The David Hockney retrospective currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the three or four best museum shows in New York right now. Hockney, as most everyone knows, is a celebrated English painter who visited Los Angeles in the early ‘60s and decided to stick around. There, he painted coolly observed scenes of palm fronds and turquoise swimming pools that seemed to define something new about America, locating pleasure in near-emptiness.
This took considerable moral fortitude. For one thing, Hockney was a realist during the heyday of abstract painting, when narrative, plot and spatial depth were declared taboo. For another thing, he depicted visibly gay figures in an era when homosexuality had yet to be decriminalized in the English courts.
But now that questions of identity— both sensual and racial — have sprung to the forefront of contemporary art, and figurative painting is ascendant again, Hockney, at the age of 80, seems remarkably relevant.
The Met show, which was organized by curator Ian Alteveer, covers six fervidly inventive decades but feels crisp, with not an ounce of painterly fat. By the end of the show, whose last gallery brings together recent views of Hockney’s home in the Hollywood Hills and its jutting blue terrace, you are likely to notice many new things about a painter whom you thought you knew well.
For instance, as I went through the show, I became aware that Hockney is a Master of the Chair. Over the years, he has lavished serious and sometimes obsessive attention on depicting a variety of chairs and the fabrics in which they’re upholstered. They capture his affection for decorative detail and can be viewed as a stand-in for the artist. His chairs have included shabby-chic armchairs covered in floral or polka dot chintz; fancier lounge chaises in cherry red; and hardwood folding chairs, the last of which appear in a tender double portrait of his elderly parents, perhaps to emphasize the hardness of their working-class lives.
Sometimes a chair can seem more alive than the people in his paintings. “California Art Collector” (1964), for instance, shows a svelte woman clad in black sitting in a poolside cabana and gazing at an abstract sculpture that echoes her own flattened and schematic forms. The chair upon which she sits, by contrast, has volume and heft, with one side brightly lit, the other in shadow. Truly, the chair has the fullness of a monument. Matisse famously said that art should aspire to be like a comfortable armchair that provides a respite from our chaotic modern lives. Hockney gives us that chair, although one suspects from his prolific output that he himself seldom sits down.
