© Property of David Hockney. Version of 75. {Photograph} by Richard Schmidt.
David Hockney, Contrejour within the French Fashion, 1974. Etching, soft-ground etching, aquatint.
David Hockney, who died at 88 in June, turned well-known as a younger artist for imbuing Twentieth-century life with the formality and stasis of early Renaissance portray. His sharp-edged figures stand by the pool or sit by a espresso desk in areas as orderly as these in a Fra Angelico annunciation. The actual world doesn’t look so tidy, symmetrical, and enchanting. Besides, very sometimes, when it does.
Contrejour within the French Fashion depicts a window on the Louvre that Hockney encountered shortly after transferring to Paris in 1973. With its shade partly drawn, shutting out undesirable daylight whereas giving a glimpse of backyard, it was, he thought, “an image in itself.”
Working from a drawing and a few pictures, he rebuilt the discovered scene—tugging right here, flattening there. His pathways and parterres are a streamlined echo of the close by Tuileries, simply as his balustrade is a compass-and-protractor enactment of the elegant authentic. The best way the 2 receding diagonals intersect the wall, window, and walkway to converge on the tree line is an virtually excellent diagram of single-point perspective. Hockney used visibly totally different etching strategies in numerous territories of the picture—comfortable mats of shade for the window blind, meticulous linear hatching for the ground, and splotchy, translucent shade for the encompassing wall.
The formal backyard, the parquet, the deep window setback, and the dappled wall (a nod to the pointillism of Georges Seurat) all wave the flag of “French Fashion,” with its distinct historical past of guidelines developed within the pursuit of magnificence. Quickly after Contrejour, Hockney’s personal fashion shifted towards fragmented area, expressive brushwork, and episodic movement. This print, nonetheless, nonetheless exerts its wistful invitation to delight in quiet emotional climate, and see the pictorial equipment he was about to dismantle.
This text seems within the September 2026 print version with the headline “Contrejour within the French Fashion.”
