Hockney Puts Things in Perspective

So, here's a weird thing: Hockney's Eye at Teylers Museum in Haarlem isn't an easy exhibition. In fact, you have to think quite hard and look closely to get your head round David Hockney's exploration of different perspectives in art, alternative ways of seeing. But it is an extremely enjoyable and rewarding experience. 

We didn't get to visit this show when it was on at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Heong Gallery in Cambridge earlier this year, but we jumped at the chance during an autumn visit to the Netherlands to explore what looks to be a rather smaller version. It was worth the wait. 

If you're hoping for classic 1960s and 70s Hockney like A Bigger Splash or Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, you've come to the wrong exhibition. To be sure, there's a very jolly Self-Portrait from last year of the artist in flat cap and garish check suit, poised with his brush, as you come in, but seeing becomes far less straightforward quite quickly. 

Take Viewers Looking at a Ready-Made with Skull and Mirrors, for example. It's big -- about 2.2 by 3.7 metres -- and it's very disconcerting. Where are we in this curious room with this strange perspective and all these mirrors, and how did we get here? 

Hockney photographed these people and the construction they're sitting around from all sides. The photos were then merged digitally to create an image that's made up of hundreds of individual pictures, each with their own perspective. 

He has of course been putting photographs together for decades. If you've ever been to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, you'll appreciate just how impossible it is to take a picture that conveys any idea of the immensity of the gorge. As we look over the edge, our eyes are moving all the time, and we can take more in. Early on we get to see how Hockney himself attempted to capture a broader view, taking dozens of photographs and combining them into a single image.  

You can see his feet at the bottom left. 

What Hockney's trying to get away from here is the view that linear perspective, as perfected by painters and draughtsmen since the early Renaissance, is the correct way to represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface.

Or indeed four dimensions, because he's not necessarily capturing a single moment. The Scrabble Game is another photographic collage, with Hockney taking shots of his mother and two friends during a game. You can see the different images representing the passage of time, the players' intense concentration and reactions, reflecting the success perhaps of a triple word score or the failure of having to pass. But who's winning? The Scrabble board is no longer a simple flat square with little square letters on it. 

Getting a little bogged down in the game here yourself? Let's bring in the idea of reverse perspective. In linear perspective, you're looking into a picture in which, if there are parallel lines, they converge at a vanishing point on the horizon. Hockney believes that you can create accurate and credible representations by turning that round, so that the perspective lines converge not on the horizon, but in the position of you, the viewer. It's rather complicated, but take a good look at Hockney's comparisons and suddenly the concept becomes clearer.

With its tree-lined lane disappearing straight down the middle of the canvas, The Avenue at Middelharnis by Meindert Hobbema in London's National Gallery is the epitome of linear perspective, incorporating two vanishing points, one on the horizon and one just above it in the sky.

Hockney's wackily shaped ensemble of six canvases breaks down Hobbema's careful construction to illustrate exactly where the the Dutch Golden Age painter had his two vanishing points. 

A second example sees Hockney reversing the traditional linear perspective from a 15th-century Annunciation. In this depiction by Domenico Veneziano, the artist suggests depth by the position of the two rows of columns and the angle of the pink cornice they support. We are drawn in further through the archway where the path narrows, goes under a smaller arch and ends at a wall with blue sky above.

Hockney takes not this painting but a contemporaneous fresco in Florence as the basis for his own startling coloured work, in which he has broadened out the view, so that we are at the vanishing point, the bottom point of the V, and the work spreads outward from us, instead of our eyes being led inwards. Once you've got past the complication, there is a logic to it.  

It's a bit like a deconstructed pudding in a posh restaurant; very clever, though of course you may prefer the traditional version. Some local visitors were reminded of the graphic art of that Dutch creator of impossible yet apparently logical buildings, MC Escher, and there's something in that. 

In this show, Hockney also wants to highlight his research into the ways artists have used artificial aids to help their perception and depiction of the world around them down the centuries. There are works by Dürer and Rembrandt, among others, and we learn about the use of mirrors, the graphic telescope, the camera obscura, and perhaps most notably, the camera lucida. 

Hockney was intrigued by the precision -- almost photo-realism -- of Ingres's drawings of people he was not well acquainted with, and concluded from close examination of the contour lines that they appeared to have almost been traced. 

He deduced they had probably been made with the help of a camera lucida, a tool developed at the start of the 19th century that has a four-sided prism allowing an artist to simultaneously see the object in front of him and the drawing he's making. 

That prompted Hockney to experiment himself with the device, resulting in 2000 in 12 portraits of National Gallery security guards. You can see how the camera lucida produces shifts of scale; the hands are very large in relation to the rest of the body. 

This instrument is actually from the Teylers Museum collection and you can admire many other old scientific devices and artists' aids that look as beautiful as they were useful. It's the perfect location for this exhibition exploring the ways artists looked at things in centuries gone by. Opened in 1784, it feels as if you're stepping back in time. But watch out: Hockney pops up in surprising places scattered through the museum and the adjacent, recently restored house of its founder, Pieter Teyler.

Dotted among the galleries full of depictions of Dutch daily life down the ages are screens showing films of his bright iPad drawings of flowers and still lifes, and the eye-catching multi-screen video of a journey through the snowy landscape of Woldgate in Yorkshire that was part of his Royal Academy exhibition in 2012. 

Do also be sure to catch a taste of Hockney's video A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China, exploring the very different perspective of Chinese scroll paintings. We should have stayed till the end; turns out the full-length version isn't on YouTube after all! 

Practicalities

Hockney's Eye runs at Teylers Museum in Haarlem until January 29. It's open Tuesday to Sunday (except Christmas Day and New Year's Day) from 1000 to 1700 and entrance to the museum, including the exhibition, costs 15 euros. You need to book a ticket in advance with a time slot online here, and don't leave it too late; tickets were sold out the day we went. Allow perhaps 60 minutes to get round the main exhibition; quite a bit longer to take in the videos and iPad drawings fully. The museum is 10-15 minutes walk from Haarlem station; there are trains from Amsterdam Centraal every few minutes, taking 15-20 minutes, or if you're travelling from elsewhere in the Netherlands, 9292.nl is an excellent site for transport connections.

Images

David Hockney, Viewers Looking at a Ready-Made with Skull and Mirrors, 2018. Photographic drawing printed on 4 sheets of paper (87 1/2" x 36 1/2" each), mounted on 4 sheets of Dibond; exhibition proof #4; 87 1/2" x 146" overall. © David Hockney assisted by Jonathan Wilkinson

David Hockney, Grand Canyon Arizona with My Shadow, Oct. 1982. Photographic collage, edition 13 of 15, 38" x 62 1/2". © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt 

David Hockney, After Hobbema (Useful Knowledge), 2017. Acrylic on 6 canvases (2 canvases: 24" x 24" each; 4 joined hexagonal canvases: 18 1/2" x 36" each), 44" x 109" overall. © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt
Domenico Veneziano (c. 1410-61), The Annunciation, c. 1445-47. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 
David Hockney, Annunciation II, after Fra Angelico from The Brass Tacks Triptych, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 48" x 96" (hexagonal). © David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt 
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Madame Augustine-Modeste-Hortense Reiset and her Daughter Thérèse-Hortense-Marie, Nicknamed Babiche, 1844, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Anonymous maker, after design by William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) and Giovanni Battista Amici (1786-1863), Camera Lucida, c. 1850-74, Teylers Museum, Haarlem