Martin Gayford

This is one of those books where you have to look quite closely at the title: It's not a history of visual art, it's a history of pictures. In other words, Hockney and Gayford are discussing the history of human depictions of the real world on flat surfaces. They look at the interaction between imaginative reproduction — artists putting lines and colours on paper — and technical reproduction where we use optical devices to project images of the real world either temporarily onto a wall show more or a screen or more permanently onto a photographic film or a digital sensor.

Hockney, of course, has a long-standing bee in his bonnet about the way artists have used optical devices to assist them in composing pictures. So there's a lot about how every important artist from the renaissance onwards has been using a camera obscura to trace forms or at least to establish the composition of their work. It's perhaps controversial if you're an art historian, but if you don’t have a vested interest, it does seem to make perfect sense. Why wouldn't you use a tool if it's available and makes your work easier?

Of course, they emphasise that there's still always an important creative element in choosing the composition and lighting of what you want in your picture and then choosing how you want to transfer it from the projection to the permanent record.

Hockney points out that trained artists have often also turned out to be very good at taking photographs, whilst people who have no sense of visual art are unlikely to be good at taking photographs, except in a technical sense.

The book also covers moving images and digital creation of pictures — Hockney is the great advocate of iPad art, of course — but it’s just a bit too old to cover the rapidly developing topic of AI-created images. I’m sure there will be a chapter on that if they ever update the book. It would be interesting to know what Hockney thinks about computers producing images of penguins on surfboards or inadequately-clothed Asian girls in post-apocalyptic cityscapes.

It's interesting how this book is set up very explicitly as a dialogue with alternate passages written by Hockney and Gayford. Hockney writes, of course, from the practical viewpoint of a practising artist and also from his own aesthetic insight, whilst Gayford sticks more to filling us in on the history of art, explaining the background and context of the things that were going on around the artists at the time. It's a very good collaboration and it works surprisingly smoothly. I didn't find it at all distracting really.

The book is very richly illustrated. It includes practically every picture mentioned in the text, even the very over-familiar ones. In the paperback it's not always the most beautiful, glossy reproduction, but they're all perfectly adequate. The book is quite pretty to look at, although a bit chunky to be a coffee table book.

If you're going to read just one book on the history of visual images, this is probably a bit too random and discursive: you would probably want to start with someone like Gombrich. But this is also a very nice one, and a lively, entertaining read. show less

I borrowed this thinking it would be an art book which is what I wanted and then it seemed as though it would be a biography. It isn’t really either, even though it has aspects of both. There is art in here and it’s wonderful. Some of it is by Hockney and some of it is by other artists. A lot of Hockney’s recent work is included and I love it. Most of it is presented on only parts of pages though so it never really feels like an art book. It was interesting reading the email show more correspondence between Hockney and the art critic. It was great reading about Hockney’s decision at age 80 to be in a setting with beauty and a lack of distractions and then when covid-19 hit it didn’t make much difference anyway. He was already deliberately living in safe isolation. The art that came out of that experience is wonderful. I think this is as much a philosophy of life book as it is anything else. I enjoyed it a lot but I think I’d have enjoyed it more had I known what I would be reading/viewing. The art was my favorite part of the book. I was expecting a not too heavy text art book but this book is mostly text and it took me forever to read it. I will be looking for more Hockney books. I’ve enjoyed those I’ve read and enjoyed the Hockney museums exhibits and painting I’ve seen in museums. I like the man and I like his art. 4-1/2 stars show less

Discussing the visual arts successfully in words is often held to be an impossible task. In fact it is merely difficult. And since the days of the ancient Greeks, many writers of all kinds have taken up the challenge -- not only art critics but novelists, poets, gossips, artists, and essayists. In The Grove Book of Art Writing, Martin Gayford and Karen Wright have collected the best and most lively attempts to pin it down, in a single-volume cornucopia of writing on art. From Vasari and show more Freud on why Mona Lisa smiles, to Adolf Hitler on the degeneracy of modernism, to Picasso on how to measure the depiction of the female body, art historians, art critics, artists, as well as the aforementioned weigh in on what makes art so wonderful, frustrating, what makes it art. From the deadly serious to the deeply witty, from the sublime to the ridiculous, The Grove Book of Art Writing is an eloquent compendium of insight into the diverse ways the visual arts can be seen and thought about. show less

