{"id":124271,"date":"2018-04-16T11:00:46","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124271"},"modified":"2018-04-16T13:53:56","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:53:56","slug":"david-hockneys-improbable-inspirations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/16\/david-hockneys-improbable-inspirations\/","title":{"rendered":"David Hockney\u2019s Improbable Inspirations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

David Hockney, A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden<\/em>, 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Hockney\u2019s show of new work, currently up at Pace in New York, is an explosively energetic exploration of reverse perspective. Hockney deploys hexagonal canvases, the lower ends notched out, so as to allow the eye to bend the picture far beyond the frame. As Hockney quips, \u201cFar from cutting corners, I was adding them.\u201d In Lawrence Weschler\u2019s catalogue essay, Hockney suggests what he means by reverse perspective by way of an allusion to an experience he once had coursing through the arrow-straight eighteen-kilometer St. Gotthard Pass road tunnel, the tiny pinpoint of light ahead epitomizing \u201cthe hell of one-point perspective.\u201d \u201cI suddenly realized,\u201d Hockney tells Weschler, \u201chow that is the basis of all conventional photographic perspective, that endless regress to an infinitely distant point in the middle of the image, how everything is hurtling away from you and you yourself are not even in the picture at all. But then, as we got to the end of the tunnel everything suddenly reversed with the world opening out in every direction \u2026 and I realized how that, and not its opposite, was the effect I wanted to capture.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In one of Hockney\u2019s first experiments in his recent series, he took Fra Angelico\u2019s San Marco fresco<\/em>\u00a0The Annunciation (a masterpiece of one-point perspective)\u2014a poster of which used to grace the upper corridor of his elementary school\u2014and turned it inside out, offering a sense of what it might have looked like in reverse perspective.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation<\/em>, c. 1450.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

David Hockney, Annunciation II, after Fra Angelico,<\/em> 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Weschler\u2019s catalogue essay, from which we will be publishing\u00a0two adapted excerpts this week and next, goes into further detail on the taproots and implications of Hockney\u2019s current reverse-perspective passion. The first, below, involves an improbable recent mentor. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

During this period, Hockney came under the spell of a new intellectual mentor. He\u2019d always been a ferocious autodidact, and in the past, entire bodies of work had come into being in tandem with his discoveries of one fresh contemporary influence or another: the physicist David Bohm and his implicate order, the historian George Rowley and his ideas on moving focus in Chinese art, the art and science historian Martin Kemp and the optical physicist Charles Falco and their notions on mirrors and lenses as possible contributors to the rise of one-point perspective (and the optical look it began enforcing) as far back as the start of the Renaissance. Approaching eighty years of age, Hockney was as susceptible to such sudden passions as ever\u2014only the inspiration this time around proved perhaps his most surprising yet: a Russian Orthodox monk and his writings from almost a full century earlier.<\/p>\n

Early on in the creation of these new notched paintings, David had been rhapsodizing on the virtues of reverse perspective, and one evening, one of his friends and assistants, Jean Pierre Goncalves de Lima (universally referred to around the studio as JP), decided to burrow into the World Wide Web in search of further clarification on what this boss of his kept yammering on about. He quickly came upon a long essay from 1920, offered forth in its entirety, indeed entitled \u201cReverse Perspective\u201d and credited to one Father Pavel Florensky of Moscow, Russia. JP printed out a copy of the eighty-page monograph and left it on David\u2019s studio chair for David to discover in the morning, which indeed he did, becoming progressively more engrossed (\u201cpositively thrilled\u201d being the way he described his reaction later that very day when he called me up, along with many other friends no doubt, positively ordering us all to download the text<\/a> and get back to him with our reactions).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pavel Florensky.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

