As part of the Normandy Impressionist Festival, the Rouen Museum of Fine Arts is displaying around thirty works by David Hockney in its rooms until September 22.
Three rooms for three series which demonstrate the vitality of his painting. Portraits, landscapes as homages to Monet and the Moon Room dedicated to the night and its moonlight. In this anniversary year of Impressionism, the exhibition is called Normanism by someone who, since 2019, has spent a large part of his year in this region.
Portraits like Proust
After walking through the rooms and floors of the museum, admiring Monet, Sisley, Caillebotte and Géricault… we see it from afar. It is at the very back of the gallery of portraits painted by Jacques-Émile Blanche. A smiling face, a paintbrush in his left hand, the eternal cigarette in his right hand. He poses, wearing yellow-rimmed glasses, tweed suits and a cap. A true British, but also a Norman gentleman farmer.
From this self-portrait seen in the mirror, the visitor could guess all his residences over the years. He is English, he was based in California at the time of pop art and, since 2019, he has been resident in Pays d’Auge, near Caen.
The entire Hockney character is on this canvas, as highlighted at Franceinfo Culture, Florence Calame-Levert, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts Rouen and curator of the exhibition Normanism. In front of the painting, she, who prepared the exhibition with him, recognizes him as on the first meeting.
“During our first meeting, at his house, when I saw him arrive, he appeared like this. He was wearing a magnificent flower in his buttonhole, a tweed jacket, very smiling, a wonderful look, incredible blue eyes and a flash in the back of the eye, we are dealing with a genius, but very smiling, with an enormous amount of gentleness.”
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He has the sparkling look of an 86-year-old young man who paints every day, “everything is painting with David Hockney”, so his self-portrait is brush in hand.
Then the visitor discovers a gallery of around ten portraits. This is the gallery of intimacy. There is the village mayor, Sophie Gaugain, her cook sitting a little stiff in her chair, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, her partner in a bathrobe, relaxed and smiling, an art critic friend, young actors passing through or his gardener perched on his mini-tractor. All framed identically and against a white canvas background. Modernity of the portrait, a genre to which the painter has always tackled. Previously, it was his missing family or friends, often victims of AIDS.
“People fascinate me, and more specifically the most interesting aspect of them – the point where we enter into them – namely, the face. The face says it all,” he declared about his taste for portraiture.
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We thus become acquainted with what we could call “friends and neighbors”, a familiarity that Jean Frémon, the painter’s gallery owner, compares to another lover of Normandy, Marcel Proust. Hockney is a reader and admirer. With his portraits, he creates here “an imaginary autobiography” as Proust depicts his characters of The Search for Lost Time. Time flies, but Hockney thus preserves and fixes his world. A world which, around him, pursues only one goal: painting.
Hockney at Monet
In the second room, the visitor travels from Giverny to Beuvron-en-Auge and its half-timbered building. Hockney, pop art star with his famous Hollywood swimming pools where light floods the canvas, is a fine connoisseur of art history. “He is fascinated by the great designers like Ingres, Rembrandt, Picasso, because he too is a great designer. reminds us of Florence Calame-Levert.
But in Normandy, it is to Monet that he pays homage: “The return to Europe and the fact of settling in Normandy changed his view of Monet, he had an even stronger relationship with him. Here, after the light of California, he found the passage of the seasons which is the breeding ground of the Impressionists. He now feeds on this soil, these showers, these meteors, these lights have changed his quest for painting.”
Whether these tributes to Water lilies or these magnificent scenes of mist in his garden, the figurative Hockney borders on impressionism and its temptation towards abstraction.
“The connection is obvious: the fascination with capturing nature, atmospheric phenomena, the reflections of light, and being devoted to nature and the spectacle of the seasons. He is also an heir of Monet in his way of using the touch “. From the big splash of his swimming pools, Hockney moved on to peaceful ponds.
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In this room, the visitor can, thanks to the screens, which look like animated paintings, see the painter’s gesture unfold, almost in real time. On screens, drawing and digital painting are constructed, surface by surface, layer by layer. With this technological tool, Hockney teaches us to look. He, the innovator who, from 2010, used the iPad as an electronic palette.
The Moon Room
He is a tireless worker, the proof: he even draws at night. His series Moon Room being carried out from rising to setting of the Moon attests to this. The commissioner adds: “He has a genius eye that knows how to capture the inexhaustible nature of nature.” So, sitting on his terrace, he set about capturing this strange light of the Moon in the branches, these uncertain shadows. The Moon Room, made up of eleven digital prints and two canvases, will not make us contradict these remarks.
Hockney like Monet tackles the series here. The Moon crosses the sky, it appears, rises to the firmament, and ends up disappearing below the horizon. A very successful scenography allows the visitor immersed in his night to be alongside the painter who we imagine diligently sitting on his terrace. For this painter who has always had an obsession with the image, using in turn cameras, photographs, photocopiers and of course iPads, this little still image film, between fear and nocturnal magic, is indeed a new story, that of a young man devouring creation while smiling.
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“In this room, we feel small or immense, it’s moving, it’s very cinematic and metaphysical. He’s a genius, because he never does the same thing,” concludes Florence Calame-Levert. He had already surprised us with his long fresco, 90 meters long, painted during confinement and telling the story of nature in four seasons, exhibited in 2022 at the Orangerie. It is certain that the Hockney adventure, joyful, innovative and bursting with color, is not over. It is rumored that in 2025, a major retrospective will be dedicated to him in Paris which, we have no doubt, will bring its share of delightful surprises.
“David Hockney. Normandism”, from March 22 to September 22, 2024, at Rouen Museum of Fine Arts.