This is a past event
David Hockney and the Early 60s Rediscovery of Representation: Dr Sam Rose (St Andrews)
Over the course of the 1960s David Hockney seemed to undertake an extraordinary recapitulation of earlier centuries of the history of art, gradually moving from the most basic forms of representation at the beginning of the decade to a full self-described ‘naturalism’ by its end. This attempt to rediscover the means of pictorial representation has been difficult for even recent modernist art historians to accept, with the work variously criticised as not experimental enough, as too obsessed with ‘reference’ to the external world, or as overly bound up with the outmoded project of working ‘from life’. This paper asks what we might learn from taking the exploration of pictorial representation more seriously than these critics have done. Looking at work of the early 1960s in particular it asks what specifically is being done with representation here, what kinds of comments about art and life are being made, and where, looking forward, might a larger study go in attempting to place Hockney’s investigations into representation back into the story of 20th-century painting.
Sam Rose is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews, where he teaches modern art and the history and theory of art history. He is the author of Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism (2019) and the open access book Interpreting Art (2022).