Bland and Maniacal

By R.H.

There are artists who remain boy wonders in the public eye until the gates of the geriatric home clang shut behind them. This threatens to be the fate of David Hockney. He was still a 25-year-old student at London's Royal College of Art when his work began to attract notice in 1962. In the decade since then he has remained one of the most conspicuous figures in the English art world. The Clairol-bleached thatch, the Yorkshire accent and the owl-like stare through horn-rims the size of old Bentley headlights have become almost as much a part of the London myth as Twiggy. But a serious painter lurks behind the ruffle of publicity, and Hockney's new show, at New York's Andre Emmerich Gallery, demonstrates how wiry and controlled his talent is.

Part of the attraction that Hockney's work exerts is its mixture of unusual guile and apparent naivete. He is a painter of frozen pleasures, held in ironic parentheses as though behind glass--the artificial but absorbingly hedonistic blue of Los Angeles swimming pools, the plastic palms, the flat glitter of light on a shower stall or a street facade. It is all painted deadpan, and Hockney's poker-faced style, coupled with his liking for artifacts as subjects, has given rise to the illusion that he is an English Pop artist. But unlike Pop, his work is not concerned with advertising or blare or mass production.

Humor. In Hockney's most recent painting, even the elaborate ambiguities have dropped away, leaving an exhibition of (almost) normal genre painting and landscape. Some of the humor remains. One painting looks like an orthodox New York abstraction, with a plane of blue punctuated by a red geometric circle; not until you consult the catalogue do you find that it is a view from above a swimming pool, with a rubber ring floating on the surface. But in general, Hockney's new scenes are as visually straightforward as anyone might wish. So where does their odd presence come from?

In part, from their stillness, which is --if such a combination can be imagined--both bland and maniacal. Hockney's enormous Still Life (Glass Table), 1972, is played down almost to silence; none of the spidery, wandering and quirkish line of his graphic work survives in it. Object answers object, bowl to lamp shade to vase of tulips, across an expanse of plate glass that seems as large and expectant as a De Chirico piazza. Everything is given extreme distinctness but deprived of weight, and the effect is decidedly eerie.

So, too, when Hockney tackles the least promising of subjects in French Shop, 1971. The building is all facade; nothing stirs. It is hardly more than a doll's house with a sign on it. The vacancy is such that one needs time to notice the brilliant precision with which every shape is disposed on the canvas.

It takes time to recognize that this deliberation is a form of irony. But it is.

Hockney makes a delicate caricature of high seriousness; one is never sure whether he is offering the chair or whisking it away. Thus his paintings occupy a very fine edge between poignancy and burlesque, submitting neither to the expressionist flavor of one nor to the cartooning of the other. What his work amounts to is a visual comedy of manners. Hockney's vision is both courteous and sharp; he is the Anthony Powell of painting. . R.H.

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