Martin Gayford has provided us with an intriguing snap shot of British art from 1945 to the end of the 1960s, making use of many personal testimonies and yet retaining the discipline of a historian. He rightly centres on Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and David Hockney without neglecting the 'scene'.

This book is not just about those three dominant artists. There is scarcely a significant artist from this era who is not introduced and positioned in his or her milieu by Gayford. His story of show more these 25 years flows so that you get a sense of a fairly closed world that only sometimes spills out into ours.

The core point here is the sheer variety of artistic endeavours so that at no time can we speak of some dominant school or fashion as we might with, say, Abstract Expressionism in New York. Even such Schools as do emerge (such as Pop Art) prove to be more fluid than we might expect.

The creative attraction of America is important, however. It is arguable that Hockney has always been a Californian as much as an English artist. The pioneering work of the British Pop artists depended on the pull of American popular culture whilst remaining wholly distinctive.

It was also perhaps a culture that was perhaps more tolerant of difference than others. Abstraction never crushed figurative art (unlike in the US). The figurative and abstract could merge creatively as they appeared to do in the work of Bacon and Hockney. Freud never ceased being figurative.

Gayford is also good at letting artists speak for themselves on occasions if only to demonstrate that speaking is not really very helpful when it comes to art. Artists will talk amongst themselves in what becomes a private language that hides as much as it shows. Their bias is towards 'doing' - action.

One is struck by Bridget Riley's comments about her creative process which was highly individualistic and 'unscientific', its fashionable 'zeitgeist' aspect accidental and even irritating in its commercial exploitation without the artist's consent.

Artists simply 'do' Art. Bacon, Freud and Hockney are all extremely different from each other but what they had in common (only Hockney is still alive) was an intense creative obsession to 'act' and then, having acted, to move on and act something else out, to express, to develop.

I found myself by chance in a room full of film directors a few weeks ago and found the same attitude. It was for critics to analyse their work and that was another profession entirely. They were interested in making their peculiar sausages and, once the sausages were made, they were sent off to be eaten.

The educational system, the galleries, commissions, social change, private ambition, networks and Soho (and Camberwell) are all covered but the emphasis is always on the artist and what they actually did - their work - and how relationships between artists affected that work.

These are (mostly) sociable people in their way and yet the act of artistic creation seems to be one of existential isolation, a working out of 'being in the world' using physical materials where language simply has minimal place except sometimes as just another raw material in its own right.

I ended up with the rather uncharitable thought that perhaps 95% of the artistically fascinated middle classes who troop along to retrospectives and blockbusters are likely to emerge no wiser as to the apparent meaning of the work they have just viewed.

This is not to be a snob but a realist. The artist's world is intensely private and belongs to a club of artists where it is not. Little can be communicated when much art actually has no meaning (in linguistic terms) despite the best interpretative efforts of critics.

The famous and apparently Philistine comment that 'I don't know much about art but I know what I like' may, in fact, be as far as most of us can go in practice. Few 'art lovers' can go further. Even the critics (it becomes clear from the book) are likely to be guessing much of the time.

But we could say this about any of the great zones of human thought - Art, Religion, Science, Music, Politics, the list goes on. We bathe in their glow, accept or reject them, pretend to knowledge as opposed to pleasure or aversion, trust in others for our views yet not know their inner secrets.

An excellent book with excellent and appropriate illustrations, it is highly recommended to anyone interested in post war British Art and in the rather unique individualism of a culture that was still able to emphasise learned basic skills like drawing until quite late in the day. show less