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拍品专文
A poignant act of homage, and a luminous portrait of friendship, Three Chairs with a Section of a Picasso Mural is a landmark painting dating from an important moment in David Hockney’s practice. Executed in 1970, it is the first work in his oeuvre to make direct reference to Pablo Picasso: his great inspiration and idol. It depicts part of the latter’s mural at the Château de Castille in Provence, home of the eminent collector and art historian Douglas Cooper. Cooper was close to Picasso, and later became friends with Hockney, who stayed at the property on a number of occasions. These visits brought the artist within striking distance of his hero, though he and Picasso never met in person. Here, his mural looms large above three exquisitely painted chairs: defining motifs within Hockney’s own practice. Their forms glow with anthropomorphic intensity, as if awaiting the arrival of their unseen sitters. Upon Cooper’s sunlit stage, Hockney and Picasso pass through art history’s sliding doors: two masters half a century apart.
Included in Hockney’s major touring retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1988, the work occupies pivotal territory in his practice. As Picasso’s career came to an end—he died three years after the present work—Hockney’s was in its ascendancy. 1970 saw his first retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, which toured Europe to critical acclaim. This period of early professional triumph spawned some of his finest works, including his seminal “double portraits.” These extraordinary large-scale canvases marked the culmination of Hockney’s celebrated “naturalistic” phase, defined by the same crisp perspective, hyperreal clarity and sharp theatrical lighting that characterize the present work. Chairs featured prominently in these paintings—from the iconic pink sofa in Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), to the sleek Marcel Breuer “Cesca” in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1971, Tate Gallery, London). Le Parc des Sources, Vichy (1970, Chatsworth House Trust), meanwhile, echoes the present work’s trilogy of chairs. Two are occupied by Hockney’s then lover Peter Schlesinger and his friend Ossie Clark; the other is left tantalizingly vacant, as if for the artist himself.
Three Chairs with a Section of a Picasso Mural confronts the viewer in a similar manner. Conceptually, it might be read as a double portrait of Cooper and Picasso, with Hockney triangulated between them. Alternatively, it might be seen as a virtual meeting between two artists, brokered by their mutual friendship with Cooper. As in Vincent van Gogh’s chair portraits, which Hockney deeply admired, presence is made all the more palpable by absence. The painting became the first in a long line of works in which Hockney paid explicit tribute to Picasso. Following the latter’s death in 1973, he produced the etchings The Student: Homage to Picasso and Artist and Model, depicting himself in imaginary conversation with the Spaniard. In 1977 he made a further suite of etchings based on Wallace Stevens’ Picasso-inspired poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” That year, he also painted the extraordinary Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna), featuring a bust of Dora Maar in the background, and another expectant empty chair opposite Hockney.
Hockney’s fascination with Picasso dates back to his student days at the Royal College of Art, when he had famously returned eight times to the artist’s 1960 retrospective at the Tate Gallery. The dazzling stylistic range of Picasso’s art had fueled his early practice, instilling in him a lifelong desire to avoid allegiance to any particular genre or medium. In 1980, another retrospective—this time at The Museum of Modern Art, New York—would spark a new wave of engagement with his work: “it’s like the National Gallery all painted by one man,” he enthused at the time. “Totally incredible” (letter to R.B. Kitaj, 20 May-19 August 1980). That year, he began working on the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Eric Satie’s Parade (1917), drawing heavily upon Picasso’s original set and costume designs. His portraits, landscapes and photocollages of this period, meanwhile, grappled with the teachings of Cubism, prompting critics to posit him as Picasso’s heir. Studying the artist’s cubist works showed Hockney that sight is not a linear experience, but rather a composite of multiple simultaneous viewpoints. This revelation would come to form the touchstone of his art, writing and research over the following decades.
Hockney’s friendship with Cooper also brought him ever-more deeply into Picasso’s world. A distinguished scholar of Cubism, Cooper had spent the 1930s amassing one of the largest collections dedicated to the movement, including works by Picasso as well as Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger. In 1949 he had moved to France, where his collection was transplanted to the walls of the magnificent Château de Castille near Uzès. Cooper’s partner was Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, and the artist became a regular guest, even requesting to buy the property on several occasions. After Cooper expressed an interest in some of his engraved drawings in Barcelona, Picasso had reportedly exclaimed “Give me a wall!” The horse visible in Hockney’s painting was inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799, Musée du Louvre, Paris), while other parts of the mural drew upon Edouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). In 1962 Picasso’s images were etched into the wall of the château’s eastern veranda using the “Betograve” technique made famous by the Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar.
