David Hockney: Pictures within pictures
About
David Hockney has a long-term practice of inserting small-scale images into his compositions – creating ‘pictures within pictures’. With close reference to the works in ‘Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look’, James Cahill explores how Hockney’s various depictions of paintings and reflected images reflect a deep investment in historical painting, from the pivotal Renaissance works of Piero della Francesca and Jan van Eyck to the high-Baroque conceptualism of Velázquez.
Cahill considers how Hockney’s use of the inset image functions often as a mise-en-abyme, drawing the viewer through time and history – but also how his ‘pictures within pictures’ serve a more private, autobiographical purpose. Through the examples of ‘My Parents’ and ‘Looking at Pictures on a Screen’ (both 1977), we see how the inset picture functions, for Hockney, as a means of transcending the here-and-now of a given scene – of inducing his viewers to take a longer look.
This event is part of Art History Festival 2024 organised by the Association for Art History
Speaker
Dr James Cahill is an author, critic and art historian. His debut novel, 'Tiepolo Blue' (Sceptre Books, 2022), was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. His second novel, 'The Violet Hour', will be published by Sceptre in February 2025. His writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph. He was the lead author of 'Flying Too Close to the Sun' (Phaidon Books, 2018), a survey of classical myth in art from antiquity to the present day. He is currently writing a book about David Hockney’s landmark painting, ‘Beverly Hills Housewife’.
Friday Lates: James Cahill
David Hockney: Pictures within pictures
Free
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