David Hockney plays with our perception of fine art in Palm Springs

David Hockney is one of the world’s most famous living artists — pioneer of gay identity, icon of swinging ‘60s London, chronicler of people and places in his adopted city of Los Angeles, scholar of Picasso— and the subject of countless retrospectives. However, a show at the Palm Springs Art Museum addresses all of that and more with the revealing title David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.

Comprised entirely of prints ranging from the traditional lithography Hockney began in the 1950s to his current mastery of the iPhone and iPad, the 160 works are from the singular Jordan Schnitzer. The Portland, Oregon collector, owning more than 20,000 pieces of modern and contemporary art, has devoted himself to acquiring complete sets of editioned works by contemporary legends like Jasper Johns, Ellworth Kelly, John Baldessari and others. He says, “Once I bought that first work of art, it just never stopped. Now I have no sense of ownership but a great sense of stewardship.” The Schnitzer Foundation regularly funds and supports exhibitions of their prints.

Though many have tested the boundaries of printmaking, Hockney has used it to question what constitutes fine art. The consummate painter and colourist embraces untested technologies. The show includes his chaotic collages of multiple photographs to explore ideas about Picasso’s use of perspective. It was through photography that he began researching the camera lucida, its role in Renaissance painting and ideas about “reversing perspective.”

“The moment you realise what Picasso is doing, how he is using time as well—and that is why you could see round the back of the body as well as the front—once you begin to realise this, it becomes a very profound experience, because you begin to see what he is doing is not as a distortion and slowly, it then begins to look more and more real, in fact, it is naturalism that begins to look less and less real.”

Using a Pentax camera, Hockney combined numerous snaps to complete a portrait of his visiting mother in a way that she is swept into the tumult of his shelves of Zervos catalogs and his own Picasso painting while her white handbag and green suitcase lay touchingly on the carpeted floor. 'My Mother Los Angeles' (1982) exemplifies his exploration of Cubist perspective, which evolves throughout the exhibition.

Hockney gravitated to technological innovation in tandem with his interest in Picasso. Using a xerox machine in the 1980s, he made numerous still lifes and interiors whose charm is at odds with their humble origins. He liked the immediacy of printing an image, changing it and reprinting it on the spot.

But it is digital technology that has captured his heart and mind. “Digital photography can free us from a chemically imposed perspective that has lasted for 180 years,” he insists. A 2014 'photographic drawing' titled 'Perspective Should Be Reversed' features images of his friends standing in a room with a drawn red table that appears to move towards, instead of away, from the viewer. The real and invented coalesce.

Now living in France, the 87-year-old Hockney draws and paints on an iPad as though working on a sketching block. Far from a limitation, it seems to have unleashed ever more ambitious endeavours. In 2019, fascinated by the ways narrative unfolds sequentially in the Bayeux Tapestry, he drew scenes of his house and studio in the Normandy countryside in the seasonal hues of spring and fall. Each is inkjet printed on a 40-foot long band of paper.

More than a dozen of his 2021 floral iPad paintings, all hung on a Wedgewood blue wall, prove the variety Hockney can achieve. There is a double self-portrait of the artist himself, seated in two different wicker chairs, looking at these works in his studio. Taking the cue, the museum used lovely coloured walls throughout the show to compliment the works on paper.

The Hockney show originated at the Honolulu Art Museum but was expanded by the Palm Springs curator Christine Vendredi and director Adam Lerner to include earlier, more sexually provocative work for the museum’s new Q+ initiative highlighting work by artists who identify as LBGTQ+. Schnitzer says, “This is an exceptional exhibition, not only for the community here but for any of us dealing with how we evolved.”

Lithographs from Hockney’s 1966 response to the poems of C.P.Cavafy include a delicate rendering of a pair of naked men in bed. Gay friends are featured throughout the show including a print of L.A. icons author Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy — also one of Hockney’s most renowned paintings — and the prominent art dealer Nick Wilder. There are prints devoted to lovers and partners throughout the years.

The variety and depth of the show is a tribute to Schnitzer. It is rare collector who enables shows that provoke fresh understanding of artists in all of their phases of development.

'There is so much negative discussion about artificial intelligence,' he notes. 'But look at David Hockney when Xerox machines first came out. Look at what he did. Then polaroids and then, in 2004, when the Ipads came out, oh my God, it’s like the horses left the barn! He was able to take that technology and create some of the prettiest things ever made. It’s a joyful exhibition at a time when we all need a little joy in our lives.'

'Perspective Should Be Reversed: Prints by David Hockney from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation' is at Palm Springs Art Museum until March 31, 2025

psmuseum.org