A Very Personal and Tender Survey of the Works of David Hockney | David Hockney Portraits

book: David Hockney Portraits | Sarah Howgate, Barbara Stern Shapiro, ...

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	• David Hockney Portraits Sarah Howgate, Barbara Stern Shapiro, ... National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2006 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Maniac

Generally the portrait images were too small to really study his painting style. That is my only complaint. Interesting stories in the section describing all his sitters, famous or not. What a productive maniac he has been. 41 portraits of his dogs!!!

A Very Personal and Tender Survey of the Works of David Hockney

David Hockney is an artist whose works are familiar to everyone, whether from exposure to his many museum shows, his paintings and drawings included in every major survey of contemporary art, to his magical sets for operas such as The Magic Flute, Die Frau Ohne Schatten, The Rake's Progress, Tristan und Isolde, etc.

This current book DAVID HOCKNEY PORTRAITS is, for this reader, the most sensitive presentation of Hockney not only as an artist but also as a tender, feeling, caring human being. The book accompanies an exhibition soon to travel and includes over 250 examples of Hockney's view of his family, himself, his friends - famous and not so famous-, lovers, and pets. The result is a survey of Hockney's people-oriented works over the past fifty years.

Included are early pen and ink drawings from the 1950s, gentle and simple line portraits of his mother and father and himself, and progresses to the development of his large-scale paintings of life size portraits of family, lovers, and self-portraits. Many of the people depicted in these works are no longer alive and there is a sense of memory in some of the works that barely hides Hockney's sadness at their parting.

The book also opens the door to Hockney's experimentation with photography as an art medium, with several of his multiple view Polaroid collages of a single 'sitting' telling more stories than a movie. And after Hockney's excursion into that medium the portraits turn to painting his subjects from life.

Most of the works in this book have been published in other volumes or have become familiar to the public by other means, but it is the curatorial hand that makes his survey so fine and so immediate, a success not easily accomplished with an artist as private as Hockney: the collection is under the encouraging guidance of the artist. This is an excellent overview of a very special artist whose works continue to capture the imagination of viewers and fellow artists alike. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, April 06

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