Museum And Gallery

Portrait of the artist

By GREG COOK | February 22, 2006

Then in 1999, the amazing realism of Ingres’s drawings got Hockney wondering whether 19th-century artists and their predecessors achieved such illusions via deft use of lenses like the camera lucida, a prism mounted on a metal rod that allows artists to see and trace what’s in front of them on their paper below. He tried one out in a series of portraits and found the tool difficult but still achieved remarkable effects by using it to map out features that he then developed via direct observation and a skilled hand. His results sparked a ruckus in the art world. They could, for example, explain why Vermeer’s scenes often have a fuzzy soft focus. But if Vermeer was aided by lenses, is he the master we thought? Hockney’s theory is compelling, and whether he’s right or not, it makes you see Old Master works anew and gets you reconsidering what mastery is in the first place.

The end of the show is a mad dash of portraits — thick and thin, small, medium, large. Working with lenses led him back to making art without mechanical aids, the quicker the better, to emphasize the primacy of idiosyncratic human experience. After a while, you get to feel you’re watching Hockney exercise. But the repetition of familiar faces throughout the show helps you see stylistic changes between each appearance of Celia, or Henry, or Gregory. And then you watch the boy toys ripen into craggy middle age, Celia’s grinning granddaughter arrive, Hockney’s parents pass away, and the artist himself transform from a precocious teen into a gray-haired man staring out with searching blue eyes. Inevitably Hockney’s relentless productivity is about time ticking away, about death waiting somewhere out there on the horizon.

___

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The Museum of Fine Arts: http://www.mfa.org/

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Portrait of the artist

Hockney is cool. You are not cool. You are not Hockney.

By altern on 02/23/2006 at 2:05:26

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Portrait of portraiture: Learning more at the MFA
The MFA is offering a pair of lectures to help you think about the art of portraiture. This Wednesday, March 1, at 7 pm, former New Yorker staffer and David Hockney sitter Lawrence Weschler will give the Barbara and Burton Stern Lecture, “On Staying True to Life: The Stakes in Hockney’s Portraiture,” whose focus is promised to be, in the words of William James, “the pursuit of truth in the company of friends.” And on April 6, also at 7 pm, MFA director Malcolm Rogers will look at the history of British portraiture in “Frozen in Time: Masterpieces of British Group Portraiture.” Both talks will take place in Remis Auditorium; admission is $10 for MFA members, $13 for non-members. For more information and to purchase tickets, call 617.369.3306, or visit www.mfa.org.

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