Slate’s gadfly art critic Lee Siegel takes a distinctly psychoanalytical approach to dissecting the vast array of portraiture included in artist David Hockney’s current retrospective, featured through May 15 at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Siegel has subtitled his Slate Slide Show, “The Shallow Lyricism of one of America’s Favorite Painters.”
Siegel points out that “of all the genres and mediums in which Hockney has worked—landscape, still life, and opera sets, among others—his portraiture is the least accomplished and affecting.”
The problem, for Siegel, is Hockney’s narcissism — coupled with his fear of being alone. Hockney remains too focused on his subject’s role in his life to make a convincing portrait of that person as a person.
“The impression you get looking at Hockney’s portraits is that his subjects, too, need to be completed by the artist’s gaze. This is the radical deficiency of Hockney’s representations of other individuals. He sees nothing separate, original, or inviolate about their individuality. In the art of portraiture, solitude reveals the sitter. But Hockney paints his subjects as if they were afraid to be alone.”
The catalog for Hockney’s show includes an essay by the grandfather of the homosexual tome, Edmund White. In “Lineaments of Desire,” White discusses the influence of Hockney’s homosexuality on his art. Explaining that for a gay English artist growing up in the repressive atmosphere of the 1950s, sexuality was a very different arrangement — with different psychological and legal repercusions. Coming out was next to impossible, even in cosmopolitan London. As Siegel notes:
“In the States, the Stonewall riots and the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement happened two years after homosexuality was legalized in England. And so building plentiful, interconnected friendships amid a hostile society must have been very important for a young gay man such as Hockney. This is perhaps why every portrait in this show—and most of the portraits Hockney has ever made—is of a friend, relative, or lover.
“For Hockney, making art is a social activity. His portraits aren’t studies in character. They are documents of social bonding … The almost manic intensity with which Hockney paints people, the sheer vast number of his portraits, are like an attempt to fill the empty spaces around his subjects by painting more and more of them, with more and more empty space that needs to be filled with further subjects …”
