Reviews

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.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

"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 Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.