Hockney had first visited the Château de Castille five years later, during a summer tour of Europe at the height of his relationship with Schlesinger. He would return on a number of occasions over the years, notably immortalizing Cooper in an exquisite drawing of 1974. Hockney described him as “fascinating person,” with “a mad side to him which I rather liked” (quoted in conversation with C.S. Sykes, March 2011). Together, they spoke at length about art. Cooper, like Hockney, believed that Picasso was “an inventive genius—undoubtedly, the only true genius... of the twentieth century” (quoted in Douglas Cooper and the Masters of Modernism, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1986, p. 170). The two, however, were somewhat divided on the merits of his later work. Hockney painted the present canvas from a photograph of the mural taken in March 1970, eliminating part of the foreground as well as the crazy-paving pattern of the floor. He also produced a smaller-scale sister painting, Chair with a Horse Drawn by Picasso (1970).
While Three Chairs with a Section of a Picasso Mural serves as a record of Hockney’s friendship with Cooper, it also hints at a tale of bittersweet personal loss. By 1970, the artist’s romance with Schlesinger was becoming increasingly tense, and would eventually dissolve in an explosive row in Europe the following year. During this period, Hockney’s distress wrote itself into his art. Le Parc de Sources, Vichy, with its single empty chair, was already infused with a sense of emotional estrangement. In the years that followed, the artist would produce a number of portraits of lonely objects—among them Still Life on a Glass Table (1971)—that seemed to capture the pain of his heartbreak. It was perhaps no coincidence that vacant chairs featured prominently in this body of work: from the mournful Chair and Shirt (1972), to Two Deck Chairs, Calvi (1972, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam), bathed in the glow of long lost summers. This trajectory would culminate in the poignant poolside masterpiece Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), set—like the present work—in the South of France.
Hockney was far from alone in the strength of his personal debt to Picasso. Francis Bacon had wrestled with the artist’s influence ever since he saw his Dinard beach scenes in 1920s Paris. Jean-Michel Basquiat had stood transfixed in front of his work as a boy, while Martin Kippenberger would paint himself in the guise of the artist’s widow Jaqueline Roque. For Hockney, however—a master of theater and illusion—the process of painting Picasso’s work into his own became more than just an act of tribute. Paintings within paintings, and pictures within pictures, would become central to his practice, each time foregrounding the mechanics through which we receive meaning from art. The present work, in this regard, shares much in common with the 1977 masterpiece Looking at Pictures on a Screen, depicting the curator Henry Geldzahler admiring reproductions of famous artworks. In both paintings, art becomes part of the theater of everyday life, contextualized by the quotidian props that surround it. The dialogue between artifice and reality had been central to Picasso’s own enquiries. Here, the stage is set for Hockney to make that investigation his own.
Included in Hockney’s major touring retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1988, the work occupies pivotal territory in his practice. As Picasso’s career came to an end—he died three years after the present work—Hockney’s was in its ascendancy. 1970 saw his first retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, which toured Europe to critical acclaim. This period of early professional triumph spawned some of his finest works, including his seminal “double portraits.” These extraordinary large-scale canvases marked the culmination of Hockney’s celebrated “naturalistic” phase, defined by the same crisp perspective, hyperreal clarity and sharp theatrical lighting that characterize the present work. Chairs featured prominently in these paintings—from the iconic pink sofa in Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), to the sleek Marcel Breuer “Cesca” in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1971, Tate Gallery, London). Le Parc des Sources, Vichy (1970, Chatsworth House Trust), meanwhile, echoes the present work’s trilogy of chairs. Two are occupied by Hockney’s then lover Peter Schlesinger and his friend Ossie Clark; the other is left tantalizingly vacant, as if for the artist himself.
Three Chairs with a Section of a Picasso Mural confronts the viewer in a similar manner. Conceptually, it might be read as a double portrait of Cooper and Picasso, with Hockney triangulated between them. Alternatively, it might be seen as a virtual meeting between two artists, brokered by their mutual friendship with Cooper. As in Vincent van Gogh’s chair portraits, which Hockney deeply admired, presence is made all the more palpable by absence. The painting became the first in a long line of works in which Hockney paid explicit tribute to Picasso. Following the latter’s death in 1973, he produced the etchings The Student: Homage to Picasso and Artist and Model, depicting himself in imaginary conversation with the Spaniard. In 1977 he made a further suite of etchings based on Wallace Stevens’ Picasso-inspired poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” That year, he also painted the extraordinary Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna), featuring a bust of Dora Maar in the background, and another expectant empty chair opposite Hockney.
