con el que crear y combinar multitud de elementos plásticos. Este trabajo es una investigación que presenta de manera sintetizada los procesos y materiales que utilizan artistas que crean sus obras con pastas papeleras. En el corpus central del trabajo mostramos desglosadas, algunas de las múltiples posibilidades y combinaciones expresivas que ofrecen las pastas producidas por artistas. Se describen procesos, herramientas y materiales utilizados en la obtención de las obras. Además se incluyen diversas variantes llevados a cabo por los artistas para optimizar el carácter expresivo. La serie de obras investigadas en este artículo pertenecen a artistas de ámbito internacional como Chuck Close, David Hockney, Bill Weege o Lucio Muñoz.

A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings by David Hockney

Reviewed by: A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings by David Hockney Deborah Stevenson Hockney, David A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings; by David Hockney and Martin Gayford; illus. by Rose Blake and with photographs. Abrams, 2018 128p ISBN 978-1-4197-3211-9 $24.99 R* Gr. 4-9 "When I begin a picture, one of the first questions I have to ask is: What do I do with the space? How can I tell a story in this space?" So says legendary artist Hockney, who along with his co-author Gayford here revamp their 2016 adult book, A History of Pictures, for young people. Chapters are organized conceptually, on topics such as "Light and Shadows," "Mirrors and Reflections," and "Paintings and Photography," while the discussion and examples range from cave paintings to movies to graphic art for games. The text is written in two clearly notated voices, with Hockney's and Gayford's words in different fonts, that build on each other's points and keep commentary informal and manageable. The result is a lively, curious, and deeply informative book about art. It's especially good at exploring the fascinating technical components in a way that most art books don't: Hockney talks about the high cost of paper limiting the size of Rembrandt's drawings; the challenge of translating a locale's particular light to marks on a page; the dramatically, implausibly dark shadows in Caravaggio's work and how he might have made them. Throughout, the book evinces an infectious enthusiasm for the making of art in many different ways and the evolution of those ways. The layout is appealing, with lots of white space as well as reproductions of work by Hockney and a pile of other artists appearing on just about every page. Blake's sturdily drafted small figures in watercolor-style digital images caper through the extra space, sometimes tipping a little too far to the childlike but often providing additional illumination of key points. End matter includes a timeline of art-relevant inventions, a glossary, endnotes, a bibliography, notes on included artworks, and an index. DS Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Dynamic tensions in A. S. Byatt’s “A Lamia in the Cévennes”

ABSTRACTA. S. Byatt’s short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes” is built on a principle of dynamic tension that operates across all her work, established in the initial part of this article by her critique of D. H. Lawrence’s cosmological dichotomies, her subversion of gender and sexuality in Possession, the deconstruction of postmodern theory in The Biographer’s Tale, and her retelling of the myth of Melusine. The second part of the article analyzes how these dynamic tensions influence the story in question, from Byatt’s critique of Keats’s romanticism, to her subversion of the line between myth and reality, her examination of realism and abstraction through references to David Hockney, and her reframing of these questions in terms of artistic and cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality. These examples demonstrate the critical mindset at work in Byatt’s fiction, which confronts the complexities that necessarily co-exist in life and art.

Exhibition: David Hockney and the BJGP.

David Hockney Tate Britain London , 9 February 2017–29 May 2017 One of the nice things about going to a David Hockney exhibition is that almost everyone comes out smiling. This was certainly true at the recent Tate Britain retrospective David Hockney: 60 years work which brought together, in a compact show in only 12 rooms, key pictures from the 1960s to the present. Rather like a visit to the Frick Collection in New York, a Hockney exhibition contains almost nothing ugly, visceral or alarming, although it raises plenty of questions. I am hopeful that a visit to the Life &Times section of the BJGP also puts a smile on some of our readers’ faces, and makes you ask some questions. I trust that you will not think it too fanciful if I draw some parallels between Hockney’s career and the development of the Journal, and of general practice more broadly. Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool acrylic paint on canvas by David Hockney, 1966. Photograph by Richard Schmidt. Copyright David Hockney, National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. Hockney is 80 this year, despite being a dedicated smoker, and began his …

デイヴィッド・ホックニーの《劇中劇》(一九六三年) : 一九六〇年代に描かれたカーテンの連作の文脈から(第六十三回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

デイヴィッド・ホックニーの《劇中劇》(一九六三年) : 一九六〇年代に描かれたカーテンの連作の文脈から(第六十三回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

