David Hockney Review

David Hockney review: eight critical contributions challenge the familiar image

This David Hockney review concerns the 1995 Manchester University Press volume edited by Paul Melia, not an autobiography by the artist and not a conventional biography of him. That distinction changes the reading experience completely. The book belongs to the publisher's Critical Introductions to Art series and gathers eight named contributions that examine Hockney's work through specific problems: public persona, pictorial stillness, pools and power, figure painting, double portraits, mapping, representation, photo-collage, and the new work of the early 1990s.

The collection's central achievement is to make a very familiar artist strange again. Hockney's blond public image, California swimming pools, bright color, double portraits, and photographic “joiners” can look so accessible that critical questions disappear behind recognition. Melia's volume resists that ease. Its chapter sequence asks how an artist becomes a public figure, how a static painting declares itself as a picture, how looking can involve desire and control, and how different media organize time and space.

That makes the book a strong entry in History and Ideas, but not because it supplies a continuous history of Hockney's life. Its subject is interpretation. The essays treat artworks as arguments about seeing rather than as illustrations of a colorful personality. The resulting book is selective and sometimes academic, yet it offers more critical traction than the generic celebrity monograph its bare title might suggest.

Which David Hockney book this actually is

The bibliographical record requires unusual care because Open Library groups several unrelated or only loosely related books titled David Hockney under one work key. The cover identifier used on this page, 3887167, belongs to edition OL1116740M: David Hockney, edited by Paul Melia, published in Manchester and New York by Manchester University Press in 1995. The hardback and paperback ISBNs are 0719044049 and 0719044057. The catalog describes xvi plus 158 pages, with illustrations including some in color, bibliographical references on pages 147–150, and an index.

This is not David Hockney: Poster Art, another 1995 book that has been merged into the same Open Library work but uses a different cover and ISBN. Nor is it the 1968 publication from which the merged record appears to inherit its misleading first-publication year. The David Hockney Foundation independently lists the Manchester University Press book in its chronology for 1995 and identifies Paul Melia as editor.

Hockney is the subject and maker of the reproduced art, not the sole author of the critical prose. Melia writes the introduction and one later chapter; Simon Faulkner, Alan Woods, Nannette Aldred, Andrew Causey, and William Hardie supply the other essays. Recording Melia's editorial responsibility is therefore not a minor catalog correction. It identifies the book's real form: a multi-author critical monograph whose disagreements and shifts of method are part of its value.

The structure moves by problem rather than chronology

The contents make the collection's method visible. Melia's introduction establishes the frame. Simon Faulkner's “Dealing with Hockney” is followed by Alan Woods's “Pictures emphasising stillness,” Melia's “Showers, pools and power,” Nannette Aldred's “Figure paintings and double portraits,” Andrew Causey's “Mapping and representing,” Woods's “Photo-collage,” and William Hardie's “Novelties: the 1990s.” This is not a cradle-to-mid-career narrative divided into neat periods. It is a set of critical approaches arranged around recurrent formal and cultural questions.

That design suits Hockney because his career repeatedly crosses media while returning to problems of representation. A strictly chronological survey could move efficiently from Bradford and London to California, then from painting to photography and later work. This book instead places pressure on the connections. Stillness matters to painting but also to the difference between a painted fiction and a photographic instant. Mapping matters to landscape, yet it also opens questions about perspective and how a viewer moves mentally through an image. Portraiture involves likeness, but double portraits make space and relationship inseparable.

The price of this structure is discontinuity. A new contributor can reset the vocabulary and assume a different level of theoretical familiarity. Readers wanting one stable voice may experience the collection as a sequence of strong seminar readings rather than a seamless monograph. Readers willing to compare arguments, however, gain something a single-author overview rarely provides: evidence that the same accessible-looking work can support competing accounts of identity, spectatorship, medium, and power.

Public persona and the problem of pictorial stillness

The opening sequence is especially well chosen because it refuses to separate Hockney's public visibility from his formal intelligence. “Dealing with Hockney” signals that the artist's reception, market presence, self-presentation, and critical image cannot simply be treated as decoration around the paintings. Hockney became legible to the public through a distinctive appearance and an unusually quotable manner, but the book's structure asks what happens when that legibility begins to dictate how the art is seen.

