Painting: The Play’s the Thing

In Southern California, where palm trees grow outside of hotel lobbies, one of the first palm trees that the visiting British artist ever saw was made of plastic. It was the kind of experience that has lured David Hockney, 28, into spending most of the past 2½ years in the U.S. “Cézanne used to paint pictures of paper flowers,” he says, “and I painted that plastic tree not with a realistic sky but a realistic painted sky behind it.”

Hockney is one of Britain’s brighter young talents who unabashedly admire America’s folk-pop imagery of the dragster, the supermarket, and the ad-cluttered cityscape. They approach art with much the same witty enthusiasm, technical virtuosity and cool gamesmanship as do the Beatles.

Gold Medal & Lamé. British art has long leaned on literary meanings and social satire. Hockney, following Hogarth, has done his own etching album on The Rake’s Progress. Hockney’s witty series is a chronicle of his first trip to America. His Bedlam scene shows him lined up with other lunatics, ears plugged into rock ‘n’ roll-thumping transistor radios, wearing “I swing with WABC” sweatshirts.

Hockney is something of a sketch himself. He does himself up occasionally in a gold lame dinner jacket and a blond-dyed hairdo (Clairol’s “Champagne Ice”), but he has a manner that matches the sturdy guttural of his native Yorkshire origins. London’s Royal College of Art at first refused to grant the rebellious painter a diploma, wound up awarding him a gold medal. Last week his third one-man show in as many years opened in London’s Kasmin gallery.

Through the Scrims. Hockney once delighted in verbal as well as visual wit. One painting, showing two men rushed by a ferocious leopard, was coolly captioned: “They’re perfectly safe. This is a still.” Recently he has abandoned word play to pun pictorially with the very notion of art. In his Picture of Rocky Mountains with Tired Indians (see opposite page), the title refers to the modern chair at right, placed there for composition purposes, not for the Indians. His More Realistic Still Life is a primer on how to place imaginary apples and a vase on a cloth. To underline his intent, he sometimes paints false frames around his canvases to force the viewer to see the works as paintings of paintings.

Although Hockney never loses the sense of direct observation, he makes his paintings step back from reality through successive scrims, screens and curtains that dissolve the boundaries between the real, the imitation and the out-and-out fake. A Hockney still life becomes a cartoon of apples, a stage set, then an abstraction—and finally a comment on painting itself.