David Hockney
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
David Hockney Details
About the Author Chris Stephens is head of Displays and lead curator, Modern British Art, and Andrew Wilson is curator, Contemporary Art and Archives, both at Tate Britain. Read more
Reviews
I love Hockney's work, and found the catalog rather disappointing. It seems to be aimed at students of art history -- the accompanying texts are more about historical context (which style is Hockney using or ignoring or commenting on here?) and sources (this image is from a men's physique magazine, that one from ancient Egyptian sculpture) than about the paintings it's supposedly discussing. Any discussion of individual works is usually quite brief and only occasionally illuminating or helpful in examining the piece itself. This was presumably intentional on the part of the editors, since the various individual contributors all seem to write with the same voice. I will confess that for those reasons I gave up on the texts about halfway through, and just concentrated on the reproductions, which are excellent. I also didn't read the "essays" at the end. So maybe I missed some things. But I'd still rather have had more on the specific works and much, much less on its various contexts. The writing, for me, gets a lot of facts and factoids but misses much of Hockney's spirit and élan.
