"When he lit a cigarette, a nurse in blue scrubs appeared over his shoulder, peering at Hockney with apparent concern."

"But by staying silent, the nurse respected the buttons that both he and Hockney wore, reading 'End Bossiness Soon.' The artist made those after the British government banned smoking in public spaces in 2007. These days, Hockney has 24-hour medical care, and ensuring that he will be well enough to go to Paris for the exhibition opening has been a priority for his team. He planned to travel by car, with his dachshund, Tess; his doctor would travel separately, he said. 'I am looking forward to it, because it is the largest exhibition I’ve ever had. Which it should be,' Hockney said with a wry smile. 'Shouldn’t it, really?'"

From "David Hockney Wants His Biggest Ever Show to Bring You Joy/The artist is 87 now and under constant medical care. But he was determined to make it to Paris for the exhibition of his life" (NYT)(free-access link).

"For our £120, we got 45 minutes of brightly coloured splats [David] Hockney has done on his iPad..."

"... blasted around the four walls while the old ham belted out his... platitudes in quadraphonic stereo all around us ('I love life,' 'the world is beautiful when you look, but most people don’t'). There were all the old banalities about the 'quality of the light' in Los Angeles, lots of film of him 'being inspired' while driving round the California mountains in a convertible while listening to Wagner (even duller than your best mate’s hourly Instagram posts from holiday) and then endless minutes of his opera sets, complete with cringey faux-naif animations that reminded me of when it said 'cartoon' in the TV schedule in the late 1970s and you switched on hoping for Tom and Jerry but got some depressing shadow puppet thing from 1950s Czechoslovakia.... [W]e were laughing so much we had to leave, through a shop in the foyer where they had attempted to find interesting things he has said over the years to put on their brightly coloured 'quote totes' (£20 a pop, if you please) but clearly couldn’t find anything better than 'If you’re not playful, you’re not alive,' 'I’m greedy for an exciting life,' and, from the militant old smoker, 'Health is wealth'...."

Writes Giles Coren in "Don’t splash out on Hockney’s splats and platitudes" (London Times).

"She likes jokes. She likes the one David Hockney told her once. It goes: 'The trouble with Van Gogh is if you tell him something it goes in one ear and stays there.'"

"She laughs again.... Maggi, I exclaim, you are smoking again! Didn't you give up five years ago? She says she did but last year, on her birthday, her large bronze sculpture of a rising wave was being erected, and it was fraught, and 'I thought: fuck it. It's my birthday. I'll smoke.'... She smokes with sensational gusto... I can't stand namby-pamby, take-it-or-leave-it smokers. I call them 'crap smokers' and Maggi is not a crap smoker.... 'I think I was once put forward to paint the Queen Mother but the word came back saying I was a bit risky, so it didn't happen.' Perhaps they thought you'd seduce her. 'She was very fond of gentlemen.' She could have painted Margaret Thatcher but didn't bother. Some big Conservative association wanted her to do it but she refused.... As a sculptor, Maggi's public works include her Charing Cross memorial to Oscar Wilde – it shows him rising from a sarcophagus.... Critics seem to loathe Oscar.... Would you have liked to have been a mother, Maggi? 'The thing of actually giving birth to this thing that's been inside you for nine months must be quite an event,' she says. 'And I've always said that if ever a painting was crying out in one room and a baby was crying out in another, I'm animal enough to go to the baby... it sounds corny but it's true... my works are my babies... '... Did your parents accept you being gay? 'My mother had a great problem with it... she hated saying the word lesbian, and I don't like it either. I prefer lesbionic or dyke....'" 

I'm reading "Maggi Hambling: 'I was put forward to paint the Queen Mother but the word came back saying I was a bit risky'/As a painter and sculptor, she’s an art-world legend – but as our intrepid interviewer discovers, Maggi Hambling's private life is every bit as colourful as her work" (The Independent). 

That's from 2010. I got there from Wikipedia, where I went because Hambling — whom I'd never heard of — is trending on Twitter this morning because....

"People Are Furious Over This New Statue of Pioneering Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in London/The internet wishes she were a bit less nude" (ArtNetNew).

