A Bigger Message Conversations With David Hockney Revised Edition

“Sumptuously illustrated, this radiant volume encapsulates what it truly means to be a visual artist.” —Booklist David Hockney’s exuberant work is highly praised and widely celebrated—he is perhaps the world’s most popular living painter. But he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. This new edition includes a revised introduction and five new chapters which cover Hockney’s production since 2011, including preparations for the Bigger Picture exhibition held at the Royal Academy in 2012 and the making of Hockney’s iPad drawings and plans for the show. A difficult period followed the exhibition’s huge success, marked first by a stroke, which left Hockney unable to speak for a long period, followed by the vandalism of the artist’s Totem tree-trunk, and the tragic suicide of his assistant shortly thereafter. Escaping the gloom, in spring 2013 Hockney moved back to L.A. A few months later, Martin Gayford visited Hockney in the L.A. studio, where the fully-recovered artist was hard at work on his Comédie humaine, a series of full-length portraits painted in the studio. The conversations between Hockney and Gayford are punctuated by surprising and revealing observations on other artists—Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Picasso among them—and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of Yorkshire, Hockney’s birthplace, and California.

“An extraordinary record of a great artist in his studio, it also describes what it feels like to be transformed into a work of art.” —ARTnews Lucian Freud (1922-2011), widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of our time, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. The daily narrative of their encounters takes the reader into that most private place, the artist’s studio, and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master—both technical and subtly psychological. From this emerges an understanding of what a portrait is, but something else is also created: a portrait, in words, of Freud himself. This is not a biography, but a series of close-ups: the artist at work and in conversation at restaurants, in taxis, and in his studio. It takes one into the company of the painter for whom Picasso, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon were friends and contemporaries, as were writers such as George Orwell and W. H. Auden. The book is illustrated with many of Lucian Freud’s other works, telling photographs taken by David Dawson of Freud in his studio, and images by such great artists of the past as van Gogh and Titian who are discussed by Freud and Gayford. Full of wry observations, the book reveals the inside story of how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist and become a work of art.

A compact edition of Hockney and Gayford's brilliantly original book, with updated material and brand-new pieces of art Informed and energized by a lifetime of painting, drawing, and making images with cameras, David Hockney, in collaboration with art critic Martin Gayford, explores how and why pictures have been made across the millennia. Juxtaposing a rich variety of images--a still from a Disney cartoon with a Japanese woodblock print by Hiroshige, a scene from an Eisenstein film with a Velazquez paint-ing--the authors cross the normal boundaries between high culture and popular entertainment, and argue that film, photography, paint-ing, and drawing are deeply interconnected. Featuring a revised final chapter with some of Hockney's latest works, this new, compact edition of A History of Pictures remains a significant contribution to the discussion of how artists represent reality.

David Hockney reflects upon life and art as he experiences lockdown in rural Normandy in this inspiring book which includes conversations with the artist and his latest artworks. On turning eighty, David Hockney sought out rustic tranquility for the first time: a place to watch the sunset and the change of the seasons; a place to keep the madness of the world at bay. So when Covid-19 and lockdown struck, it made little difference to life at La Grande Cour, the centuries-old Normandy farmhouse where Hockney set up a studio a year earlier, in time to paint the arrival of spring. In fact, he relished the enforced isolation as an opportunity for even greater devotion to his art. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled is an uplifting manifesto that affirms art’s capacity to divert and inspire. It is based on a wealth of new conversations and correspondence between Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford, his long-time friend and collaborator. Their exchanges are illustrated by a selection of Hockney’s new Normandy drawings and paintings alongside works by Van Gogh, Monet, Bruegel, and others. We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder. A lifelong contrarian, he has been in the public eye for sixty years, yet remains entirely unconcerned by the view of critics or even history. He is utterly absorbed by his four acres of northern France and by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, color, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see . . . but about how to live.

This chronicle of the two months in 1888 when Paul Gauguin shared a house in France with Vincent Van Gogh describes not only how these two hallowed artists painted and exchanged ideas, but also the texture of their everyday lives. Includes 60 B&W reproductions of the artists' paintings and drawings from the period.

Martin Gayford’s masterful account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s, illustrated by documentary photographs and the works themselves The development of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s has never before been told before as a single narrative. R. B. Kitaj’s proposal, made in 1976, that there was a “substantial School of London” was essentially correct but it caused confusion because it implied that there was a movement or stylistic group at work, when in reality no one style could cover the likes of Francis Bacon and also Bridget Riley. Modernists and Mavericks explores this period based on an exceptionally deep well of firsthand interviews, often unpublished, with such artists as Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield. But Martin Gayford also teases out the thread weaving these individual lives together and demonstrates how and why, long after it was officially declared dead, painting lived and thrived in London. Simultaneously aware of the influences of Jackson Pollock, Giacometti, and (through the teaching passed down at the major art school) the traditions of Western art from Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the postwar painters were bound by their confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvelous things, and explored in their diverse ways, the possibilities of paint.

The fruits of a lifetime of experience by a cultural colossus, Philippe de Montebello, the longest-serving director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its history, distilled in conversations with an acclaimed critic Beginning with a fragment of yellow jasper—all that is left of the face of an Egyptian woman who lived 3,500 years ago—this book confronts the elusive questions: how, and why, do we look at art? Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford talked in art galleries or churches or their own homes, and this book is structured around their journeys. But whether they were in the Louvre or the Prado, the Mauritshuis of the Palazzo Pitti, they reveal the pleasures of truly looking. De Montebello shares the sense of excitement recorded by Goethe in his autobiography—"akin to the emotion experienced on entering a House of God"—but also reflects on why these secular temples might nevertheless be the "worst possible places to look at art." But in the end both men convey, with subtlety and brilliance, the delights and significance of their subject matter and some of the intense creations of human beings throughout our long history.