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David Hockney Portraits
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Product Description
This beautifully illustrated book examines Hockney’s portraits in all media—painting, drawing, photography, and prints—and has been produced in close collaboration with the artist. Featured subjects include members of Hockney’s family and private circle, as well as portraits of such artists and cultural figures as Lucian Freud, Francesco Clemente, R. B. Kitaj, Helmet Newton, Lawrence Weschler, and W. H. Auden. The authors reveal how Hockney’s creative development and concerns about representation can be traced through his portrait work: from his battle with naturalism to his experimentation with and later rejection of photography, and from his recent camera lucida drawings to his return to painting from life.
Featuring more than 250 works from the past fifty years, David Hockney Portraits illustrates not only the fascinating range of Hockney’s creative practice but also the unique and cyclical nature of his artistic concerns.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #176926 in Books
- Published on: 2006-03-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Since the bookshelf of the David Hockney fan likely already contains, among other titles, David Hockney: Paintings, Hockney's People and Hockney's Pictures, this collection may be a bit redundant. Except for a few rarely seen paintings from Hockney's teenage years, the work presented here doesn't stray far from the familiar greatest hits seen in earlier collections. Here again is Billy Wilder lighting a cigar in a cubist-inspired photo collage and Andy Warhol in a deft little 1974 colored pencil drawing. Nor do any of the contributing curators and academics pretend that the book—which accompanies an exhibit of the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—is really breaking any fresh ground. But for those who haven't seen it all before, this is an attractive, well-organized introduction to the artist's endlessly inventive career. The selection of plates runs the full range of Hockney's adventures, and the illustrated, year-by-year chronology gives a colorful, bird's-eye view of Hockney's life. In this case, putting old wine into a new skin is not such a bad thing. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In David Hockney Portraits, the first book dedicated solely to the British artist and longtime L.A. resident's portraits, art critic Marco Livingston writes, "For a humanist artist such as Hockney, there can be no more urgent subject than the depiction of individuals in all their particularity." And, indeed, for 50 years Hockney has been making inquisitive and vibrant portraits of his family, friends, lovers, fellow artists, and cultural icons in an impressive array of styles and media. London's National Portrait Gallery has put together a traveling exhibition of 250 works, reproduced here along with a set of eloquent and incisive essays. Hockney's portraits are compared to those of Picasso, his hero. Curator Howgate describes her experience posing for Hockney, and novelist Edmund White writes about the role of homosexual desire in Hockney's pioneering work.
Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
�A bevy of self-portraits serves as chronological anchor to hundreds of sumptuous reproductions . . . . Recommended.��Library Journal (Library Journal )
Customer Reviews
A Very Personal and Tender Survey of the Works of David Hockney
David Hockney is an artist whose works are familiar to everyone, whether from exposure to his many museum shows, his paintings and drawings included in every major survey of contemporary art, to his magical sets for operas such as The Magic Flute, Die Frau Ohne Schatten, The Rake's Progress, Tristan und Isolde, etc.
This current book DAVID HOCKNEY PORTRAITS is, for this reader, the most sensitive presentation of Hockney not only as an artist but also as a tender, feeling, caring human being. The book accompanies an exhibition soon to travel and includes over 250 examples of Hockney's view of his family, himself, his friends - famous and not so famous-, lovers, and pets. The result is a survey of Hockney's people-oriented works over the past fifty years.
Included are early pen and ink drawings from the 1950s, gentle and simple line portraits of his mother and father and himself, and progresses to the development of his large-scale paintings of life size portraits of family, lovers, and self-portraits. Many of the people depicted in these works are no longer alive and there is a sense of memory in some of the works that barely hides Hockney's sadness at their parting.
The book also opens the door to Hockney's experimentation with photography as an art medium, with several of his multiple view Polaroid collages of a single 'sitting' telling more stories than a movie. And after Hockney's excursion into that medium the portraits turn to painting his subjects from life.
Most of the works in this book have been published in other volumes or have become familiar to the public by other means, but it is the curatorial hand that makes his survey so fine and so immediate, a success not easily accomplished with an artist as private as Hockney: the collection is under the encouraging guidance of the artist. This is an excellent overview of a very special artist whose works continue to capture the imagination of viewers and fellow artists alike. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, April 06
Maniac
Generally the portrait images were too small to really study his painting style. That is my only complaint. Interesting stories in the section describing all his sitters, famous or not. What a productive maniac he has been. 41 portraits of his dogs!!!