Hockney’s fascination with Picasso dates back to his student days at the Royal College of Art, when he had famously returned eight times to the artist’s 1960 retrospective at the Tate Gallery. The dazzling stylistic range of Picasso’s art had fueled his early practice, instilling in him a lifelong desire to avoid allegiance to any particular genre or medium. In 1980, another retrospective—this time at The Museum of Modern Art, New York—would spark a new wave of engagement with his work: “it’s like the National Gallery all painted by one man,” he enthused at the time. “Totally incredible” (letter to R.B. Kitaj, 20 May-19 August 1980). That year, he began working on the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Eric Satie’s Parade (1917), drawing heavily upon Picasso’s original set and costume designs. His portraits, landscapes and photocollages of this period, meanwhile, grappled with the teachings of Cubism, prompting critics to posit him as Picasso’s heir. Studying the artist’s cubist works showed Hockney that sight is not a linear experience, but rather a composite of multiple simultaneous viewpoints. This revelation would come to form the touchstone of his art, writing and research over the following decades.
Hockney’s friendship with Cooper also brought him ever-more deeply into Picasso’s world. A distinguished scholar of Cubism, Cooper had spent the 1930s amassing one of the largest collections dedicated to the movement, including works by Picasso as well as Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger. In 1949 he had moved to France, where his collection was transplanted to the walls of the magnificent Château de Castille near Uzès. Cooper’s partner was Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, and the artist became a regular guest, even requesting to buy the property on several occasions. After Cooper expressed an interest in some of his engraved drawings in Barcelona, Picasso had reportedly exclaimed “Give me a wall!” The horse visible in Hockney’s painting was inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799, Musée du Louvre, Paris), while other parts of the mural drew upon Edouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). In 1962 Picasso’s images were etched into the wall of the château’s eastern veranda using the “Betograve” technique made famous by the Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar.
Hockney had first visited the Château de Castille five years later, during a summer tour of Europe at the height of his relationship with Schlesinger. He would return on a number of occasions over the years, notably immortalizing Cooper in an exquisite drawing of 1974. Hockney described him as “fascinating person,” with “a mad side to him which I rather liked” (quoted in conversation with C.S. Sykes, March 2011). Together, they spoke at length about art. Cooper, like Hockney, believed that Picasso was “an inventive genius—undoubtedly, the only true genius... of the twentieth century” (quoted in Douglas Cooper and the Masters of Modernism, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1986, p. 170). The two, however, were somewhat divided on the merits of his later work. Hockney painted the present canvas from a photograph of the mural taken in March 1970, eliminating part of the foreground as well as the crazy-paving pattern of the floor. He also produced a smaller-scale sister painting, Chair with a Horse Drawn by Picasso (1970).
While Three Chairs with a Section of a Picasso Mural serves as a record of Hockney’s friendship with Cooper, it also hints at a tale of bittersweet personal loss. By 1970, the artist’s romance with Schlesinger was becoming increasingly tense, and would eventually dissolve in an explosive row in Europe the following year. During this period, Hockney’s distress wrote itself into his art. Le Parc de Sources, Vichy, with its single empty chair, was already infused with a sense of emotional estrangement. In the years that followed, the artist would produce a number of portraits of lonely objects—among them Still Life on a Glass Table (1971)—that seemed to capture the pain of his heartbreak. It was perhaps no coincidence that vacant chairs featured prominently in this body of work: from the mournful Chair and Shirt (1972), to Two Deck Chairs, Calvi (1972, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam), bathed in the glow of long lost summers. This trajectory would culminate in the poignant poolside masterpiece Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), set—like the present work—in the South of France.
Hockney was far from alone in the strength of his personal debt to Picasso. Francis Bacon had wrestled with the artist’s influence ever since he saw his Dinard beach scenes in 1920s Paris. Jean-Michel Basquiat had stood transfixed in front of his work as a boy, while Martin Kippenberger would paint himself in the guise of the artist’s widow Jaqueline Roque. For Hockney, however—a master of theater and illusion—the process of painting Picasso’s work into his own became more than just an act of tribute. Paintings within paintings, and pictures within pictures, would become central to his practice, each time foregrounding the mechanics through which we receive meaning from art. The present work, in this regard, shares much in common with the 1977 masterpiece Looking at Pictures on a Screen, depicting the curator Henry Geldzahler admiring reproductions of famous artworks. In both paintings, art becomes part of the theater of everyday life, contextualized by the quotidian props that surround it. The dialogue between artifice and reality had been central to Picasso’s own enquiries. Here, the stage is set for Hockney to make that investigation his own.