デイヴィッド・ホックニーの「逆遠近法」再考 : 一九七〇〜八〇年代の日本美術受容に着目して

デイヴィッド・ホックニーの「逆遠近法」再考 : 一九七〇〜八〇年代の日本美術受容に着目して

Between a Rock and a Blue Chair: David Hockney’s Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians (1965)

Travel and cultural exchange between the United Kingdom and the United States of America became a key feature of the 1960s, shaping the world view of many a British artist, curator, architect, writer, film-maker, and academic. Against that wider backdrop, I offer here a focused reading of David Hockney’s 1965 painting, Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians. With its faux-naive idiom and overt but quirkily un-modern American theme, the work conveys the artist’s singular take on what it felt like to be a Brit at large in the US, an environment at once wondrously exotic and at times strikingly banal. Close analysis discloses Hockney’s rich repertoire of artistic and literary allusions in Rocky Mountains, and the meanings and associations these may have encapsulated.

Ben Buchanan Photographs of Artists

Previous articleNext article FreeAcquisitionsBen Buchanan Photographs of ArtistsMary SavigMary Savig Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis story begins on April 23, 1985, at Mr. Chow restaurant on East 57th Street, in Manhattan. Dozens of artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andy Warhol, had gathered for a dinner hosted by the owners of Area—a downtown nightclub known for its immersive and idiosyncratic environments—in advance of an upcoming “Art” theme there (see section opener and fig. 1). Ben Buchanan (b. 1958), Area’s official photographer, has donated to the Archives twelve photographs documenting these events, several of which highlight the activities of the gender-bending performer and artists’ muse Bernard Zette, who helped bring the nightclub’s elaborate installations to life.fig. 1. Ben Buchanan, “Jean Michel Basquiat [and] Benjamin Liu 1985 at Mr. Chows NYC.” Ben Buchanan Photographs of Artists, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.During Area’s brief existence (1983–1987) Zette assumed the guise of dozens of characters, from Marie Antoinette to Cleopatra to a mermaphrodite (a hermaphrodite mermaid). At Mr. Chow, he transformed himself into a human guestbook by acquiring many of the diners’ signatures on his coral-hued unitard. “I positioned myself in the entry vestibule and somehow coerced everyone to sign their names,” he recalled in a 2015 email to Buchanan. Alex Katz signed the chest, and Julian Schnabel (who crashed the party) initialed just below. Stefano and Dennis Oppenheim signed the right thigh. David Hockney added his name along the right hip. Kenny Scharf doodled a face over the pelvis. Basquiat embellished his signature (which graced the back of both legs) with a trademark symbol. William Wegman sketched a small dog with a halo on the left foot. Warhol signed under the left arm. And Keith Haring drew one of his dancing figures on the rear end.Weeks later, Zette posed again as a human guestbook to kick off the “Art” theme at Area. At the opening event, and periodically throughout the theme’s six-week run, he draped himself over the open pages of a large book made of foam, posing to display the artists’ signatures on his unitard (fig. 2). Zette later sold the garment and it eventually made its way to a gallery in Japan, where it was purchased by its current owner, an anonymous collector in Sweden. In 2015, Buchanan photographed the unitard in his London studio, and these images are included in his gift to the Archives.fig. 2. Ben Buchanan, “Bernard ‘Zette’ human guestbook on display at AREA 1985 NYC” (detail). Ben Buchanan Photographs of Artists, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.Buchanan’s collection of photos help contextualize a more formal portrait of the dinner guests at Mr. Chow, taken by photographer Michael Halsband and donated to the Archives by Dennis Oppenheim in 1996. Indeed, it was this very portrait that prompted the Swedish collector to share with me the story of Zette’s unitard. More broadly, Buchanan’s 1985 photographs document many of the art world luminaries who expanded the boundaries of pop art by merging art with everyday life. His images compliment the Archives’ existing holdings of personal papers, gallery records, and oral history interviews with artists who attended the events at Mr. Chow and Area, including Hockney, Oppenheim, Warhol, Wegman, and LeRoy Nieman, among many others. Notes Mary Savig is the curator of manuscripts at the Archives of American Art. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 56, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692641 © 2017 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

1950’ler sonrasında gelişim gösteren pop sanat natürmortları üzerinden bir sanat tarihi okuması

