Periodically, Mr. Hockney made an effort to break with what he considered overly realistic painting. One disruptive tool he called on was photography, which he initially used as an aide-mémoire, snapping pictures wherever he went and referring to them when he was painting. Around 1970, he began pasting photographs onto collages, creating figures that appeared to be seen, Cubist-style, from slightly different angles at once. Initially intended as studies for paintings, the collages became an end in themselves and grew in complexity and sophistication.
When, in 1982, Mr. Hockney was invited by the Pompidou Center in Paris to have a show of his photographs, he began experimenting with elaborate Polaroid composites — creating single images, often figures, from many individual photographs arranged on a grid. He then moved on to photo-collages made with a Pentax 110 camera, creating panoramic landscapes of the American Southwest, a part of the United States he particularly loved. He then translated this incremental approach — using many small images to build a large one — to paintings, in the late 1990s composing images of rolling East Yorkshire terrain from something like an aerial perspective.
His stated intention in such pictures was to repudiate the Renaissance ideal of one-point perspective, which in its scientific exactness was held to define the most advanced form of painting. In arguing against that dogma, Mr. Hockney called on the visual and conceptual logic of Cubism and the multipoint perspective found in Chinese narrative scroll paintings, many of which he examined in the Asian art department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Such work, he said, welcomed viewers as participants, whereas Western-style photographic realism coldly shut them out, as if with a sheet of a glass.
Artistry Onstage
Mr. Hockney’s notion of painting as an immersive medium — demonstrated in a late-life digital extravaganza based on large-scale projections of his work, “Bigger & Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away)” — was also on display in his several much-praised theater designs. The earliest was for a staging of Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” at the Royal Court Theater in London in 1966; his others were for operas.
In 1975, the Glyndebourne Festival, in the English countryside, invited him to create the sets and costumes for Stravinsky’s version of “A Rake’s Progress,” a subject with which Mr. Hockney was familiar. The visual effects he achieved through the use of magnified linear cross-hatching were stunning; the production became one of the most admired of its day.