“Pictures emphasising stillness” then redirects attention from personality to the ontology of the picture. Hockney's early paintings often include words, signs, schematic marks, and deliberately awkward devices that remind viewers they are looking at made objects. A picture is not identical to the action it represents. The title's emphasis on stillness therefore points toward one of the collection's most productive concerns: representation does not transparently deliver a world but constructs the terms on which a viewer can imagine one.

This pairing prevents two common reductions. Hockney is neither just an appealing public character who happens to paint nor a formal technician isolated from social life. Persona affects reception, while formal choices shape the viewer's position. The book is strongest when its table of contents alone begins to show those questions touching each other, turning “accessibility” from an unexamined compliment into something that requires explanation.

Pools, desire, portraits, and power

The middle chapters move through motifs most readers immediately associate with Hockney, but their titles resist simple celebration. “Showers, pools and power” places the famous California imagery inside a vocabulary of looking and control. Pools may offer surface, light, leisure, and technical challenge, yet the chapter's framing also asks who looks, who is exposed, and how desire is organized within an apparently immaculate scene. That approach is essential to a serious account of Hockney's male figures and the cultural visibility of gay desire in his work.

“Figure paintings and double portraits” widens the problem. Hockney's large double portraits do not merely record two recognizable people. Their interiors, furniture, thresholds, sight lines, and intervals help define relationships. The National Portrait Gallery has since emphasized how Hockney's development and concerns about representation can be traced through portraits of family, friends, lovers, and cultural figures. Aldred's chapter title indicates that the 1995 book had already made the movement between bodies, pairs, and constructed social space a distinct critical subject.

These chapters are valuable together because they shift attention from subject matter to relations. A swimmer, a showering figure, a couple, or two friends may be immediately recognizable, but recognition is only the beginning. The image distributes vulnerability and authority through pose, distance, framing, and gaze. Readers who know the paintings mostly from reproductions or auction headlines will find this change of question more useful than another list of famous works.

Mapping, representation, and photo-collage

The final thematic movement clarifies why Hockney cannot be understood as a painter of pleasant surfaces. “Mapping and representing” treats spatial construction as an active problem. A picture has to select a viewpoint, order distance, and decide whether space will look continuous, fragmented, diagrammatic, or mobile. Those decisions matter across landscape, interiors, and the movement between observation and memory.

“Photo-collage” takes that inquiry into a medium commonly associated with mechanical accuracy. Hockney's composite Polaroids and photographic collages refuse the single, instantaneous viewpoint promised by an ordinary photograph. The Getty Museum describes his key 1980s photographs as investigations of time and perspective and notes that Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2 uses almost eight hundred photographs. A collage records successive acts of looking, so the finished field contains duration, movement, overlap, and competing viewpoints.

Woods's return as the author of both the stillness and photo-collage chapters gives the collection a useful internal bridge. Painting and photography are not simply opposed as subjective invention and objective record. Both make decisions about what a viewer can see and how time is imagined. The book's arrangement encourages readers to connect early painted signs of artificiality with later photographic structures that expose the limitations of one-point vision.

What the 1990s ending contributes

William Hardie's “Novelties: the 1990s” gives the book an endpoint that was contemporary in 1995. The David Hockney Foundation's chronology for that year records large new paintings, dog paintings, photographs of paintings, a drawing retrospective, and continuing experiments around studio performance and reproduction. The chapter therefore closes a mid-career collection with work that had not yet settled into a later historical consensus.

That contemporaneity is now a historical asset. The book captures critics attempting to understand Hockney before the long sequence of later landscapes, camera-lucida research, iPad drawings, large digital projects, Normandy work, and major twenty-first-century retrospectives changed the shape of his reputation. It records an artist who was already internationally famous but whose career could not yet be narrated as the extensive whole now visible.

The word “novelties” also makes a useful critical question unavoidable: when Hockney adopts a new tool or format, does the medium create a new problem of seeing, or merely refresh a recognizable style? A collection committed to representation and spectatorship is well positioned to ask that question. Its endpoint is not definitive, but it prevents the preceding essays from turning the artist into a closed historical case.

Strengths of this critical collection

The first strength is precision of scope. In only 158 pages, the book does not pretend to inventory every work or settle every phase. It chooses a series of problems that can reorganize a reader's attention: celebrity and reception, pictorial status, erotic looking, social space, mapping, photography, and the pressure of new work. That focus makes it useful in courses and reading groups where a chapter can be paired with the relevant images.

