My Parents, David Hockney (1977) | Culture | The Guardian

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No 91

My Parents, David Hockney (1977)

Jonathan Jones The Guardian, Saturday 19 January 2002

View the work online Artist: David Hockney (born 1937) was the first British artist to act like a pop star, famous and glamorous from the moment he graduated from the Royal College of Art as gold medal-winner in 1962. British pop art started before American pop art (with Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi in the 1950s), but it was Hockney, a young man dealing with love, sex and the modern world, who captured the public imagination in paintings with graffiti-like slogans such as "I will love you at 8pm next Wednesday" and the Beatles-like comic pathos of his 1962 work A Man Stood in Front of His House With Rain Descending. By the 1970s Hockney was discontented with fame; the film A Bigger Splash, a fascinating document of his iconic status and move to the US, distressed him with its intrusion. Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1971) and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1) are the climax of his pop art in their evocation of the early 1970s. He started to distance himself from his earlier work, with explicit art historical references to Picasso, Chinese art and, in this painting, Chardin and Piero della Francesca, preoccupying himself with method rather than content. In his book Secret Knowledge, published last year, Hockney argues that the old masters achieved their representational effects using lens-based technologies such as the camera obscura and camera lucida. His book can be read as a vindication of pop art's use of photography. Subject: Hockney's parents were strong-minded individuals, and the artist is perhaps coming to resemble them as he rides hobbyhorses such as his theory about lenses. His mother was religious and a vegetarian, which was unusual at the time. His father, who died a year after this painting was done, was an anti-war campaigner and noted Bradford character who fiercely opposed smoking. Distinguishing features: Nostalgia for a simpler, sparser and perhaps more moral world gives this painting a lean grace, as Hockney's parents sit in a pared-down interior on chairs of minimalist geometrical rigour. Its emotional power, however, lies in its confession of love. And it is also a meditation. Hockney's parents are separated by the books and the vase of yellow and pink tulips, and adopt different relationships with the painter, their son. His mother looks at him directly, adopting a suitable pose, as if having her photograph taken. His father seems to have no sense of occasion, ignoring the artist as he reads a book - Art and Photography by Aaron Scharf. The painting is poised between art and life, between Hockney's intellectual interests as a painter and his desire to put his parents before us. It is full of symbolic objects and
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My Parents, David Hockney (1977) | Culture | The Guardian

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clues, like an Old Master painting. The reflection of a postcard of della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ in the mirror on the cabinet suggests his parents' Christian values. Hockney originally attempted a version of this painting with his own face in the mirror. Hockney was living in Paris when he began this painting. On the cabinet shelf is Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and a book on Chardin, the 18th-century French painter of intimate, enigmatic scenes of domestic life. Chardin's clean, simple world is reflected in the purity of Hockney's painting: a calm, steady light pours in from the left, giving his mother's hair a stellar brightness. Her blue dress has a silvery sheen, as does the light catching his father's face. His father's brown suit and position in the picture take him further from the light. Together they are a formidable double act. Inspirations and influences: In addition to Chardin and della Francesca, the grand emotional quality of the canvas recalls the classical portraits of revolutionary French artist Jacques-Louis David. Hockney's explicit references to art history in this painting have a purpose. This artistic autobiography seems to protect him a little; he puts a postcard in place of himself in the mirror. And yet by juxtaposing his parents with his artistic influences, he acknowledges their influence. Art took him away from Bradford and his parents' world, but art allows him to bring them closer again. Where is it? Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8008).

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