David Hockney is one of the world’s most famous living artists. Born in England in 1937 and renowned almost as much for his embrace of technology as for his inventive use of color and bold rendering of line, he has been honored with many exhibits around the globe since his first show, in London in 1963, launched him to artistic superstardom. His most celebrated paintings tend to be Matisse-like California seascapes and swimming pools and wondrous Yorkshire landscapes. His portraits, however, should not be overlooked, and the exhibition David Hockney: Drawing From Life at the Morgan Library in New York City means to ensure that they will not be. Drawing From Life collects over 100 of Hockney’s drawings from his youth to the present (Hockney made new drawings for this exhibition specifically), enabling us to trace his evolving interest in portraiture through his evolving relationships with the subjects of his portraits.
For Hockney, as for everyone, the story begins with his parents, Laura and Kenneth. Laura was a devout Methodist who worked for the London Rubber Company in Bradford, a heavily industrialized city in West Yorkshire, where David was born and raised. Kenneth was a clerk for a company of dry-salters who would later establish his own pram and bicycle restoration shop. Notwithstanding their working-class origins, both had a keen interest in the arts — Kenneth was an amateur photographer, and Laura was an avid reader — and they impressed upon their children the importance of education and culture.
David, who was inspired to become an artist after watching his father work with paint in his shop in the family basement of their house, would go on to paint several moving portraits of his mother, most of which are on display in Drawing From Life. Some are rendered with brown ink and green pen, a technique also favored by Vincent Van Gogh. And we sense quite vividly Hockney’s love for his aging mother in the photo collage My mother, Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire (1982).
Photo collage, in Hockney’s view, enabled him to render human subjects with more empathy than he could manage with traditional painting and drawing. He first started using photography in the ‘60s and has had an ambivalent relationship with the medium ever since. On the one hand, a photo can depict something more accurately than even the most skilled painter. On the other hand, Hockney believed that photography could never capture reality in the same way as the human eye. Despite its literal realism, that is, a photograph is untrue to reality. When we view things with our eyes, our perspective is never static but constantly shifting; in real life, we see movement, changes in angle and light, objects, and people from different sides. Hockney believed that collage could aspire to be even closer to reality than either painting or photography.
There are portraits on display in Drawing From Life of Hockney’s mother even into her 90s, as well as drawings of her extracted from his sketchbooks. Hockney used his sketchbook the way writers might use a notepad, drawing and scribbling, jotting down whatever passed through his head. Often, he used it to draw his mother. Hockney didn’t paint or draw his father with the same frequency, in part because his father died relatively young, in 1978, and in part because while he was alive, he was jittery and didn’t like sitting for portraits. Even so, one of Hockney’s first paintings was a portrait of his father, and it was also one of the first paintings he ever sold.
As the curators of Drawing From Life explain, Hockney sees drawing as an act of love and has always liked to draw the people he loves. While in art school, Hockney, who is gay, had complained about the female-only models they were given to paint. To be artistically inspired, he believed, one needed an attractive model. But what if one wasn’t attracted to women? Hockney petitioned the school for permission to bring in male models (the school made an allowance for one). His quest for a true muse, however, did not end until he met Gregory Evans in the early ‘70s, who quickly became Hockney’s model and lover and, eventually, his longtime companion, studio manager, and curator. Hockney’s early portraits of Evans on view here are done in a naturalistic style. Still, while living in Paris between 1973 and 1975, Hockney, who was visiting the Louvre frequently and imbibing Renaissance artists’ portrayals of young adolescent men, began to draw Evans in a slightly more sensualized and beautified (though still naturalistic) manner, some of the results of which are included in Drawing from Life.
Hockney has continued to explore genres and techniques throughout his career. After collage, he tried his hand at photography, and in 1999, after seeing a portrait by the French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Hockney began experimenting with a camera lucida, a 19th-century optical device that enabled artists to trace what they saw in broad daylight without the need for a dark enclosure, as was necessary with the camera obscura. Three sections of Drawing From Life display Hockney’s camera lucida drawings. Though the camera lucida is an unstable device that allows for a minimal range of motion, it allows for greater precision in rendering faces than does the pen or pencil. Hockney ended up making over 200 of these illustrations, several of which have been enriched with watercolor. Another section contains Hockney’s drawings of Celia Birtwell, a friend and fashion designer whom he first met in the mid-to-late ’60s. The first one here is from 1969, done in an architect’s rapidograph pen, which Hockney later referred to as “the hardest drawing I did.” And his colored pencil drawings of Birtwell are some of the most beautiful in the exhibition.
Hockney was interested in any sort of technology capable of producing images — woodblock printing, photocopiers, fax machines, and, eventually, computers. In the 1980s, he began creating art on computers but stopped after becoming dissatisfied with early computers’ insufficient aesthetic capabilities. By the 2000s, though, he felt that computers (and programs such as Photoshop) had become advanced enough to allow him to do on the screen what he had been accustomed to doing on paper and canvas. With computer art, you lose the sense of texture of the paper, Hockney said, but you gain the ability to make as many changes as you want.
The exhibition ends with several of Hockney’s iPad drawings. Hockney embraced the technology as a kind of digital sketchbook, and almost as soon as it became available in March 2010, he was sending iPad drawings to his friends. Although digital art is still a hard sell for traditionalists such as myself, even I have to admit that a few of his digital self-portraits on display here are some of his most expressive.
David Hockney: Drawing From Life first opened at London’s National Portrait Gallery in February 2020 but had to close only three weeks later during the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 lockdown. Fortunately, the exhibition is now available for a select number of daily viewers (reservations and advance ticket purchases are required) at the Morgan Library in New York through May 30. During this time of continued seclusion and social isolation, in which we have grown accustomed to hiding our faces from one another, Hockney’s vulnerable, contemplative portraits offer us a glimpse at the old and soon, one hopes, the new normality.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer, rabbi, and scholar from western Massachusetts. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
