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拍品专文
A virtuosic observation of light, and a bittersweet portrait of loss, Still Life on a Glass Table stands among David Hockney’s most poignant paintings. Begun in September 1971, it takes its place within the extraordinary sequence of canvases that the artist produced following the devastating end of his romance with Peter Schlesinger. It is a dazzling examination of reflection, luminosity and transparency, shot through with the lessons of his swimming pool paintings and double portraits. At the same time, the work has come to be recognized as a deeply personal expression of heartbreak. Its nine sentinel objects—many associated with Schlesinger—are rendered with crystalline intimacy. Each quivers with anthropomorphic charge, electrified by the distance that holds them apart. Light, darkness, grief and longing refract across the surface. Setting the stage for Hockney’s landmark farewell to Schlesinger Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), its pristine depiction of glass upon glass simmers with tension. It is a radiant tribute to the beauty, pain and fragility of love.
With an outstanding exhibition history that includes major retrospectives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1988) and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2017), Still Life on a Glass Table has been widely celebrated in scholarship. Christopher Simon Sykes labeled it a “masterpiece” (Hockney: The Biography, London, 2011, vol. I, p. 260). Marco Livingstone, meanwhile, described it as a “virtuoso display” of Hockney’s “perceptual conviction” (David Hockney, London, 1982, p. 147). Elsewhere, Henry Geldzahler—the legendary curator and critic—wrote that the work “has the emotional energy of a portrait.” Geldzahler himself had posed alongside the same table two years earlier in Hockney’s seminal double portrait Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), another image of emotional estrangement. “All the objects on it are things the artists lives with,” he explains, “… yet there is a poignancy in their separateness.” It is “as autobiographical,” he writes, as the works of this period “are permitted to get” (Making It New, New York, 1994, p. 144).
In the immediate aftermath of his break-up, Hockney confessed, he believed he was embarking upon a straightforward still life. However, he quickly came to realize the personal significance of the objects he had chosen. Apart from the flowers and the two straw water containers, he explained, the items were “not my loves but those of Peter,” many bought by him for their London home (David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976, p. 241). Here, Hockney depicts them with breath-taking clarity and near-human gravitas. The complex dance of light through multiple glass surfaces—lamp, vases, jug, water glass and ashtray—is captured with razor-sharp precision. Contrasting textures and contours are immaculately observed, every shadow, highlight, angle and curve rendered in crisp, hyper-real detail. Reflections pool in the table below, swimming with light and color. Despite their proximity, each object stands alone. The figure-shaped shadow under the table, many have suggested, serves as a painful reminder of Schlesinger’s absence. The tulips, meanwhile—Hockney’s favorite flowers, and a recurring motif in his work—seem to implicate the presence of the artist himself, lost in a sunlit chamber of memory.
Hockney and Schlesinger had met in the summer of 1966. A young history student looking to forge a career as an artist, Schlesinger had attended a drawing class run by Hockney at the University of California, Los Angeles. “On the first day of class the professor walked in,” he recalls; “—he was a bleached blond; wearing a tomato-red suit, a green and white polka-dot tie with a matching hat, and round black cartoon glasses; and speaking with a Yorkshire accent… I was drawn to him because he was quite different.” Hockney immediately recognized a kindred spirit. “I could genuinely see he had talent, and on top of that he was a marvelous looking young man,” he remembers (quoted in op cit., 2011, pp. 180-181). After the course finished, the two struck up a friendship which quickly blossomed into a romance. It was Hockney’s first great love affair, immortalized in sensual early works including Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and The Room, Tarzana (1967).
When Hockney returned to England, Schlesinger came too, a place at the Slade School of Art in London awaiting him. From the artist’s studio on Powis Terrace, the couple traveled widely, spending halcyon summer days with friends in Europe. The period brought great professional triumph for Hockney, who mounted his first retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1970. By January 1971, however, the relationship was beginning to show signs of strain. A trip to Morocco in February sought to rekindle it: Hockney’s heart-wrenching portrait Sur la Terrasse (1971), depicting Schlesinger on the balcony of their room at the Hôtel de la Mamounia in Marrakesh, is an extraordinary precursor to the present work, every inch of it suffused with yearning. That summer, as Jack Hazan began filming his landmark documentary A Bigger Splash, the couple traveled to Spain and France. An explosive row in Cadaqués led Hockney to flee in anger, only to return almost immediately in a bid to make amends. For Schlesinger, however, the relationship was over. That August, Hockney returned to Powis Terrace alone.
