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“Picasso: Important Paintings of the 1960S” by David Hockney, 1984

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“Picasso: Important Paintings of the 1960S” by David Hockney, 1984 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Picasso: Important Paintings of the 1960s” by David Hockney, 1984 MIMI POSER Good evening. I’m Mimi Poser, and I’d like to welcome you all to the Guggenheim Museum, and this first in our series of lectures on the work of Pablo Picasso. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to hear about an artist’s work from three distinct vantage points. As you all know, tonight’s lecture will be given by artist David Hockney. The next lecture will be by author John Richardson, who is at work on a biography of Picasso. The third lecture will be given by Kim Levin, an art critic with The Village Voice. Now, since neither the subject nor the lecturer this evening needs very much introduction, I will, in the interest of keeping all of our time for David Hockney’s remarks, turn the podium over [00:01:00] to him without any further ado. Please help me in welcoming David Hockney. (applause) DAVID HOCKNEY Well, this lecture, if that’s what it is, I did give it in Los Angeles about a year ago, I think. Before that, I was asked to give it there because I had been giving it privately to people if they came to visit me. It began my own discovery of what the pictures I’m going to show you was because of one painting that I [00:02:00] saw and enjoyed a great deal instantly, and I didn’t quite know why, but I kept going back to look at it. Eventually, I traded one and a half pictures of mine for it. Actually, mine were very big, and this is very small. I don’t really collect pictures. Postcards will do for me on the whole. Although the moment I had got it and kept looking at it all the time, I must admit it did have an effect. I’ve even counted the number of brush strokes in it, because — there’s 38, I think. Anyway, since I gave the lecture, I also made a lot of experiments myself about photography that, also, idea is actually from Picasso. I did give a lecture on photography as well, which was related [00:03:00] to Picasso. Now they seem to merge, myself. And I’m doing this without notes. I will read a little bit from a book. There are 35 paintings, really, I wanted to talk about that I think, in a sense, are perhaps one work. They were done in 10 days, in the end of March in 1965. I think there’s a clear kind of narrative to the pictures. The themes they have, seem to me, work on many, many levels. Some simple. The subject matter, as it appears to be, is an artist and his model, or a man and a woman, but I think there’s other subject matter as well, [00:04:00] about depiction, about representation. I’ve also discovered — although I haven’t brought it this evening — I think there are more references than I thought in Picasso to photography. I keep finding them. I’ll start with the first slide, because I think — which button do I press? This one. Because I think this is the first painting that I knew by Picasso that people attacked a bit, or did not like. Even as recently as three or four years ago, in a book about late Picasso, it’s very quickly and easily dismissed. But [00:05:00] when I saw it again in the show at the Museum of Modern Art, it dawned on me that there was something about it that was unusual. I think the art historian thought perhaps he’s quoting Goya, he’s interested in Goya, but there’s another aspect of the painting that I think can be overlooked, and I read it this way. Painting, for a start, could only — it’s called Massacre in Korea, and it is about a massacre, clearly. But the one point, I think, that — it might be obvious, this, but I think it has to be made — is that a photograph could not depict this scene, because it’s very clear which side the artist is on. [00:06:00] If it was a photograph, it would also be clear which side the photographer was on. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 10 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Picasso: Important Paintings of the 1960s” by David Hockney, 1984 He would be forced to be on the side of the soldiers, and therefore it would horrify us, because the identification with what was going on would be the opposite of what it is here. I think Picasso grasped this about documentary photography, that it was always too late, as it were. In documentary photography, we do not see the action of a massacre. We only see what’s happened afterwards, even as recently as the Beirut massacre. The photographs I have seen of it, or anybody have seen of it, show you what happened afterwards, not what happened at the time, because people who commit massacres do not generally like photographers, [00:07:00] or do not like people recording what they’re doing. I think he’s making a comment about photography here. It was painted in 1951, and after all, I think people had seen, in the late ’40s, they’d seen photographs of massacres of the Second World War, but again, they were after the event. They were not what was actually happening. I think he’s making the point — he uses illustrational techniques, naturally, to do this. So it seems ridiculous to criticize the illustrational techniques, because I think they were very, very necessary here. Anyway, we’ll start with that, because I think one problem that seems to grow, [00:08:00] and it seems to grow with me, is that the photograph, since the invention of Cubism, which, after all, tried to destroy a single point of view, one way of seeing, has actually — Cubism has not triumphed in this sense. Photography seems to have triumphed. It’s more pervasive than ever. Most images we see are made this way. In a sense, the photograph is the last way of making a Renaissance picture. It’s not the beginning of anything. It’s the end of something. In the way photographs are made, it cannot actually go on that way. All it can do is have some interesting subject matter, and all we can do is see it for its subject matter, because it does not use any new way [00:09:00] of seeing. Of course, Picasso does have a new way of seeing, and deals with it right to the end. I think the point to be made as well is, of course, that no artist’s work is done until he drops dead. He goes on, and one shouldn’t particularly, I think, make too many judgments until it’s finished. With an artist the caliber of Picasso, common sense tells you that an artist of that quality does not spend the last 20 years of his life repeating himself. It’s against his nature, really. I don’t think it would be possible for him to do it, and it becomes clearer and clearer that the pictures of the ’60s and the early ’70s couldn’t have been painted any earlier. It could not have been done that way. I know some people [00:10:00] did not care for the late pictures. I went to visit the show in Avignon in 1973. I went with Douglas Cooper, who is a wonderful Picasso scholar, really. I had been staying with him, and I suggested I wanted to — I said, “I want to go over and see it.” He assured me it was terrible, and it was all sad. We drove over, and all the way there, he kept telling me how terrible it was, and mumbling on and on. I just kept smiling. But when we got there, I insisted anyway on looking around carefully, and I suggested to Douglas he wasn’t old enough to see what it was about, anyway, in the end. The [00:11:00] second picture is a photograph, which amused me because this is a photograph of the mother of Marie-Thérèse Walter. I got this from a Japanese catalog, and then found a painting Picasso had done of her, which is not in the Zervos catalogs. I must say the only way anybody can know the work of Picasso — I mean, any work, really — is through those catalogs. I’d purchased the last 10 of those catalogs a few years ago, since I’ve got the whole lot. It’s 35 volumes, and in a way, it’s an incredibly unique document, because, from a very early period, Picasso dated everything. It’s put in the catalog so [00:12:00] with this document you can — it’s Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 10 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Picasso: Important Paintings of the 1960s” by David Hockney, 1984 like a diary, of course. You can look up and find out what he was doing on Thursday afternoon of June 23, 1939 or something. You can actually find out. They listed if he did two or three paintings in the day. Listed in order, so you know one is done in the morning, and one in the afternoon or something.
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