BOSTON — British contemporary artist David Hockney, who rose to international fame in his twenties, has returned to his roots in oil portraits.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is staging the first major retrospective of Hockney’s portraiture — a show that examines a half-century of work from his prolific career, which includes photography, design and printmaking. Several of the pieces are fresh from his Los Angeles studio and never before exhibited. The show, “David Hockney Portraits,” opens on Sunday and runs through May 14.
A W.H. Auden quote, “To me, art’s subject is the human clay,” opens the exhibit. An overwhelming jumble of faces — friends, family members, fellow artists, current and former lovers — peers down from every wall.
Almost a dozen of his portrait subjects were with Hockney here for a private gallery talk and gala on Feb. 16 and 17. Among those attending were Los Angeles art world icon Sidney Felson, co-founder of print studio Gemini GEL, and his wife, Joni, and Hockney’s assistant and companion, Gregory Evans.
Evans’ image in portrait evolves over 30 years from a fluffy-haired youth in a frank, frontal nude, to the shy, slender man who wandered the gallery looking exactly as he appears in a 2005 oil — in a dark pinstriped suit with slightly downcast eyes.
“It is a reunion of old friends,” Hockney, 68, said slowly, gazing around the room at his subjects, those in the room and on the walls.
Hockney, wearing a red ascot and baggy tweed jacket, took questions in front of his masterpiece, “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy.” The session led to reminiscences of his parents, Paul and Laura Hockney His mother “was less interested in pictures and thought everything I did was wonderful,” the artist said. Painting his father was a tedious process interrupted by the older man’s finicky suggestions about lighting and technique. That portrait, done when Hockney was 17, was his first oil painting and his first sale.
Hockney said he can tell simply from the position of a crossed leg “if a couple connects or not.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1970-1971 dual oil portrait, captures the growing estrangement between the fashion designer Ossie Clark and his young wife. They would divorce soon after the paint dried, and Mrs. Clark — née Celia Birtwell — maintained her career in textile design and her status as one of Hockney’s favorite subjects. She is one of two women — the other was his mother — Hockney has painted regularly.
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The exhibition is an intensely personal body of work. There is a nude of former lover Peter Schlesinger hoisting himself out of a shimmering Los Angeles pool, and a series of ink-and-charcoal self-portraits from an early Eighties period when Hockney, depressed, drew himself each morning as soon as he awakened.
“When I’m a bit down sometimes I think, ‘Well it’s time to have a look at myself again,'” he said.
In 50 years, Hockney has accepted only two commissions, one of which is in the show. It is a widely acknowledged masterwork of opera patron Sir David Webster. The dying man, shown in profile, seems to levitate in a Marcel Breuer chair in front of a vase of red tulips.
These days, Hockney is back in his Los Angeles studio, painting trees. His mother lived until age 99. On the subject of legacy, he said, “The work isn’t over until you fall over. The work is a long way from being finished.”