As fall descended, the artist attempted to come to terms with his new reality. “It was very traumatic for me,” he recalls. “I’d never been through anything like that.” Deeply unhappy, Hockney threw himself into his work, seeking solace in art. “I started painting very intensely that September,” he explains. “… For about three months I was painting fourteen, fifteen hours a day. There was nothing else I wanted to do. It was a way of coping with life … I was incredibly lonely” (op. cit., 1976, p. 240). These feelings wrote themselves into his paintings: from the solitary Beach Umbrella (1971), casting its long shadows upon a deserted beach, to the vacant Chair and Shirt (1972), the elegiac Mount Fuji (1972, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Pool and Steps, Le Nid du Duc (1971), depicting Schlesinger’s discarded shirt and shoes. Several of these were unveiled alongside the present work in Hockney’s exhibition at André Emmerich Gallery, New York, in 1972. Also shown for the first time was Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures). Here, Hockney dispensed with wistful signifiers: in their place was an image of Schlesinger himself, his gaze directed at another figure swimming underwater.
Still Life on a Glass Table is situated at the pinnacle of Hockney’s celebrated “naturalistic” phase, which dominated his practice from the late 1960s until the early 1970s. Defined by rigorous use of one-point perspective and meticulous command of light and space, this period saw the rise of the artist’s double portraits, which draw heavily upon the teachings of Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca. The present work inherits the incisive attentiveness that characterized these paintings, as well as their sense of simmering interpersonal drama. Its objects, like many of the double portraits’ subjects, are at once bound together and subtly disconnected: “they do not so much interweave as declare their identities,” wrote Geldzahler (op. cit., 1944, p. 144). It is perhaps no coincidence that tables, often laden with still-life arrangements, featured as key compositional devices throughout the series, gracing major works such as Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968) and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1971, Tate, London). The present painting’s glass table, following its appearance in Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, would also reappear in Hockney’s Portrait of Sir David Webster (1971), adorned with the same vase and bunch of tulips.
The swimming pool paintings, too, played a central role in Hockney’s pursuit of naturalism. In California, the play of West Coast light upon sparkling waters had fired his imagination, instilling in him a desire to understand how we truly experience complex visual phenomena. From the stylized iconography of A Bigger Splash (Tate, London), painted in 1967, Hockney would branch into ever-more detailed studies of reflection and refraction, each time probing new truths about the workings of human sight. That year, he made his first depiction of the present work’s glass table: an ink sketch entitled A Glass Table with Glass Objects. Others would follow, including a drawing now held in Tate, London. “Water and glass are something that you cannot quite describe, they are transparent,” he explained. “…There’s a line of that mystical poet, George Herbert: ‘A man may look on glass, on it may stay his eye or if he pleases through it pass, and there the heaven espy’. It’s a nice idea, that you can decide where your eye is going to rest” (quoted in M. Glazebrook, “David Hockney: an interview” in David Hockney: Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960-70, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1970, p. 13).
Still Life on a Glass Table brings these interrogations to a climax. For all its emotional resonance, there is an elemental purity to Hockney’s glass matrix, its kaleidoscopic play of light distilled to quiet, clinical order. Its clean lines echo the aesthetics of East and West Coast Minimalism that emerged during this period, similarly fueled by a fascination with the mechanics of perception. The long tradition of still-life painting, too, was rooted in the rigors of close observation. The genre, which flourished in the Dutch Golden Age, had been given new life by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso: all of whom were deeply admired by Hockney. Perhaps he also had in mind the work of Edouard Manet, whose 1882 painting Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (The Courtauld Gallery, London) offered one of art history’s most extraordinary studies of reflection. And while Hockney had arguably outgrown his associations with American Pop Art by 1971, it was not lost on him that the still-life genre had also come under the microscope of Roy Lichtenstein: an artist for whom glass, mirrors and other reflective objects were of keen interest.
