Review by Choice Review
This handsome catalog details a current exhibition of more than 250 portraits now on view in the US (Boston and Los Angeles), later to be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Not only is every work in the exhibition illustrated in color and cataloged, but biographical sketches of all the sitters are included, with each one illustrated again. These include Hockney, his family and close friends, and such major figures as W. H. Auden, Lucien Freud, Andy Warhol, Stephen Spender, J. B. Priestley, and Billy Wilder. This is followed by a year-by-year chronology of Hockney's painting career, including landscapes not in the exhibition. A wide range of the artist's work is covered: brilliant drawings (pencil, crayon, pen and ink) and paintings, including his masterpiece Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy. Polaroid and photo-collage as well as his late less impressive works are also included. Equally valuable are the essays on various aspects of Hockney's career by Marco Livingstone, Mark Glazebrook, Sarah Howgate, Edmund White, and Barbara Stern Shapiro; each has its own illustrations, most not in the exhibition. Though there have been numerous publications on Hockney, this is the only one devoted to his portraits and it is a major contribution. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through faculty. T. J. McCormick emeritus, Wheaton College (MA)
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
\deflang1033\viewkind4\uc1d\f0\fs24 In David Hockney Portraits, 0 the first book dedicated solely to the British artist and longtime L.A. resident's portraits, art critic Marco Livingston writes, "For a humanist artist such as Hockney, there can be no more urgent subject than the depiction of individuals in all their particularity." And, indeed, for 50 years Hockney has been making inquisitive and vibrant portraits of his family, friends, lovers, fellow artists, and cultural icons in an impressive array of styles and media. London's National Portrait Gallery has put together a traveling exhibition of 250 works, reproduced here along with a set of eloquent and incisive essays. Hockney's portraits are compared to those of Picasso, his hero. Curator Howgate describes her experience posing for Hockney, and novelist Edmund White writes about the role of homosexual desire in Hockney's pioneering work. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Since the bookshelf of the David Hockney fan likely already contains, among other titles, David Hockney: Paintings, Hockney's People and Hockney's Pictures, this collection may be a bit redundant. Except for a few rarely seen paintings from Hockney's teenage years, the work presented here doesn't stray far from the familiar greatest hits seen in earlier collections. Here again is Billy Wilder lighting a cigar in a cubist-inspired photo collage and Andy Warhol in a deft little 1974 colored pencil drawing. Nor do any of the contributing curators and academics pretend that the book-which accompanies an exhibit of the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston-is really breaking any fresh ground. But for those who haven't seen it all before, this is an attractive, well-organized introduction to the artist's endlessly inventive career. The selection of plates runs the full range of Hockney's adventures, and the illustrated, year-by-year chronology gives a colorful, bird's-eye view of Hockney's life. In this case, putting old wine into a new skin is not such a bad thing. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"I paint what I like, where I like, and when I like, with occasional nostalgic journeys," Hockney has declared; the artist's confident independence is borne out in this handsome catalog by curators Howgate and Barbara Stern Shapiro that accompanies an exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and that spans more than 40 years of production on several continents. Essays are by writer and curator Mark Glazebrook, art critic and curator Marco Livingstone (Hockney's People), and Edmund White (creative writing, Princeton Univ.; Genet: A Biography), whose eloquent investigation of Hockney's homosexual identity and its role in his art is a standout. A bevy of self-portraits serves as chronological anchor to hundreds of sumptuous reproductions that include Hockney's cool, clean Los Angeles pool scenes, large-scale couples of the 1960s (his best work), and his kaleidoscopic photo collages. Like Picasso, his great hero, Hockney works through various styles and muses, capturing a subtle aspect of his sitters even as he makes the images distinctly his own. With biographical notes on sitters and an illustrated time line of the artist's career, this work is recommended for larger libraries and specialized art collections.-Prudence Peiffer, Cambridge, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
