DAVID HOCKNEY AT THE Fitzwilliam Museum

@David Hockney Self Portrait

People love David Hockney. They did right from the start. The glorious colours of his California paintings hung in the Fitzwilliam 40 years ago. On a visit then  my parents both from Yorkshire beheld them with delight - and possibly pride that the lad born only a few miles from them had made such a splash. A Bigger Splash than anyone in the art world. And as Martin Kemp the art historian remarked at the opening of this wonderful exhibition , “ He could have gone on with Mr. And Mrs. Ozzie Clarke style for the rest of his days, but he explored. instead”  To work out how we see the world is  David Hockney’s life-long quest. The public have stayed loyal to him as he experimented with more and more up to date methods of doing just this. The Royal Academy exhibition where he first showed his iPad drawings, his giant lucid spontaneous creations of colour in nature with its knock out greens and limpid blues, divided opinion.. Art critics mumbled but people flocked in to endorse the lad from Bradford .They loved the results  - however he broke the rule,- admired how he used new everyday technology, extended the boundaries . This full on Royal Academy-style extravaganza of a show at the Fitzwilliam matches David Hockney’s adventurous styles with imagination. Georgian portraits sit alongside the artist’s own pencil drawings, Monet is twinned with the lanes outside Bridlington in the snow and the Renaissance perspective is almost rivalled by David Hockney’s own experimentation. Look out in the exhibition  for a brilliant sequence where we get to see the artist’s step by step assemblage of his own self portrait. It is riveting. However much we enjoy a conventionally painted  portrait - and the stunning new study a seated figure in front of a vase of tulips is deeply satisfying - there’s an added satisfaction to get on board a tour of the artist’s new techniques (and watch how it’s done).

David Hockney’s latest self portrait is one such picture. There he is in a slouchy tweed checked suit (made for him we find out from the Sunday Times critic who did his interview there) by a tailor in Normandy. It’s hurried and fast, like the others in its set, it took only afew of hours, but the feel of it is there. It’s part of the Hockney technique. As viewers we look at this portrait and add in  our own experience of life , That’s why Martin Kemp reckons it’s so enjoyable  “Like finishing a Sudoku  puzzle. The tweed jacket is a series of lines  And we put the shoulder inside it”. So side by side, the classic Hockney portrait and the new style portraiture, take your pick .

@David Hockney Spring - shown alongside Monet’s Springtime

This show is so inclusive. David Hockney wants to share the way artists draw. He has spent years looking at seeing  every bit as profoundly as John Berger. In a overly muted video (with subtitles) David Hockney explains so candidly how he came about the role of the Camera Lucida in a series of celebrated sketches of heads by the French artist Ingres. “They were postcards really” Hockney tells us casually“ of “well off tourists in Italy”. Yet on closer inspection Hockney saw some of the lines in them looked rather like Andy  Warhol’s drawings, Warhol famously traced almost all his drawings.. “On a hunch he tells us disarmingly“ . I blew them up on the photocopier and yes they were traced.“ Using the new equipment. He then goes on to reveal how to use it. “ You look at your subject very closely” (so like David Hockney, scrutiny is a huge part of his art) and then make some marks on the paper. “Then you , or Ingres deploy the machinery of the new fangled invention.’

David Hockney self portrait @Hockney

Hot off the press Martin Gayford, the prodigious art biographer, who is a co-curator and inspirer of this show had a discovery to reveal. (I was delighted to see Martin sashay about the gallery in the colours  a sort of salmon pink scarf that David Hockney had used for his portrait). Martin told us how a new examination of portraits in the museum  bore the very same ‘marks on the paper’ to represent the face David Hockney mentioned.  David Hockney is always willing to show what goes on behind the scenes

Woldgate Woods by David Hockney @ David Hockney

In this immense and impressive winter scene, the nine screens, slightly ill adjusted for a more complex experience echo winter scenes from classical painting but create a new way of looking at the landscape.

@David Hockney Le Parc des Sources

The painting above shows two of three friends (one took a photograph) like an audience - contemplating a view which, ironically is itself a kind of visual deception, a legerdemain.

@Hockney After Fra Angelico

The Annunciation by Fra Angelico

It’s worth going to see the show to experience the intensity of colour in this painting - especially with the original to hand, owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum. The analysis of the lines of perspective are daunting but absorbing and the Fitzwilliam have gone full-0n Royal Academy with gorgeous modernist corridors of frames in vibrant green to emphasise their fascination with David Hockney’s own exploration of how even the Old Masters of the past conceived and planned their work, to thrown emphasis on what they wanted to convey of the reality they saw.

© David Hockney_After Hobbema

The original Dutch painting on which this reverse perspective version by David Hockney is right there in the gallery, on loan from the National Gallery - most of the rest of the paintings are possessions of the Fitzwilliam. A copy used to hang over the school dining table of Stephen Brown a Cambridge architect. “to see it deconstructed is amazing” he remarked “David Hockney has already changed my life with his fresh view of trees. I now see their outline and shapes in a way I never did. As all architects, perspective vanishing points, angles are part of my stock in trade. This remarkable take on an all too familiar classic is wonderful”

Domenico Veneziano

The Exhibition has some profound fun with this startling painting by Domenico Veneziano.In a street in Florence, a miracle happens through the Saint’s powerful intercession. The dramatic moment is captured by two sets of perspective and a double vanishing point. It is all carefully and architecturally laid out in an interesting way. Still all the mechanisms of the artist are in one pursuit, to tell the story of the power of God working through his Saints. In his world and in his work ,this would be his intention. So the experience of the viewer is concentrated on the drama of the action. The Fitzwilliam even has photographs aerial and ground level of the actual street it happened in. Unchanged largely.

The entire purpose of any artist is to express their own view of the world. By any means they can.

Apparatus from the artist’s box of tricks

As I stepped out of the Gallery I met an old friend, she was instantly lit up by Hockney fever, like the rest of Cambridge. “ I remember when he came around Camberwell Art School to look at our work. 30 years ago. It was the era of abstract and those of us who drew could have a model to ourselves each it was so unfashionable. David Hockney picked out my painting and announced that he liked it very much. Why? some bemused trendy tutor asked. ‘Because it tells a story’ he replied.”