Hockney Portraits at the Royal Academy

Back in 2012, the Royal Academy in London put on a very popular show of David Hockney’s landscapes which, as it turned out, marked the end of his revisiting of his Yorkshire roots and his subsequent return to Los Angeles. Last year, Annely Juda Fine Art’s exhibition, David Hockney Painting and Photography, gave his UK admirers a chance to see some of his recent work including group and single portraits. Some of the latter have now re-appeared in David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life.

All these works (and another 10 or so not at the RA) were executed in acrylic on canvas taking two or three days each between July 2013 and March 2016. To be exact, there are 81 single portraits and one double, Augustus and Perry Barringer 16th, 17th June 2014, in this show. One subject, Bing McGilvray, appears three times, and J-P Gongalves de Lima and Jonathan Mills, twice each, so there were 79 different sitters, all being friends, family or acquaintances of the artist. As well as there being three portraits of members of Hockney’s own family, the same fairly distinctive surnames often appear more than once, for example Velasco, Schmidt, Pynoos, McHugh and Perlman. Hockney painted the still life, Fruit on a Bench 6th, 7th, 8th March 2014, when a sitter didn’t turn up.

The pictures are identical in size, with all the sitters in the same chair against a background divided blue green. Hockney didn’t specify what his sitters should wear, but nonetheless they are all rendered in vivid colours. A lot of the subjects were unknown to me and I suspect would also be to many of those visiting the show. Barry Humphries 26th, 27th, 28th March 2015, (above right) is, of course, an exception, recognisable from television but looking here more like Sir Les Patterson than Dame Edna Everage. All Hockney fans will know Celia Birtwell 31st August 1st 2nd September 2015, (above left).

Larry Gagosian 28th, 29th September 2013 (above left) and Benedikt Taschen 9th, 10th, 11th December 2013 (above right) are familiar as names but not as faces. Photographs of Jacob Rothschild 5th, 6th February 2014, (below right) have been in the media recently because of his views about Brexit.

On the whole, Hockney’s older sitters seem more interesting, or perhaps inevitably more characterful, than young ones and in general male sitters seem to engage Hockney more than females (disclosure: an old male speaks!). So, and just for example, Frank Gehry 24th,25th February 2016 (below left) made more of an impression on me than Chloe McHugh 9th, 10th, 11th November 2013 (below right).

I included some of Hockney’s earlier portraiture in a post about Randall Wright’s film in 2014. Tate Britain’s David Hockney next year is almost bound to include Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71) but I would very much like to see Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968. That would certainly put the works at the RA in perspective, as might this long-forgotten book cover (left). The informative exhibition catalogue by Tim Barringer and Edith Devaney covers Hockney’s evolution as a portrait painter from the 1950s as well as this show and who the sitters are. The Italian printers have delivered at the high standard the authors deserve.  

David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life ends on 2 October 2016. The Tate Britain exhibition, David Hockney, will be from 9 February – 29 May 2017.

Michael Grandage’s ‘Genius’

To describe Genius as unusual would probably be an understatement. It is Grandage’s first film, although he is an eminent director in London theatre. It is set in the USA in the 1930s, but was shot in England in 2015. It includes cameos of two of America's most famous writers, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, but these are played by Dominic West (British) and Guy Pearce (Australian). A Brit is cast as the film’s main character, Maxwell Perkins, pre-eminent literary editor of the time at Scribner's in New York but obscure now in the UK and probably so even then. When Genius is released in the UK, Perkins should gain a little more recognition, if only for having been brought to the screen by no less than Colin Firth. To add to the confusion, the film is based on a biography published as long ago as 1978: A Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.

Genius is not just a biopic but a bi-biopic of Perkins and of the writer Thomas Wolfe (no, not Tom Wolfe), played by Jude Law (British), covering the years between their first meeting in 1929 and the latter's death in 1938 at the age of 37. Wolfe arrives in Perkins' office with a voluminous and much-rejected manuscript titled O lost. Those (like me) who haven't read anything by Wolfe will just have to accept that his style was prolix before editing and wordy afterwards. Perkins produces his red pencil and convinces Wolfe to agree to the slimming down of the thousand pages of O Lost by hundreds of pages to transform it into Look Homeward, Angel, a best-seller in 1929. An even more epic set of deletions is required in 1935 to turn the four crates of hand-writing constituting the draft of Of Time and the River into something publishable.

Perkins never had, but clearly wanted, a son, despite his wife gamely producing five daughters. So there is an inevitable father-missing-a-son dimension in the close Perkins and Wolfe collaboration, although Perkins was only 16 years older. A classical rite of passage arises when Wolfe, his fame secured by Perkins, departs for another publisher. Not that Wolfe had been too much troubled earlier when he discarded the theatre designer Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman, Australian), his lover and patron in the days of his obscurity. Another theme is provided by Perkins’ musings over the nature of the role of an editor when it involves so substantial an input to a writer’s work. Just which genius should be credited with the outcome? Similar issues arise when artists produce works with the help of “assistants”, but the convention for literary editors is to stay in the shadows.

Many of the US reviewers of Genius did little to conceal their dismay at the film’s UK provenance and, apart from Laura Linney as Perkins' wife, Louise, the absence of a significant involvement by any of their own. Richard Brody in the New Yorker, admitting it was “a facile way to review it”, concentrated on a fact-check of Genius against Berg’s biography, identifying various errors and simplifications. His justification seemed to be the film’s title card describing Genius as “a true story”. However, on even brief consideration this is surely just as ambiguous a phrase as “editor of genius”. It’s a testimony to the craft of the British film industry that  American reviewers didn't seem to think that the realisation of New York and elsewhere in the US in the 1930s lacked authenticity.

Firth is a master of conveying the feelings of inhibited souls (for example in The King’s Speech) in a few words or none. Apparently  Perkins was very reluctant to take his fedora off.  Kidman’s Bernstein is aggrieved but justifiably so – whether Law’s Wolfe is over the top or how the man was, I don’t know. West and Pearce are convincing as the two literary lions of the three whose reputations have endured.  I thought it was one of the best-looking films I had seen since The Two Faces of January. Particularly striking was Perkins’ office at Scribner’s (below) where so many of the film’s key events take place.

Max Perkins (Colin Firth, left) and Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law)