Hockney painted still lifes throughout his practice. His studies of refracted light would eventually lead him away from naturalism, giving rise to a stream of cubist inspired examples throughout the 1980s. They continued to punctuate his art during the 1990s, taking the form of poignant flower portraits that the artist frequently conceived as memorials for friends. Nowhere, however, did the genre find such potent expression as in Still Life on a Glass Table. In the spirit of “nature morte,” it offers a statement of life’s transience: a reminder that the objects and people we hold close cannot last forever. At the same time, however, it is a celebration—a tribute to art-making as a vehicle for clarity and catharsis. The process of intensive scrutiny, it proposes, can preserve the ineffable in paint. Light can be captured and sealed; feelings can be embalmed. In the present work, memories of lost love live on, reflected indefinitely in the glass table.
With an outstanding exhibition history that includes major retrospectives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1988) and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2017), Still Life on a Glass Table has been widely celebrated in scholarship. Christopher Simon Sykes labeled it a “masterpiece” (Hockney: The Biography, London, 2011, vol. I, p. 260). Marco Livingstone, meanwhile, described it as a “virtuoso display” of Hockney’s “perceptual conviction” (David Hockney, London, 1982, p. 147). Elsewhere, Henry Geldzahler—the legendary curator and critic—wrote that the work “has the emotional energy of a portrait.” Geldzahler himself had posed alongside the same table two years earlier in Hockney’s seminal double portrait Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), another image of emotional estrangement. “All the objects on it are things the artists lives with,” he explains, “… yet there is a poignancy in their separateness.” It is “as autobiographical,” he writes, as the works of this period “are permitted to get” (Making It New, New York, 1994, p. 144).
In the immediate aftermath of his break-up, Hockney confessed, he believed he was embarking upon a straightforward still life. However, he quickly came to realize the personal significance of the objects he had chosen. Apart from the flowers and the two straw water containers, he explained, the items were “not my loves but those of Peter,” many bought by him for their London home (David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976, p. 241). Here, Hockney depicts them with breath-taking clarity and near-human gravitas. The complex dance of light through multiple glass surfaces—lamp, vases, jug, water glass and ashtray—is captured with razor-sharp precision. Contrasting textures and contours are immaculately observed, every shadow, highlight, angle and curve rendered in crisp, hyper-real detail. Reflections pool in the table below, swimming with light and color. Despite their proximity, each object stands alone. The figure-shaped shadow under the table, many have suggested, serves as a painful reminder of Schlesinger’s absence. The tulips, meanwhile—Hockney’s favorite flowers, and a recurring motif in his work—seem to implicate the presence of the artist himself, lost in a sunlit chamber of memory.
Hockney and Schlesinger had met in the summer of 1966. A young history student looking to forge a career as an artist, Schlesinger had attended a drawing class run by Hockney at the University of California, Los Angeles. “On the first day of class the professor walked in,” he recalls; “—he was a bleached blond; wearing a tomato-red suit, a green and white polka-dot tie with a matching hat, and round black cartoon glasses; and speaking with a Yorkshire accent… I was drawn to him because he was quite different.” Hockney immediately recognized a kindred spirit. “I could genuinely see he had talent, and on top of that he was a marvelous looking young man,” he remembers (quoted in op cit., 2011, pp. 180-181). After the course finished, the two struck up a friendship which quickly blossomed into a romance. It was Hockney’s first great love affair, immortalized in sensual early works including Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and The Room, Tarzana (1967).
When Hockney returned to England, Schlesinger came too, a place at the Slade School of Art in London awaiting him. From the artist’s studio on Powis Terrace, the couple traveled widely, spending halcyon summer days with friends in Europe. The period brought great professional triumph for Hockney, who mounted his first retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1970. By January 1971, however, the relationship was beginning to show signs of strain. A trip to Morocco in February sought to rekindle it: Hockney’s heart-wrenching portrait Sur la Terrasse (1971), depicting Schlesinger on the balcony of their room at the Hôtel de la Mamounia in Marrakesh, is an extraordinary precursor to the present work, every inch of it suffused with yearning. That summer, as Jack Hazan began filming his landmark documentary A Bigger Splash, the couple traveled to Spain and France. An explosive row in Cadaqués led Hockney to flee in anger, only to return almost immediately in a bid to make amends. For Schlesinger, however, the relationship was over. That August, Hockney returned to Powis Terrace alone.
