When it comes to David Hockney and design, one can’t help but think of the classic 1971 cover for Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (University of California Press), illustrated by the artist’s “A Bigger Splash.” Hockney was inspired by the optimism and casualness of California living and constantly explored the different ways of capturing the world around us.
Standing in front of a delicate lithograph of a rumpled armchair, senior Walker Art Center curator Siri Engberg discusses the through line of intimacy in the built environments that David Hockney depicts or hints at, both in shape and title.
Engberg indicates this with “Chair-38 The Colony, Malibu” (1973)—on view for the new exhibition David Hockney: People, Places & Things—the furniture piece is homey, lived-in, giving the impression that its sitter left merely moments ago. The print hangs next to “Sofa 8501 Hedges Place” (1971), another soft object with pillows strewn, also implying a recently departed lounger.
The prints “are referencing a specific architectural site where the objects reside,” Engberg says. “These are as much about portraiture as they are about still lifes or everyday objects. This is about the person who owns the sofa. There is so much there. Who was just lying there? Or sitting there? The absence is really loud in these.”
These prints and nearly 90 other works—mostly drawn from the Walker’s own deep holdings of more than 230 of the artist’s pieces—are on view for David Hockney: People, Places & Things, which runs through Aug. 21, 2022, in Minneapolis, Minn.
As the name implies, the wide-ranging exhibition is divided into three sections that showcase an incredible knack for color, landscapes, and domesticity by the British artist and adoptive California son. People, Places & Things begins with a hall of portraits, featuring many of Hockney's beloveds and muses, such as his mother (“Portrait of Mother III,” 1987); textile designer Celia Birtwell in the lithograph “Celia 8365 Melrose Ave, Hollywood” (1973); and Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art curator Henry Geldzahler in the red pencil on paper drawing “Henry Reading Thackeray, Convent da Serra d’Ossa” (1976). While this section is focused on the subjects, it’s hard not to notice the attention to chairs, many of which even make it into the art’s titles: director’s chairs, wicker chairs, bistro chairs.
Next come the Places and Things sections, which are just as much intimate portraits of objects and places as those of Hockney’s sitters.
“Very early on he began depicting his surroundings in a way that was quite personal in the sense that a lot of the spaces he chose to depict were his own, the spaces of his friends, collectors he knew, gallerists. His circle, basically,” Engberg says.
Museumgoers can see this in the preceding rooms, which feature Hockney's dachshund companion in the fax print on paper "Breakfast with Stanley, Malibu" (1989), the airy and bright lithograph “Pembroke Studio Interior” (1984), and the colorful canvas “Hollywood Hills House,” done in oils, charcoal, and collage, of Hockney’s California studio, which he created from memory while in London between 1981 and 1982. In addition to wood beams, blue skies, and palmy accents, the canvas shows a series of theater and opera sets the artist made for another Walker show, the 1983 Hockney Paints the Stage. Hockney created many designs for the stage, including for Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tirésias) (1983). In the current exhibition, Hockney’s nearly to-scale model for the opera is on view to the public for the first time in nearly 40 years. The work is a world unto itself, depicting a seaside town built up with dozens of canvases.
In general, the personal is to be found even in the works that are more anonymous and less explicitly domestically self-referential, like Hockney’s prints of swimming pools (in this show, the large-scale pressed paper pulp “Piscine a minuit, Paper Pool 19” is a knockout), the architectural Hotel Acatlán series, and, most recently, his large-scale candy-colored iPad “drawings made for printing” of East Yorkshire landscapes.
These images become intimate because of Hockney’s repetition and revisitations of subjects over time: He returns to them again and again, cultivating a relationship, and viewers see how they have burrowed a home in his mind’s eye.
Hockney invites his viewers into private spaces, domestic environments, one-on-one relationships. The worlds he cultivates imply habitation at a very human scale, be that an individual, a couple, a family, a group of friends. On this visit to the Walker, what made the human scale of Hockney’s world so striking was its juxtaposition with a neighboring exhibition, Julie Mehretu, which began its tour at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019 and ends at the Walker in March 2022.
Mehretu also depicts the built environment through layered paintings. Her massive, complex, and abstracted tableaus, however, depict it at the scale of society, of history, of globalism, featuring hints of architectural renderings of mass transit and cityscapes, as well as symbols of immigration, war, and racism, appearing to be blown to bits in an outward existential expansion, not unlike the universe itself. These masterful works make the viewer feel breathless and small.
In contrast, Hockney’s chairs and domestic scenes have never felt more comfortable and welcoming. Architects and designers could take away from this exhibition that, ultimately, people want to live in places where they feel at home.