Pop Art was first appeared in London Art Schools and then later it became a new movement of art in New York after 1950s. This movement, in which artists such as Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Roy Lithenstein, Tom Wesselman, Claes Oldenburg, David Hockney, and Jasper Johnes had created works in many different styles, came to the fore with the extraordinary “still life” pieces created under the effect of this movement. In this study, rather than examining Pop Art as only an art movement, we aimed to examine the still life works of the artists of this movement from the perspective of the history of art literature, and to define their contributions to today’s art. The Pop Art still lifes are important as they form the foundation of the graphic design techniques that are still practiced today. The combination of the daily used materials with art, which turned into a platform where ordinary items have gained value as art pieces, has been a critical juncture in history of art. For the study, we examined this genre over the 350 samples we selected from the works of artists who produced their art pieces under the influence of pop art, and interpreted a small selection of these samples from the aspect of today’s art literature.

Musical Metaphors in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential poems of the 20th century. Inspired by Picasso’s painting The Old Guitarist, the poem in turn inspired Michael Tippett’s sonata for solo guitar, “The Blue Guitar” (Tippett 1983) and David Hockney’s The Blue Guitar: Etchings by David Hockney who was inspired by Wallace Stevens who was inspired by Pablo Picasso (Hockney and Stevens 1977). Central to “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” the metaphor of the musical instrument as a transformational symbol of the imagination is common in Stevens’s poems. The structure of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” according to J. Hillis Miller, is the structure of stream-of-consciousness. Stevens’s poem creates what has been called “the deconstructed moment in modern poetry,” “an attempt to project a spatialized time that can be viewed from the privileged position of a timeless, static moment capable of encompassing a life at a glance” (Jackson 1982). This consciousness, which Derrida refers to as the “trace,” Stevens calls “the evasive movement of language.” The trace is the perception of the absence of meaning after the word or perception has passed, the glimpse of a hidden meaning that immediately vanishes. Stevens’s poem influenced not only other poets, artists and composers; references to and echoes of his ideas and techniques can be seen in popular music and culture well into the 21st century.

The Impact of Era Features and Characteristics on Landscape Painting-A Critical Study of Joseph Turner and David Hockney

The Impact of Era Features and Characteristics on Landscape Painting-A Critical Study of Joseph Turner and David Hockney Ihab Mahmoud Hanafy Abstract This study aims at shedding the light on the impact of the technological and cultural features associated with an era on landscape painting. A critical study is carried out analysing the artworks of two British painters lived in two different eras. These are “Joseph Turner" and “David Hockney”. Painters’ artistic features including the construction of their paintings are discussed. It was found that each era has a great impact on forming artists’ colour palette, composition and media used. Therefore, cultural and technological features associated with an era should be taken into consideration in the process of criticising artworks including painting. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijaah.v4n2a6

White Skin, Black Flag: Hardcore Punk, Racialization, and the Politics of Sound in Southern California

The year 1978 was an awfully weird time to be young in Southern California. Perhaps nowhere else at that time could a young person be so well attuned to cultural contradictions of American capitalism, to gap between media's California dreams and their own California nightmares. In summer of that year, in Orange County, which is immediately south of Los Angeles (LA), suburban populist Howard Jarvis led first in what would become a series of nationwide tax revolts. Jarvis's revolt resulted in passage of California's Proposition 13, which severely decreased property tax rates in state for even wealthiest property owners. According to California historian and urban theorist Mike Davis, a contemporary newspaper called passage of Proposition 13 the Watts riot of middle classes.1 It was culmination of so-called slow growth movement and decades of redlining, restrictive covenants, and nimbyism (a prototypically Californian ideology that said, Not in my backyard), and a disaster for region's working poor and its increasingly alienated minority communities (black, white ethnic, Latino, and Asian alike). Indeed, socioeconomic consequences of Proposition 13 are still being felt today, during tax-starved California's perennial fiscal crises and its emergence as United States' preeminent carceral state.Yet, to turn on radio or television in late 1970s Southern California was to be greeted by rictuses of politicians like Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown; saccharine disco of Bee Gees or Donna Summer, whose most LA-centric and aesthetically inconsequential song, MacArthur Park, was a number-one hit in 1978; or television programs promoting aspirational fantasies of New West, like Dallas and Vega$, both of which debuted in 1978. Films set in Los Angeles, such as Heaven Can Wait and California Suite, both among top-grossing films of 1978, offered audiences a breezy respite from one-two punch of post-Vietnam War movies that dominated Academy Awards and were also commercially successful in that year, Ccnning Home and Deer Hunter. California Suite, which was filmed mostly at Beverly Hills Hotel and featured painter David Hockney's pastel LA dreamscapes in its credit sequence, was only film besides Coming Home or Deer Hunter to win a major Academy Award that year, for Supporting Actress Maggie Smith. Nowadays, LA-centric commercial culture of this ilk- MacArthur Park, California Suite-has been nearly erased from our collective memory, perhaps because its anodyne fantasies sting when recollected alongside socioeconomic disaster that was about to befall Los Angeles, and eventually rest of United States, with election of Ronald Reagan, a Southern California export, who starved nation's inner cities and arguably produced socioeconomic conditions that led to 1992 LA riots.However, in California at that time, there were also stirrings of an existential and political revolt against these anodyne fantasies beginning to emanate from Hollywood, East LA, Orange County, and South Bay, in form of LA's nascent punk scene. In 1977, Brendan Mullen had opened his Hollywood club, Masque, which would provide LA punk scene with its incubator and home for next two years. In 1977 and 1978, all of most important LA punk bands debuted-the Germs, X, Screamers, and Bags, among many others. In 1978, Santa Ana band Middle Class would release its debut EP Out of Vogue, usually thought of as first West Coast hardcore record, and, later that year, a new band called Black Flag released its debut EP Nervous Breakdown on band's own SST record label, which bandleader and guitarist Greg Ginn founded with money he had earned by running a mail-order electronics business for ham radio operators.2 The label name was a remnant of this period-Solid State Transmitters. Over next eight years, until it broke up in 1986, Black Flag would emerge as perhaps most emblematic hardcore punk band not only in Southern California, but also in United States more generally. …

