‘At one side of my little house in Malibu is the Pacific Coast Highway; at the other is the beach. I step out of my kitchen door and there, right there, is the sea. So when I am painting in my studio I am very aware of nature, in its infinity, and of the sea endlessly moving.’

—David Hockney

Unfolding in a joyous, swirling cacophony of bold, bright color and riotous patten, The Twenty-Sixth V.N. Painting represents a pivotal moment in the impressive and highly inventive seventy-year career of Yorkshire-born artist David Hockney. Executed in 1992, it is the last of a small but highly significant series of twenty-six so-called “Very New Paintings,” the highly personalized “internal landscapes” that had preoccupied the artist over the course of that year.ⁱ Showcasing his innovative and experimental approach to pictorial and spatial problems, the work represents the culmination of the series – and of the themes that had absorbed Hockney for the previous three decades—synthesizing the chromatic and spatial experiments of his Californian landscapes with his celebrated theatrical set designs, and anticipating the new territories into which he would push landscape painting following his return to Yorkshire at the turn of the century.

First exhibited alongside the other twenty-five works from the series in the 1993 show Some Very New Paintings presented by André Emmerich Gallery in New York, examples from this pivotal body of work have featured in every major subsequent retrospective to date, the present painting especially notable  for its inclusion in the monographic 2017-2018 exhibition which travelled between Tate Britain in London, The Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Tellingly, in establishing the curatorial parameters for his current and critically acclaimed career retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Hockney paid special attention to this pivotal moment in his practice, his Very New Paintings marking at once the close of his long and illustrious California chapter, and the start of a highly inventive and industrious period passed between Yorkshire, London, and Normandy.

Malibu: A Very New Perspective

In 1988, Hockney relocated from his longtime residence in the Hollywood Hills to a coastal studio in Malibu, framed by the momentum and restless energy of the Ocean on the one side and the hum of the Pacific Coast Highway on the other. It is this centrifugal force that makes itself particularly felt in The Twenty-Sixth V.N. Painting, its patterned passages and complex surface textures bordered by the swooping striated forms of aquamarine and cerulean tones.

“[…] here at the beach I am between two great forces, the mountains and the sea. The mountains were made by a great force of nature, a thrusting force, which calmed in time, leaving them here, grand and peaceful. While below the other thrust continues, the endless movement of the sea. These forces are present, I believe, in the paintings.”

—David Hockney

While the work and the larger series to which it belongs share the unmistakable hot tones, vertiginous perspectives, and winding vistas of his celebrated Californian landscapes epitomized by works such as the 1980 Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, it is significant that Hockney did not turn his attention to the ocean until this decisive move, its fluid, mutable surface introducing a powerful, elemental energy to the works made after 1988

Pulsating with the same quintessentially Californian energy that the artist had made unmistakably his own over the course of the previous decade, Hockney’s restlessly innovative approach nevertheless makes its presence felt in the Very New Paintings, most forcefully in their spatial complexity and challenge to the pictorial conventions of single point perspective. Although conceding that these Very New Paintings might “seem a jumble to the viewer at first,” Hockney here advocates a slow approach to looking, explaining that “They take time to unfold. They’re a bit mind-boggling, but they are meant to be. The viewer can roam freely within them, finding his or her own space. That’s why there are no figures in them. You construct your own space mentally.”ⁱⁱ

It was this question of the experience of space and its representation that preoccupied Hockney more and more during the 1980s as his work moved away from the cooly detached and strikingly naturalistic modes that had first secured his reputation as a painter of sun-soaked pools and West Coast playboys

in the 1960s. While these conformed to the traditions of single point perspective with its clear vanishing point, Hockney felt increasingly as though this placed the viewer outside of the composition, failing to capture the movement, depth, and complexity of the act of looking itself.

“I couldn’t play in that space—the one-point perspective was terribly constricting—and it’s only by playing with the space in the years since that I’ve been able to make it clearer. Everything since then has been a progression towards a playful space which moves around and is still clear.”

