The exhibition to see: David Hockney in the lands of Cézanne

The London Tate is being exported to the Musée Granet, in Aix-en-Provence, for a long-term exhibition featuring around a hundred works by David Hockney. All that remained was to convert this exceptional contribution from the international institution into an unprecedented demonstration around the work of an artist often exhibited in our latitudes. Bruno Ely and Paméla Grimaud, from Granet, in collaboration with Helen Little, from the Tate, ensured this. Although there is nothing revolutionary about the route – it is chronological – it is the prolific collection of paintings and drawings, many of which had never made the trip to France before, which constitutes its appeal.

We find here the well-known development of the artist: the stammering beginnings in Bradford, his native town, among which some paintings little or never seen, such as The Berliner and the Bavarian (1962); the iconic Los Angeles swimming pools; the monumental double portraits, including the iconic My Parents and its mirror where a reproduction of the Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca; works born from inverted perspective; iPad landscapes of the 2010s.

At the heart of the throne device In the studio, a 7-meter-long canvas dated 2017, where the artist, then based in Hollywood Hill, appears in the middle of old and recent works. A total of 3,000 digital photographs assembled into a drawing. The work, donated to the Tate by Hockney in 2018, has not yet been shown to the British; we are the first in France to discover it. “By playing from the unique vantage point of traditional perspective, it gives the impression of a focal point moving in three dimensions, reinforcing Hockney’s belief that if a viewer or performer is mobile, the image that result must also reflect several points of view”, emphasizes Helen Little.

“The eye is always in motion”

The artist describes it himself: “The eye is always in motion; if it does not move, you are dead. When my eye moves, the perspective varies according to the way I look, so well that it’s constantly changing; in real life, when you’re five people watching, there’s a thousand perspectives.” On the large colorful views of the Hotel Acatlan in Mexico, taken from his series moving focusabundantly lit here, he represents both interior and exterior spaces by shifting his palette to multiply the points of view before synthesizing them into a single image.

At Hockney, the theme of the workshop is nourished by the inspiration of his elders: Matisse, of course, but also Courbet and his Painter’s studio. For the artist, the studio remains the sacred place where questioning and observation construct representations of the way he perceives the world. Cézanne and Van Gogh have their place there, like Picasso, three giants who have a lasting influence on it. According to Bruno Ely, A Bigger card players “convokes both Cézanian iconography and the simultaneous points of view of Picasso’s cubism”. More than a wink, a tribute to the first versions of card players of Cézanne who see three seated figures and a fourth standing looking at them, a scene that Hockney replays in the background of his photographic painting. And, while he dresses the characters in contemporary clothes, he evokes, with a blue shirt hanging on the wall, the peasant smock worn by the players of the Aix master.