Photographic adaptations of Cavafy

Abstract This article offers a critical discussion of photographic projects based on Cavafy’s poetry. It begins with an overview of the theoretical implications of photographing poetry within the wider framework of photography and literature as fields interconnected in their narrative concerns. To establish the link between photographic and other visual adaptations, the article goes on to discuss Cavafy in painting; this dicussion proves that gay agendas that framed the project of such photographers as Duane Michals or Dimitris Yeros, had already appeared in the work of painters, notably David Hockney. In its second part, the article examines in detail the most important photographic adaptations of Cavafy’s work from 1978 to the present day, placing them in two large categories: the ‘gay’ adaptations, which focus on issues of body, sexuality and LGB rights, and those (more recent ones) that identify Cavafy with modernity, aestheticism and memory. The proliferation of photographic projects based on Cavafy points to his transformation from literary figure to a creative field inviting artists to self-expression.

O conhecimento secreto de David Hockney e as múltiplas janelas de tempo nos desenhos de Jandira Lorenz

Pensando na relação “leitura visual: arte, mídia e cotidiano”, entre ciência e imagem e nos processos de produção de imagens com problemas estéticos e de representação, alguns artistas nos chamam a atenção, pois utilizam a própria arte como fonte de aprendizagem, em procedimento científico, de forma mais explícita. Um deles é David Hockney, que com o livro "O Conhecimento Secreto", nos explica como tenta redescobrir as técnicas perdidas dos grandes mestres, mostrando seu fascínio pela pintura, pelo mágico universo surgido da capacidade e necessidade que tem o homem de representar a realidade e de inventá-la. O outro é a artista plástica Jandira Lorenz, professora de história da arte, que em sua produção revela sobrevivências, sintomas de sua experiência com os estudos em arte. Este artigo visa construir um pensamento em relação à montagem de tempos históricos diversos nas obras da artista Jandira Lorenz com o livro de David Hockney que contribuiu com a possibilidade de estabelecer um ponto de convergência quanto às características de multiplicidades e particularidades na compreensão das imagens vistas por janelas múltiplas na recente pesquisa do acervo completo de desenhos de Jandira Lorenz. Ao enfocar a ligação desses dois artistas com a arte e a ciência, sobretudo, enfatizamos o valor da pesquisa artística.

An artistic photographic collage on a mobile device

Computer graphics and image processing technologies for editing photographs taken by a user, and for photographic entertainment, have increased in recent years. One of these techniques, non-photorealistic rendering (NPR), is the focus of this study. In this study, we propose a method for applying David Hockneys photographic collage filtering on mobile devices by using several well-known computer graphics and image processing techniques. This process involves taking a sequence of images and extracting feature points, and using these feature points to deform an image. Finally, we obtain a photographic collage using the David Hockney style by generating a patchwork.