—David Hockney

In their radical challenge to the conventions of fixed, single point perspective, and their introduction of movement and the experience of time into their compositions, the early Cubist experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would prove to be an important touchstone in this respect. While Hockney was already in close dialogue with Picasso and applying the lessons of Analytical Cubism to his innovative photocollages in the early 1980s, an important trip back to London in 1983 consolidated these investigations, coinciding with the opening of the first significant exhibition of Cubism in the city, The Essential Cubism: Braque, Picasso and Their Friends, 1907 – 1920 organised by Tate director Alan Bowness and curated by Douglas Cooper and Gary Tinterow. A major event, the exhibition presented the visual history of Cubism together for the first time, and would have a profound impact on Hockney, who returned a purported seven times during his short visit.

While Hockney’s palette here owes more to the vibrant Fauvist tones of André Derain and Henri Matisse, his careful organisation of space and dissection of volumetric form is rooted in the early lessons of Picasso’s Cézannesque landscapes, extended by the artist in his flattened, light-soaked Mediterranean landscapes from the 1950s which, although falling beyond the scope of the 1983 exhibition serve as a compelling reference point here.

Set Design and Pictorial Space

“All the work I have done in the theater has been useful to me […] what is most important is using real space. You begin to think spatially much more.”

—David Hockney

Synthesising all of these elements, it was Hockney’s experiences designing theatrical sets for the stage that proved to be “the consistent motor for change through the late 1970s and into the 1980s’, these operatic sets introducing ‘a new experience of space [that] always acknowledged the involvement and emotional response of the audience.”ⁱⁱⁱ Following his first commission to produce sets and costumes for a 1975 iteration of Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at Glyndebourne, Hockney spent the best part of the following two decades focussed on these interdisciplinary projects, even following more directly in Picasso’s footsteps with his 1981 reimagination of Parade, for which the modern master had first designed the avant-garde sets and costumes in 1917.

Richard Strauss, Frau ohne Schatten, Act I, Set design by David Hockney

With the move to Malibu inspiring an energetic return to painting, the sweeping vistas, juxtaposed textures, and concentrated drama of these operatic environments would directly inform Hockney’s painting during this period. In 1991 Hockney was finalising the designs for Puccini’s Turnadot in collaboration with Ian Falconer, travelling to Chicago in July to oversee production. On his return journey, Hockney travelled through Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon in a camper van, the monumental lunar rock formations of that landscape appearing almost immediately in his painting, and would form the basis of both his final set designs for Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten which opened in London’s Royal Opera House the following year, and the highly personalised motifs and more abstract forms of the Very New Paintings. 

“The first thing I made for Die Frau, on a small model, was an abstract representation of a river, like a snake. I put little dots on it which were actually derived from the textures that were appearing in these paintings. Turandot is mostly architectural interiors; even the garden, which is nearest to nature is a Chinese garden, stylized, formal, not raw nature. In Die Frau, on the other hand, we are dealing with nature in the wild […] and I knew these paintings were going to influence its design.”

—David Hockney

As Hockney explains, while the designs for Turandot had focused on architectural space, the context of Die Frau ohne Schatten allowed him to work with the natural landscape and its forms in a more direct manner, the set designs and paintings working in close dialogue with one another in the realisation of his vision. Hockney started the Very New Paintings in earnest immediately after completing work on the Die Frau ohne Schatten commission, works from this cycle of “internal landscapes” gradually becoming more complex, “using different marks and textures to create space, so that the viewer wanders around.”^iv

Capturing the essence and vernacular of the American West, The Twenty-Sixth V.N. Painting showcases the remarkable inventiveness and complexity of Hockney’s vision, the simultaneity of its multiple viewpoints, bold use of non-naturalistic color and pattern, and harmonious balance of forms all working together to under score his fundamental commitment to the question of representation itself. As the last work in this pivotal series, The Twenty-Sixth V.N. Painting is an especially important work, representing the summation - not just of the ideas, themes, and motifs that informed this suite of paintings – but of this entire long chapter in Hockney’s career, laying important foundations for his return to Yorkshire at the end of the decade, and his radical extension of a tradition of landscape painting there.

ⁱDavid Hockney, quoted in David Hockney: Some Very New Paintings, Glasgow, 1993, n.p.
ⁱⁱDavid Hockney, quoted in David Hockney and Hans Werner Holzworth, eds., David Hockney: A Chronology, London, p. 296.
ⁱⁱⁱAndrew Wilson, “Experiences of Space,” in David Hockney, London, 2017, p. 142.
^ivDavid Hockney, Hockney’s Pictures, London, 2004, p.57.