"DAVID HOCKNEY – A RETROSPECTIVE". Collectif. Editions The Los Angeles County Museum of Art en collaboration avec Thames and Hudson, Londres. 1988. Fort petit in-4 carré, dos droit, couverture souple cartonnée illustrée en couleurs. Pages de garde illustrées. 312 pages. Textes en anglais de R.B. Kitaj, Henry Geldzahler, Christopher Knight, Gert Schiff, Anne Hoy, Kenneth E. Silver, Lawrence Weschler, illustré de très nombreuses reproductions photographiques noir & blanc et couleurs, in-texte et hors texte, de travaux de David Hockney. Ouvrage réalisé dans le cadre de l'exposition éponyme itinérante au Los Angeles County Museum of Art du 04 Février au 24 Avril 1988 ; au Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, du 18 Juin au 14 Août 1988 ; à la Tate Gallery, Londres, du 26 Octobre 1988 au 03 Janvier 1989.

 

"Basic to David Hockney's art from the first has been the need to communicate directly with the viewer. Hockney is not at all involved in the creation of beauty as an end in itself. It is exactly this didactic urgency, this need to be heard plainly and to be understood clearly, which is the basis of his phenomenal popularity. No other artist today has been the subject of so many books, most of them generated by the prodigious flow of his own art, work that he produces in abundance and with great care. As often as I have visited David over the years, I have never seen an empty studio; his cornucopia is always full to brimming. Studying his earliest work, we may ask, How might he have painted if left to his own devices and those of his masters at Bradford School of Art? Judging from the very few paintings that survive from the mid-fifties - the painting of his father done in 1955, when Hockney was eighteen years old, being our chief evidence - we would be justified in thinking of Hockney as an Intimist, somewhat in the manner of Walter Sickert, whose work was sanctified in the English art schools of the day…" Extrait de "Hockney: Young and Older" par Henry Gledzahler.

 

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