This naked 18-year-old (Hockney’s lover) pulling himself out of the pool is near the start of a fine line of wan boy toys. The delicate 1975 colored-pencil drawing Gregory Leaning Nude presents a cherubic Mr. Evans leaning against the studio wall. Asked about the many “same-sex couples” depicted in the show, Hockney demurred, saying, “They’re usually just friends actually. That’s a lot of the people I know.” Certainly so. But Hockney’s adherence to realism, in reaction to then art-world preferences for abstraction, resulted in a frank and loving report of gay life, of his friends and lovers and crushes, of long-time couples, of arousal. And this sort of straightforwardness is still unusual to see from a major artist in an august institution like the MFA.
This isn’t exactly news when it comes to Hockney, though. So what other insight do we gain from the narrowed view of the artist’s œuvre in “David Hockney Portraits”? One thing that jumps out is how his double portraits tap the electricity between two subjects, especially the three major canvases — American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968), Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), and Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-’71) — from the height of his photorealistic phase. In the Clark painting, which Hockney made as a wedding gift for his friends, fashion designer Ossie Clark sits in a green sweater and slacks, a cigarette in his fingers, his bare feet digging into the shag carpet, a white cat perched in his lap. At left, Hockney’s long-time subject and pal, the textile designer Celia Birtwell, stands in a black and red dress. The couple stare out at you from a darkened room, all the light coming from the open shutters of a window at the back. And then you notice a strange detachment between them and between the pairs in other paintings. Maybe Hockney is hinting at something in the sitters’ relationships — the Clarks separated soon after their painting was finished. But I suspect there’s more going on here. Hockney’s pairs rarely touch, let alone interact. Even together they are isolated and alone.
The show also points up Hockney’s experimentation with photography and lenses. In the early 1980s, he made a series of photo collages from Polaroid snapshots laid out in strict grids. He soon moved on to works like The Scrabble Game, Jan. 1, 1983, in which constellations of photographs are pasted down next to and atop one another. Here Hockney plays Scrabble while his mother watches and a friend racks her brain for an answer, then, yes, makes her move. These collaged photos re-examine Cubism, revealing untapped potential in its fracturing of space. The multiple viewpoints suggest what things look like as well as what we know of their overall construction and purpose, their platonic forms. And unlike conventional photography, which freezes a moment in time, Hockney’s collages show many moments and the passage of time in a way that corresponds more closely to how we remember. These are fertile areas for exploration, but Hockney hit dead ends marked by his Picasso knock-off paintings. No one else has pursued the ideas in a significant way.
