The Art Collective

Three of those magical works highlight a rambling and uneven 50-year retrospective devoted to Mr. Hockney's extensive work in portraiture now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. One is the 1968 portrait of the art collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman standing outdoors with some of their sculptures; their still postures and fierce expressions comically echo a Northwest Indian totem pole rising in the background. There is the glamorous, melancholy portrait (1970-71) of Mr. Hockney's friend Celia Birtwell and the British fashion designer to whom she was briefly married, Ossie Clark, in a darkened room separated by a bright open door. And best of all is the famous 1969 picture of the curator Henry Geldzahler sitting like an enthroned king on an arch-backed purple sofa while his partner, a thin man in a trench coat, watches from the side like a royal retainer awaiting orders.
Organized by the museum here and the National Portrait Gallery in London, in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition does not isolate Mr. Hockney's realist period or elevate it above the rest of the show. It is folded into a continuous stream of more than 150 paintings and drawings that run from precociously skillful teenage drawings and paintings from the mid-1950's right up to pictures from last year — single figures and groups of figures painted with a loose, dry touch. This approach serves to portray Mr. Hockney — not always convincingly — as a fearless explorer of styles and techniques like his hero Picasso.
In his first mature work, produced in the late 50's and early 60's, Mr. Hockney painted antic narratives, often unabashedly featuring gay themes, in an expressionistic, faux-naïve style. Then came the first realist paintings — simplified, almost archaic paintings in bright California colors of, for example, Mr. Hockney's friend Peter Schlesinger emerging nude from a Los Angeles swimming pool.
In the 70's, Mr. Hockney's realism intensified, but it never looked overworked, and though he used photographs as references, it did not turn into Photorealism. Nor did it ever appear stuffy or old-fashioned. Looking at the paintings of this period, as well as at the extraordinarily prehensile linear drawings in ink and the gossamer colored-pencil drawings of friends, lovers and luminaries like Andy Warhol and W. H. Auden, you get the exhilarating feeling of an artist on a roll who can do no wrong.
Then, sometime after 1977, Mr. Hockney abandoned his time-consuming, painstaking commitments and, like a man recently divorced or released from prison, plunged into a period of restless promiscuity that has continued up to the present. The turning point is marked by a 1979 portrait of the transvestite actor Divine. Painting in garish colors with a wide brush, Mr. Hockney achieved a cheery Fauvist immediacy but left behind the hallucinatory illusionism of the realist paintings.
From this point on in the exhibition, everything Mr. Hockney does calls more attention to his bravura performance than to his subject matter. In his woozily distorted Cubist portraits and collages, made by assembling scores of snapshots into one faceted composition, he seems desperate to show he can be more than just a skillful realist: he can be an adventurously versatile modernist. But it is more the versatility of an illustrator or designer than of an artist driven to find new forms for new feelings.
Then there is the work relating to Mr. Hockney's briefly controversial effort to prove that photography directly influenced the development of Western art long before anyone had previously thought. In addition to publishing, in 2001, a thick, glossy book on the subject, Mr. Hockney created hundreds of pencil portraits using a camera lucida, a lens that projects a virtual image of an object onto a page so that it can be traced. Examples in this show look like clumsy imitations of Ingres's pencil portraits, and it is hard to see what, if anything, they prove.
Experimental excursions aside, Mr. Hockney mostly creates portraits that border on caricature in a cheerful, generously painterly style. When he concentrates, as in a group of compact pictures from 1988-89 that includes "Mum," a soulful image of his elderly blue-eyed mother, he can be persuasive. But often he seems hurried and distracted.
Many of his portraits call to mind those by Alice Neel. Rarely, however, do his have the sort of raw personal intimacy that the best of hers have. You get the feeling that people exist for Mr. Hockney not as individuals but as models to practice on, as though he were still a student.
Wall labels in the exhibition describe Mr. Hockney as an extremely sociable man, and say that he often entertains his many visitors by making portraits of them. But when viewing the work it is impossible to tell whether his subject is a longtime friend, a lover, a recent acquaintance or a professional associate. This half-focused attentiveness to people goes hand in hand with a certain insouciance about the process of painting itself.
In his most recent efforts, large pictures of one, two or three people in rooms, it appears that Mr. Hockney is thinking of reviving the ambitions of his 70's paintings. Like the earlier works, a recent picture called "The Photographer and His Daughter" owes much to Balthus. Its image of a standing girl in a short skirt watched by the older seated man in a sparsely furnished room is loaded with psychological potential, but the painting is so thinly realized that it leaves richer possibilities untapped.
One of his most beautiful paintings from the 70's, regrettably not in the show, is another portrait of Peter Schlesinger, this one of him fully clothed, standing at the edge of a swimming pool, looking down into its luminous depths at a figure swimming underwater. Not immediately obvious but striking when you think of it, is how the subject's meditative gaze at the ghostly swimmer implicitly mirrors the invisible painter's concentration on the dreamlike scene he is painting — both are looking into their souls.
"Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy," the early 1970's double portrait that is in the exhibition also mixes meditative stillness and tantalizing mystery. The man and woman, on either side of a narrow door that looks out to a brightly lighted courtyard, are like archetypal guardians of a sacred portal to cosmic illumination. (Notice how the outsize white cat — Percy, presumably — in the man's lap stares out the door as though to point the way.)
The difference between these works and the painting Mr. Hockney went on to do is deep. The early paintings make you feel you are on the threshold of a mystical awakening. The later work reduces painting to a more or less inventive but terrestrial play with materials, processes and style.
Mr. Hockney has done other things than make portraits over the past quarter century. He has designed sets for an opera and created ambitious cycles of landscape paintings. So a show devoted exclusively to portraiture may not do justice to his whole, extraordinarily productive career. Judging by this exhibition alone, however, it is difficult not to feel that some time at the end of the 1970's Mr. Hockney lost his way.