The second strength is plurality. Six critics contribute, with Melia and Woods each appearing twice. The changing voices prevent the volume from presenting one master interpretation as though Hockney's work had already been solved. The format encourages comparison between cultural history, close formal analysis, questions of sexuality and power, portraiture, and debates about media.

The third is research utility. The index and selected bibliography give the essays a route outward. This matters because a compact critical introduction should not be judged by comprehensiveness alone. Its job is to help readers identify a question, test it against artworks, and find the next source. On those terms, the apparatus is not an afterthought but part of the book's design.

Cautions and the cost of a 1995 cutoff

The most obvious caution is age. This is a 1995 account, not a current retrospective. It cannot address the later phases that museums now use to describe Hockney's range, including extensive digital drawing and later landscape and portrait projects. A reader seeking a complete career survey will need a more recent book alongside it. The limitation should be stated clearly rather than disguised as timelessness.

The multi-author format also creates unevenness by design. Chapter titles promise different kinds of argument, and academic terminology may require readers to slow down or consult the reproductions carefully. This is not the best first purchase for someone who wants a large, lavish album dominated by images, nor for someone seeking intimate biographical narrative. The catalog confirms illustrations, some in color, but the book's compact dimensions and university-press purpose make criticism, not visual abundance, its governing value.

Finally, selection always creates blind spots. Eight contributions can illuminate recurring questions while leaving other practices and periods thinly treated. Stage design, drawing, printmaking, and the full evolution of portraiture cannot all receive equal weight in this architecture. The honest way to use the volume is as a set of critical lenses, not a substitute for the entire career.

Reader fit and how to use the book

The ideal reader has seen at least a small group of Hockney works and wants to move beyond recognition. Art-history students will benefit from treating each essay as a case study in method. Museum visitors can use the chapters to revisit pools, double portraits, landscapes, and photo-collages with sharper questions. A reading group can compare how the contributors frame representation without requiring everyone to accept one conclusion.

The book is less suitable for readers seeking an artist's memoir, a chronological biography, or a current catalogue raisonné. Hockney's own voice and public identity are relevant objects of analysis, but this is not a first-person account. The author line must therefore name Paul Melia's editorial role rather than assigning the whole book to Hockney.

A productive reading strategy is to keep images available and move nonlinearly. Pair “Pictures emphasising stillness” with early text-bearing paintings, the pool and portrait chapters with representative figure compositions, and “Photo-collage” with the Getty's Pearblossom Hwy. or related composites. The book becomes clearer when its concepts are tested visually rather than consumed as an uninterrupted verbal survey.

Context and alternatives

As a 1990s university-press collection, David Hockney belongs to a mode of art writing that tries to move beyond both biography and reverent connoisseurship. It takes popularity seriously without treating popularity as proof of simplicity. The essays ask why certain pictures feel immediate and what cultural, formal, and institutional work creates that feeling.

For another catalog in which an artist's public image is inseparable from the art, the Andy Warhol review offers the closest comparison. The Alberto Giacometti review provides a useful contrast in how a monograph frames one artist through selection and exhibition-style scholarship. The Alex Katz review is a good alternative for readers interested in a concise catalog that must establish critical stakes without becoming a full biography.

Those comparisons also clarify what Melia's volume does best. It is more argumentative than a straightforward exhibition checklist and more fragmented than a continuous single-author survey. Its value lies in the space between: enough common focus to build a portrait of Hockney's practice, enough methodological difference to keep that portrait open to dispute.

Final assessment

Paul Melia's David Hockney is worth reading as a compact critical anthology, not as a memoir and not as the last word on the artist. Its best chapters and juxtapositions turn famous motifs into difficult questions. Pools become structures of looking, double portraits become social spaces, and photo-collages become arguments about time and perspective. Hockney's public ease no longer licenses critical ease.

The recommendation is strongest for readers who already know the images and want better tools for seeing them. The book's date and brevity set clear limits, but they also give it historical definition: this is Hockney at a particular critical moment, viewed by several writers before the later career transformed the map again.

Read on those terms, the collection succeeds. It does not reduce a varied practice to one life story or one celebratory thesis. It shows how a celebrated artist can remain a contested object of interpretation—and why the most accessible picture may still demand the most careful look.