A breed apart
Blood and guts and pots, bits of string and painted trees. Talking about art with David Hockney is fundamentally different from interviewing any other artist. Where most artists seem interested in other art only as a mirror of their preoccupations, Hockney is a voracious student with acute insights. What will his own place in art history be? He and Lucian Freud are the two eminent living British painters — but where Freud has enjoyed a reverence as an Old Master in his lifetime, it will be Hockney's works of the 1960s and 1970s that are still looked at decades hence, when Freud has become a neglected minor master in the corners of museums.
I do not think it is flattery to say that, in unexpected ways, David Hockney still is a model for young artists. As I was writing this piece I was getting e-mails in response to an article on why so little art has been made about the war in Iraq. Graffitists and online agitprop collagists sent me their images. Among them was a message from Hockney's studio: he wanted me to see his recent painting The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction, which juxtaposes his interpretation of Picasso's Massacre in Korea with an image of a war photographer, and implicitly asks: can painting still deal with war, can photography? It was done in 2003, as America and Britain attacked Iraq. This brilliant and experimental artist is still passionately engaged with the way the world works.
The new edition of Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Old Masters by David Hockney is published by Thames & Hudson on Sept. 23.
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