Mark Rothko said: “I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however – I think it applies to other painters I know – is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human.”
There
are several very large pictures in this exhibition (generally made up of lots
of smaller pictures, it is to be admitted) and they are neither pompous nor
grandiose. But where Rothko was
concerned with expressing “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on” (I love that “and
so on”), Hockney is more concerned to express mutability, immutability and the
simple pleasure of looking and seeing.
Lots
of the pictures in this exhibition are of modest landscapes, given a kind of
integrity by Hockney’s worrying of them. There are three trees he paints or
draws over and over again, sometimes they are nude in winter, sometimes fully
clothed in high summer; there is a tree stump that turns up in the middle, to
the side, in the background of pictures, in a variety of hues.
In
starkest of contrasts there is an enormous horizontal painting of the Grand
Canyon, which glows. You can feel
the heat coming off it, relieved by a tiny strip of cool blue sky at the upper
edge.
I
found it hard not to smile at the sheer pleasure some these pictures
afford. It is impossible not to
feel the joy Hockney has felt in making them.
Some
of the stuff doesn’t work. There
were rooms I didn’t like, and individual efforts that fell short, but there
was, invariably, something around the next corner to delight. And there is a sneaking suspicion that
while the paintings are not great, the art is. Hockney is clearly fascinated by the changes that come over
things that stay the same. The
mesmerising films of identical roads in different seasons testify to this; they
also have a kind of didactic power.
“Look!” they are saying, “See!”
Some
of my favourite landscapes are those that are painted as with one eye, so that
perspective becomes unimportant, and the flat plane of the picture becomes a
more honest place than in purely representative painting.
The
really great paintings here, though, are those of Woldgate Wood. When
surroundeded by them you know that the experience is not aesthetic but
sensual. You need bring no art
historical baggage to this. Mark
Rothko also said: “A painting is not about an experience. It is an
experience.”
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