David Hockney - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 12, 2011 | Phillips

Contemporary Art Part I

12 May 2011
New York

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Annely Juda Fine Art, London; Private Collection

  • Exhibited

    London, Annely Juda Fine Art, David Hockney Flowers, Faces and Spaces, May 1 – July 19, 1997 (illustrated in color and on the cover)

  • Literature

    A. Juda, David Hockney Flowers, Faces and Spaces, London, 1997 (illustrated in color and on the cover)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Like Van Gogh, Matisse, Manet and countless other master painters before him, David Hockney has produced some of the most stunning and arresting still life paintings of flowers. While Hockney has painted myriad versions of this still life theme throughout his entire career, a brief period in 1996 saw the artist vigorously focus on a series of twenty-five flower paintings, each dynamic, vibrant and successful in their own ways. The present lot, 30 Sunflowers, 1996, is a superb, even sublime example of Hockney at his best with the subject matter. Of the twenty-five paintings which comprise the series, only two were made in the grand scale that 30 Sunflowers occupies; the other being the slightly less intricate and visually exciting Halaconia in Green Vase.

    30 Sunflowers, along with all the other Flower paintings from 1996 were exhibited together in Hockney’s exhibition entitled Flowers, Faces and Spaces in 1997 at Annely Juda Fine Art in London. This exhibition was hugely important for Hockney, as it not only represented his largest show in his native London since the travelling retrospective the Tate held in 1988 (which later travelled to the L.A. County Museum of Art), but was also his first show with a British art dealer in over 10 years. This flower series marked a significant departure for Hockney as his technique became significantly more painterly than with his previous work and his palette took on a more vibrant and pulsating quality. These two factors paired with his ever present curious yet careful and informed study of perception and representation of space helped Hockney to achieve the simultaneously joyous and loose yet sophisticated and accomplished flower paintings exemplified by 30 Sunflowers.

    How Hockney came to embark on the series is two-fold. On one hand there was his use or even reliance on painting pictures of flowers in times when he was coping with ill and dying friends; and on the other was the critical affect seeing the Vermeer exhibition at the Mauritshaus in The Hague the previous summer had on him.

    Hockney once said “I have always painted flowers for friends who were ill.” Sadly but importantly during the time just prior to beginning work on this series Hockney was coping with several significant losses including the death of his great friend and champion Henry Geldzahler as well as the sudden death of his close friend Sandra Fisher, painter and wife of R.B. Kitaj. The passing of these two central figures in Hockney’s life no doubt tried him intensely and forced him to examine the delicacy and transience of life. While some would become depressed and haunted by these significant losses, Hockney clearly remained optimistic and continued to celebrate life by producing these cheerful pictures rather than dwell on the inescapable process of death and decay.

    In fact, a few years before 30 Sunflowers was painted a journalist questioned Hockney about the death of his friends and whether or not it had affected his work in a negative manner; Hockney replied by describing how he felt after seeing the Matisse retrospective at MoMA in 1993: “I spent about five hours in there. It was one of the highest and deepest pleasures I’ve had. But I remember there was a painting if a little still life, just a pot of flowers and a bust on a table, and it’s painted in 1942. You look at the date and you think, in Europe they were just ripping themselves apart. It’s ghastly … I’m glad he painted it. I’m very glad somebody sat down and did something like that” (Hockney, quoted in T. Gabriel, “At Home with David Hockney”, in The New York Times, 21 January 1993, reproduced at www.nytimes.com). So what better way to ponder the basic human quandary about life than to scrutinize flowers, which so clearly and beautifully demonstrate and mimic life’s processes.

    Hockney’s love and celebration for life during this time coupled with what he gleaned from Vermeer during the summer of 1995 helped make 30 Sunflowers such a highly successful work and arguably one of his most important works from the decade. Hockney himself claimed that his private viewing of the Vermeer exhibition made him passionate about flower still life paintings. “It was absolutely thrilling,” he said, “I was amazed. After 350 years the color is still so vibrant.” Further, Hockney went so far as to claim in conversation with a friend that Vermeer's colors will last longer than MGM's. He explains further than that "… it got me thinking about the fugitive nature of color unless you treat it physically correctly." Hockney came to understand how Vermeer’s methods of layering yellow and blue hues underneath the outermost layers of paint have an uncanny ability to make the surface layers glow. In his new series of flower paintings he quite successfully reproduces Vermeer’s technique which heightens the radiance and vibrancy of the sunflowers and vases.

    Perhaps David Cohen put it best in the closing of his glowing review of the Flowers, Faces and Spaces exhibition: “From the big stage to the corner of his studio, from the big screen to Vermeer: Hockney's new modesty of scale is all about a determination to survive, to deal with isolation in his own way. Formally, there is also a retreat to the comforts of traditional, single perspective after the wild spatial distortions of his Picassoid abstractions and Cubistic photo collages. But melancholy in Hockney is always undemonstrative …Unless, that is, a spray of flowers is itself a symbol of the effervescence of life, to be frozen in time like the ejaculatory splash of his swimming pool. If Hockney's intimacy is defensive, his strategy is still full sensory attack. His drop-dead gorgeous color is a violent assault on the inevitability of decay.” (D. Cohen quoted in “David Hockney: Full Sensory Attack”, in Artnet Magazine, 7 July 1997, reproduced at www.artnet.com)

  • Artist Biography

    David Hockney

    David Hockney (b. 1937) is one of the most well-known and celebrated artists of the
    20th and 21st centuries. He works across many mediums, including painting, collage,
    and more recently digitally, by creating print series on iPads. His works show semi-
    abstract representations of domestic life, human relationships, floral, fauna, and the
    changing of seasons.

    Hockney has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal
    Academy of Arts in London, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, among many
    other institutions. On the secondary market, his work has sold for more than $90
    million.

     
    View More Works

31

David Hockney

30 Sunflowers

1996
Oil on canvas.
72 x 72 in. (182.9 x 182.9 cm.)
Signed, titled and dated “30 Sunflowers, 1996, David Hockney” on the reverse.

Estimate
$1,500,000 - 2,500,000 

Sold for $2,546,500

Contemporary Art Part I

12 May 2011
New York