Genuine question: Why present Mary Wollstonecraft as naked?
I’ve seen many statues of male writers, rights activists and philosophers and I can’t remember any of them being bare-assed. https://t.co/CNUmBgzldD

— Aunty Malorie Blackman (@malorieblackman) November 10, 2020

Was Hambling's tribute to Oscar Wilde more respectful? He's rising out of a tomb.

"I'm not very social, I don't go out that much. Frankly my life consists of reading and painting and a few nights of nice sex."

"When you realise you've got something really good to do, at my age, you get very, very excited... It made me feel a lot younger, fitter. I realised: that's a stimulant. You're living. Life is exciting, interesting, thrilling."

Said the artist David Hockney, who is 83, quoted in The Daily Mail.

He said that he no longer cared for living in London and the artistic politics that went with it. He described living in Bridlington, East Yorkshire... He has recently been living in Lisieux in the Calvados region of France. 

Under the heading "Reset," British Vogue — Vogue! — has a landscape — a landscape! — on its cover.

Yes, it's David Hockney. That's sort of like getting an important actress for a normal cover, a cover about feminine beauty and fashion. They're "resetting" to a landscape — a wheat field — the very landscape that inspired Vincent Van Gogh to blow his brains out?

The British Vogue Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninful explains (in the Independent). He says it "highlights that at the core of everything is our planet." And — referring to the coronavirus — "As the world rushes to find its feet again, we all need to be more mindful of the toll our previous pace of living took on nature."

You mean we ought to wake up from the trance you've worked so hard to put us under that has made us believe we must be ever searching for new and different clothes and paying lots of money for them?

Is that "mindful" enough?

Does it matter if the artist who's said to have painted Barack Obama's portrait had assistants who did much of the work?

Richard Johnson at Page Six writes:

Sources say artist Kehinde Wiley — who painted the former president before a background of greenery and flowers — has studios in China and produces most of his work there. "It’s his base of operation," said art critic Charlie Finch, who has known Wiley and appreciated his talent since they were students at Yale. "He has dozens of assistants working for him.... Normally, Wiley sketches out the important parts, and assistants fill out the rest."

I went there because I heard Rush Limbaugh was going on about it:

This portrait, this artist outsources portions of every painting. I mean, actual brush strokes are made by outsourced painters? And the guy admits it! He admits it! So I’m wondering who paints the sperm in this guy’s pictures. But it’s true. Obama’s picture, his portrait, was outsourced. Kehinde Wiley outsourced it. I’ve never heard of that. Is nothing real anymore? Does nobody actually do their job? Does everybody have somebody behind the scenes actually doing the work while other people are taking credit for it? It boggles my mind how often I run into this. I can’t keep of any other examples here, but it boggles my mind. Well, news anchors on TV. Somebody else is writing every word they say, and probably making one-twenty-fifth (if that much) of the salary they make.

If you don't know what "the sperm" refers to, read this. I want to talk about the practice of artists using assistants. Is it something to get worked up about or perfectly normal? I see that I missed all the discussion of this subject back in 2013 when an assistant to David Hockney died and "Suddenly Hockney's unremarkable seaside house seemed to be an art world Tardis concealing a hitherto ignored workshop of assistants, like Andy Warhol's Factory...." That's from The Guardian, which expanded on the topic:

'It was hard labour by any measure," says Jake Chapman, recalling his and brother Dinos's apprenticeship as assistants to Gilbert and George. "There was absolutely no creative input at all. They were very polite and it was interesting to hear them talking – as we did our daily penance.... We coloured in Gilbert and George's penises for eight hours a day." At least you didn't have to pay, as Rembrandt's assistants did, for the privilege of working in the master's studio. "Oh, we paid," retorts Chapman. "We paid in dignity."

The relationship between artist and artist's assistant is vexed, ripe for oedipal tensions, mutual resentments, or at least spitting in the great master's lapsang souchong. How tired, one suspects, Lucian Freud's assistant (and painter in his own right) David Dawson, got of being called "Dave the Slave" by his late master.*...

Behind every great artist might well be a highly skilled team of assistants, but that truth is suppressed for fear of shattering our illusions: the lone-genius myth helps sales, and is partly what gives an artwork its mystique.... "The idea of the genius struggling in solitude in a cockroached and frozen garret with only a crust of bread and syphilis for company is an historically specific vision no longer, if ever, of relevance," argued Stephen Bayley this week writing about Hockney's studio. "Artists are not solitary. They rely on human support systems, often of a very sophisticated sort."...