As fall descended, the artist attempted to come to terms with his new reality. “It was very traumatic for me,” he recalls. “I’d never been through anything like that.” Deeply unhappy, Hockney threw himself into his work, seeking solace in art. “I started painting very intensely that September,” he explains. “… For about three months I was painting fourteen, fifteen hours a day. There was nothing else I wanted to do. It was a way of coping with life … I was incredibly lonely” (op. cit., 1976, p. 240). These feelings wrote themselves into his paintings: from the solitary Beach Umbrella (1971), casting its long shadows upon a deserted beach, to the vacant Chair and Shirt (1972), the elegiac Mount Fuji (1972, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Pool and Steps, Le Nid du Duc (1971), depicting Schlesinger’s discarded shirt and shoes. Several of these were unveiled alongside the present work in Hockney’s exhibition at André Emmerich Gallery, New York, in 1972. Also shown for the first time was Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures). Here, Hockney dispensed with wistful signifiers: in their place was an image of Schlesinger himself, his gaze directed at another figure swimming underwater.
Still Life on a Glass Table is situated at the pinnacle of Hockney’s celebrated “naturalistic” phase, which dominated his practice from the late 1960s until the early 1970s. Defined by rigorous use of one-point perspective and meticulous command of light and space, this period saw the rise of the artist’s double portraits, which draw heavily upon the teachings of Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca. The present work inherits the incisive attentiveness that characterized these paintings, as well as their sense of simmering interpersonal drama. Its objects, like many of the double portraits’ subjects, are at once bound together and subtly disconnected: “they do not so much interweave as declare their identities,” wrote Geldzahler (op. cit., 1944, p. 144). It is perhaps no coincidence that tables, often laden with still-life arrangements, featured as key compositional devices throughout the series, gracing major works such as Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968) and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1971, Tate, London). The present painting’s glass table, following its appearance in Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, would also reappear in Hockney’s Portrait of Sir David Webster (1971), adorned with the same vase and bunch of tulips.
The swimming pool paintings, too, played a central role in Hockney’s pursuit of naturalism. In California, the play of West Coast light upon sparkling waters had fired his imagination, instilling in him a desire to understand how we truly experience complex visual phenomena. From the stylized iconography of A Bigger Splash (Tate, London), painted in 1967, Hockney would branch into ever-more detailed studies of reflection and refraction, each time probing new truths about the workings of human sight. That year, he made his first depiction of the present work’s glass table: an ink sketch entitled A Glass Table with Glass Objects. Others would follow, including a drawing now held in Tate, London. “Water and glass are something that you cannot quite describe, they are transparent,” he explained. “…There’s a line of that mystical poet, George Herbert: ‘A man may look on glass, on it may stay his eye or if he pleases through it pass, and there the heaven espy’. It’s a nice idea, that you can decide where your eye is going to rest” (quoted in M. Glazebrook, “David Hockney: an interview” in David Hockney: Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960-70, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1970, p. 13).
Still Life on a Glass Table brings these interrogations to a climax. For all its emotional resonance, there is an elemental purity to Hockney’s glass matrix, its kaleidoscopic play of light distilled to quiet, clinical order. Its clean lines echo the aesthetics of East and West Coast Minimalism that emerged during this period, similarly fueled by a fascination with the mechanics of perception. The long tradition of still-life painting, too, was rooted in the rigors of close observation. The genre, which flourished in the Dutch Golden Age, had been given new life by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso: all of whom were deeply admired by Hockney. Perhaps he also had in mind the work of Edouard Manet, whose 1882 painting Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (The Courtauld Gallery, London) offered one of art history’s most extraordinary studies of reflection. And while Hockney had arguably outgrown his associations with American Pop Art by 1971, it was not lost on him that the still-life genre had also come under the microscope of Roy Lichtenstein: an artist for whom glass, mirrors and other reflective objects were of keen interest.
Hockney painted still lifes throughout his practice. His studies of refracted light would eventually lead him away from naturalism, giving rise to a stream of cubist inspired examples throughout the 1980s. They continued to punctuate his art during the 1990s, taking the form of poignant flower portraits that the artist frequently conceived as memorials for friends. Nowhere, however, did the genre find such potent expression as in Still Life on a Glass Table. In the spirit of “nature morte,” it offers a statement of life’s transience: a reminder that the objects and people we hold close cannot last forever. At the same time, however, it is a celebration—a tribute to art-making as a vehicle for clarity and catharsis. The process of intensive scrutiny, it proposes, can preserve the ineffable in paint. Light can be captured and sealed; feelings can be embalmed. In the present work, memories of lost love live on, reflected indefinitely in the glass table.