And the text was indeed something\u2014as was its author. Florensky, born in 1882 in Azerbaijan the scion of secular Westernizing parents (his father a Russian railway engineer, his mother the cultured product of ancient Armenian nobility), proved a mathematical prodigy from his earliest years and went on to do pathbreaking work in non-Euclidean mathematics while also pouring himself into wider scientific studies more generally. But apparently, after a visit to Tolstoy in 1899, Florensky fell into a growing spiritual crisis in which he came to doubt the primacy of the scientific positivism that had guided his studies thus far. Following graduation from Moscow State University in 1904, he declined the offer of a teaching position in mathematics, instead repairing to the nearby holy city of Sergiev Posad (site of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church), where his theological studies culminated in his being ordained as a priest in 1911 (though he married and would have five children). Although he wrote widely on philosophy and theology (his essays on the idea of the Divine Sophia would later become central to the concerns of feminist theologians), he nevertheless continued his equally far-flung scientific investigations, all the while trying to meld the two vocations. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, and even though the Communists shut down many of his most beloved Orthodox institutions, he threw himself into technical work, particularly on behalf of the electrification of rural Soviets, under the sponsorship of Trotsky himself (notwithstanding his insistence on wearing clerical robes all the while). By 1932, however, Trotsky was gone, and Stalin, finding the charismatic and querulous cleric an increasing nuisance, had him exiled to Siberia, where he launched into investigations on the nature and properties of permafrost, further path-breaking research that has become increasingly relevant in recent years with the rise of global warming. Meanwhile, in 1937, at the height of his Red Terror, Stalin had Florensky brought back to St. Petersburg and, following a brief trial, summarily executed\u2014that being the very year, as it happens, of the birth of David Hockney in Bradford, England.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pavel Florensky shortly after his arrest by the GPU, 1933.<\/p><\/div>\n

The point is that on top of all of that, Florensky was also a hugely influential art critic and aesthetic theorist, one of the leading lights of Russia\u2019s Silver Age and well known to the likes of Malevich and Kandinsky (and such writers as Andrei Bely and Sergei Bulgakov). His reverse perspective essay, in particular, dates from a moment in 1920 when Bolsheviks were busily imputing the value of the medieval Orthodox icons they were tearing off the walls of museums and monasteries, dismissing them as hopelessly primitive for their allegedly clumsy handling of modeling and perspective (the way, for instance, a nose might be seen to be going one direction while the lips went another and the eyes a third\u2014not in any way, at any rate, as in real life). But Florensky fired back, marshaling tremendous erudition to argue that if, as far back as Babylonian and Egyptian times, artists and craftsmen continually made similar errors, it was not because they didn\u2019t know about rigorous one-point perspective (they would have had to call on such knowledge to be able to build pyramids and the like) but because they sensed there was something wrong with its practice when it actually came to the depiction of real life in all its timely and timeless vivacity\u2014and they chose not to use it. Florensky showed how conventionally one-point perspectival tricks first began being deployed on theater sets in ancient Greece and Rome with the express intent of deceiving audiences, such illusionistic effects being likewise prized on the walls of decadent villas, say, in Pompeii, even though they really only registered as accurate from one specific location, completely falling apart from any other point of viewing. Over and over again, Florensky marshaled arguments that Hockney himself would start deploying more than sixty years later as he launched into his photo collages around 1982 (one hundred years almost to the day after the good monk\u2019s birth, though Hockney obviously hadn\u2019t known this at the time). For example, Florensky pointed out how young children, when asked to draw their house, will naturally include the front, the back, the tree and the doghouse in the backyard, and so forth (all of that correctly, since all of those details form part of the house they live<\/em> in), and they have to be rigorously trained instead to draw in a \u201ccorrect\u201d manner, which is to say as if arbitrarily standing stock-still with only one eye open, and then only to accept that way as accurate. For that matter, Florensky, like Hockney after him, pointed out that we ourselves never see in rigorously abstracted perspective (the way a camera does) because, for starters, we look out at the world from two eyes simultaneously, and for that matter our eyes and bodies are always in motion as we construct our actual sense of the world across time from all those multiple vantages.<\/p>\n

You can see what thrilled Hockney. At one point, for example, Florensky writes how \u201cit was not in pure art that perspective arose, it came out of applied art sphere\u201d\u2014theater design in antiquity, and subsequently alongside the rise of positivist science on the far side of the medieval era\u2014\u201cwhich enlisted painting in its service and subordinated it to its own<\/em> purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

[However,] the task of painting is not<\/em> to duplicate reality, but to give the most profound penetration \u2026 of its meaning. And the penetration of this meaning, of this stuff of reality, its architectonics, is offered to the artist\u2019s contemplative eye in living contact with reality, by growing accustomed to and empathizing with reality, whereas theater decoration wants as much as possible to replace reality with its outward appearance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(One of the problems with conventional photography, Hockney often says, is the way it can capture only surfaces.)<\/p>\n

For that matter, you could see what thrilled me<\/em>, for in the sentences that follow, Florensky insists that \u201cstage design is a deception<\/em>, albeit a seductive one, while pure painting is, or at least wants to be true to life<\/em>\u201d\u2014his italics, though as it happens, those last three words track exactly with the title I gave my own 2008 collection of twenty-five years of conversations with Hockney, starting with those photo collages in 1982\u2014\u201cnot a substitute for life but the symbolic signifier of its deepest reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s of course interesting how Florensky locates the original sin of perspective in antique theatrical design whereas contemporary opera staging proved one of the places where Hockney himself chose to elaborate his critique of one-point perspective, but that was only because Hockney was consciously trying to wrestle radically free from what Florensky saw as the very foundations of a prior perspective-infused tradition.<\/p>\n

Florensky meanwhile has a slightly different take from David\u2019s on the waning of the reverse (or multiple or moving) perspective traditions that had, as far as he was concerned, haloed the art of the Middle Ages both in the West and in Russia. Although Florensky saw the growing Renaissance focus on humans in their secular individuality opposed to their sacred community as one of the wellsprings renewing the antique theatrical bias toward a one-point perspective that by definition required a solitary individual\u2019s solitary gaze (out of one eye)\u2014and of the positivist science such a revolution in turn helped occasion\u2014he declined to point to a particular moment when the world views suddenly flipped (as Hockney was to do with The Great Wall<\/em>, which\u00a0formed the heart of his research program leading up to the book\u00a0Secret Knowledge<\/em>,\u00a0in which he argued that something revolutionary must have occurred between 1425 and 1435, a point at which artists from Bruges to Florence, from Van Eyck to Brunelleschi, must have suddenly started using optical aids and it was \u201cas if from one decade to the next, European art put on its glasses\u201d). Florensky argued for a more gradual transition, pointing out that as late as Leonardo (The Last Supper<\/em>, c. 1497) and Raphael (The School of Athens<\/em>, c. 1511), masters were deploying multiple perspectives to heighten spiritual interpretations of their material.<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding the reading of which, I was thoroughly startled a few weeks later in Madrid when, visiting the Prado, I came upon another<\/em> Fra Angelico Annunciation<\/em> (c. 1430), similarly squeezed into a tapering one-point perspective:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation<\/em>, c. 1426.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Underneath it, there was a predella consisting of five scenes, all of them (but especially the second and the fourth) laid out in pure Hockneyesque notched reverse perspective:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation<\/em>, c. 1426 (detail from the predella).<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

So go figure.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cSomething New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]\u201d will be on view at the Pace Gallery from April 5 to May 12<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lawrence<\/em> Weschler<\/a>, late of <\/em>The New Yorker and director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, is the author of more than twenty books on myriad subjects. He is currently completing work on a biographical memoir of the years, during the early eighties, when he was serving as a beanpole Sancho to Oliver Sacks\u2019s capacious Quixote, due out in 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted with permission from<\/em> David Hockney: Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]; introduction by Lawrence Weschler, Pace Gallery, 2018.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  David Hockney\u2019s show of new work, currently up at Pace in New York, is an explosively energetic exploration of reverse perspective. Hockney deploys hexagonal canvases, the lower ends notched out, so as to allow the eye to bend the picture far beyond the frame. As Hockney quips, \u201cFar from cutting corners, I was adding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1456,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32024],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-art"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDavid Hockney\u2019s Improbable Inspirations<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"While working on his newest series of paintings in reverse perspective, David Hockney came across a fascinating essay by a Russian mathematician from the twenties.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/16\/david-hockneys-improbable-inspirations\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"David Hockney\u2019s Improbable Inspirations by Lawrence Weschler\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 16, 2018 \u2013   David Hockney\u2019s show of new work, currently up at Pace in New York, is an explosively energetic exploration of reverse perspective. 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