What about all those poor saps who paid Rembrandt and then wound up helping him to crank out paintings for which he got the kudos? Chapman is unsentimental: "Does the person who makes the hubcaps or whatever they're called these days – low-profile sports rims – point at a passing Mercedes SLK or whatever it's called, saying, 'I did that?' No. So why should assistants claim possession for their work? It's a job."

The work that you recognize as the work of this artist is work that is done with lots of technical help. He's the face of the operation, and if he did the whole thing himself, it would be very different work. There wouldn't be all those fussy leaves all over the background. It's like the way if the judges didn't have law clerks there wouldn't be all those citations and footnotes and reexplaining of everything over and over again. The badness would be easier to find, but is that what you want? I do, but I think a lot of people prefer slickness and glossy overproduction.

"I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore,**" [said Richard Wentworth, professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art, who worked as Henry Moore's assistant in 1967]. "Five reasons. Firstly, the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works."

_____________________

* Take a moment to note the actual slave called Dave the Slave, a much-admired 19th century American potter.



** Henry Moore was huge in the 1960s, when people enthused over things like this:



IN THE COMMENTS: narayanan said:

President (you did not build that) has Portrait "painted" by Artist (I did not paint that)

"If you dismiss David Hockney and Robert Crumb and believe only avant garde conceptual art has value, you won’t like Dylan’s landscapes."

"Yet if you do admire either of those meticulous artists, there is no reason to look down on Bob Dylan just because he happens to be a rock star. He has a surprising amount in common with Hockney. His art looks more serious with every exhibition. He is turning into a hero for anyone who thinks drawing is a noble thing to do."

Writes Jonathan Jones in The Guardian about Bob Dylan's art show in London.

"David Hockney has a fag in one hand, a mug of tea in the other, fish and chips and mushy peas in front of him, and he is surrounded by his own work."

"... Hockney is such a militant smoker you sense he sparks up even when he doesn’t fancy one, just to piss people off. His father, Kenneth, was just as militant in his non-smoking. 'I have now outlived him. I am nearly 78.” He puffs and grins.... He waves his cigarette at me. 'Do you smoke?' he asks, as if challenging me to a duel. I find myself apologising for having stopped, and he looks at me with a disappointment bordering on contempt – though he seems slightly pacified when I ask for a whisky. 'Bohemia was against the suburbs, and now the suburbs have taken over,' he says. 'I mean, the anti-smoking thing is all anti-bohemia. Bohemia is gone now. When people say, well wasn’t it amazing saying you were gay in 1960, I point out, well, I lived in bohemia, and bohemia is a tolerant place. You can’t have a smoke-free bohemia. You can’t have a drug-free bohemia. You can’t have a drink-free bohemia. Now they’re all worried about their fucking curtains, sniffing curtains for tobacco and stuff like that.' Does he think gay life has become more conservative in recent years? 'Yes. I suppose it’s that they want to be ordinary – they want to fit in. Well, I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care about fitting in. Everywhere is so conservative.'"

A tiny snippet of "David Hockney: ‘'Just because I’m cheeky, doesn’t mean I’m not serious'/At 77, and with two new exhibitions, David Hockney is more prolific and outspoken than ever. He tells us why he stopped painting after the death of his assistant – and why, despite a 9pm bedtime, he’s still a rebel at heart."

"People from the village come up to me and tease me, 'We hear you've started drawing on your telephone.'"

"And I tell them, 'Well, no, actually, it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.'"

David Hockney and his iPhone.

... Hockney limits his contact with the screen exclusively to the pad of his thumb. "The thing is," Hockney explains, "if you are using your pointer or other fingers, you actually have to be working from your elbow. Only the thumb has the opposable joint which allows you to move over the screen with maximum speed and agility, and the screen is exactly the right size, you can easily reach every corner with your thumb." He goes on to note how people used to worry that computers would one day render us "all thumbs," but it's incredible the dexterity, the expressive range, lodged in "these not-so-simple thumbs of ours."

Merging a movie still with its inspiration.

Very cool.

"Luce del mondo e amore!"

"The light of the world is love." So ends "Turandot," beautifully produced in Madison this past weekend, with fantastic sets by the great artist David Hockney. Here's a blur of color, shot in the dark, the glorious curtain call: