David Hockney Shines a Light on the True Methods of Master Painters

 

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters – David Hockney (2001)

 

            Sometimes it takes an artist to understand another artist.  Oftentimes, it takes an artist with an inquisitive mind to penetrate another artist’s methods and techniques.  As an artist myself, I know how other artists view art.  We look at the work itself but we are also deeply concerned with how the work was created.  This is similar to how normal people can appreciate a beautiful car, but it takes a trained mechanic to understand the beauty inherent in the interior workings of the vehicle, something not evident to the casual fan.  David Hockney, a world-famous artist, and one of the few modern creators still obsessed with drawing, used his artist’s eye to penetrate the obscurities and purposeful deflections of master painters, realizing, after careful study, that the revered classic painters, figures such as Ingres, Vermeer, and Caravaggio, among many others, were not drawing their subjects free-hand.  Instead, it was plain to Hockney’s modern eye that these magnificent draughtsmen utilized mechanical aids such as lenses, mirrors, and the camera obscura, to perfect their paintings and drawings. Once this idea entered Hockney’s mind it would not leave, sending him on a years-long course of research, practice, and study.  The fruition of the idea is this amazing book.

            Hockney understands that an artist lives within the means allowed during the times they happen to live in.  For Hockney, this means that he has color reproductions, printers, and material readily available.  It is this availability that allowed him to compile his amazing “wall,” a collection of images sorted chronologically on a long studio wall, which allowed him to first “see” the enormous influence exerted by the technologies of the looking glass, the mirror, and the camera obscura on the great master painters.  This is critical to understanding how Hockney arrived at his idea, and it leads into the first section of the book, showcasing the visual evidence he gathered over a decade, helping to illuminate his thesis.

            Seemingly overnight, sometime in the 15^th century, the images change.  Gone are the flat, carefully observed, painterly images of the old masters such as Poussin or Reubens. Instead, we have Van Eyck’s incredibly rich and detailed Arnolfini Wedding, or Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes, works so detailed and seemingly exact, as to feel ultra-realistic, as close to an exact reproduction as art could get until the advent of chemical photography.  The only way this could be achieved would be through the use of a camera obscura, originally just a darkened room with a pinhole on one wall, allowing the bright sunlight from outside to enter the room and shine on the opposing wall, showing a reversed and upside-down image of whatever was outside the room. This was as close to magic as humans ever got!  They were able to see the full range of color and light, as well as seeing the motion of the scene in question.  Imagine it, in a world where images were few and far between, where a master artist worked for years to learn to capture likeness, shape and form, to have a simple contraption display a magical light show must have seemed pure fantasy. 

            Hockney’s suggestion that the old master painters utilized such mechanical aids shook the art and art history worlds.  The art dogma proclaimed loudly that the true genius of artists such as Vermeer lay in their uncanny ability to capture likeness without anything as pedantic and common as a lens, mirror, or other such device.  To imagine their use of a camera obscura would only detract from their esteem.  This is a deeply rooted fallacy, which Hockney points out exists solely because most art historians are not creators of art.  In the intervening quarter-century since David Hockney released this book, his observations have gained much traction, especially among his fellow artists.

As Hockney states several times, the paint does not apply itself.  The marks created by a painter using a camera obscura serve as points of departure, allowing an artist to achieve very close likenesses of a human sitter, for example.  Free-hand drawing, what artists call “eyeballing,” is a process whereby the hand of the artist seeks the proper contours and spatial relations of the scene he is painting.  X-ray photography of such works can show how an artist moved an element of the painting, adjusted a position, or completely removed an aspect of the image.  These markings and underdrawings are not found in the highly detailed images from Vermeer, Ingres, Caravaggio, or any of the other artists using a camera obscura device.  Instead, there are basic scrapings or markings, detailing the main points of a figure, or the relation of the nose to the face in a portrait.  This makes the finished work seem as if it was created whole out of thin air, with little to no preparation!  This was only possible with the use of a mechanical aid.

The first section of this book details the visual evidence discovered by Hockney.  From spatial distortions, only producible by the use of a lens, to issues of relative size between the heads of sitters and their bodies, to the flatness created by such projections, which became a stylized flatness in the works of the major artists, Hockney points out countless examples of each, in vivid color, and invites us to make our own observations.  As an artist myself, once seen, these examples cannot be unseen. 

Hockney describes the progress of the mechanical aids and how, using a lens and mirror, the camera obscura allowed for more complex paintings.  For example, in Hans Holbein’s masterpieces, Hockney shows how each section, exquisitely detailed, was composed individually, using the tolls mentioned above.  This gives the paintings a cohesive, focused nature very pleasing to the eye, but close reading by a trained eye can see the perspective shifts, and the diverted angles which come from such technique.  Another “sign” of the camera obscura is the rise of chiaroscuro, or the treatment of bright light and deep shadow within paintings.  Before the use of the devices, paintings did not use shadow to mold the shape of the subjects, instead using color and line.  In fact, most pre-1400’s European painting matched what we see in Indian or Chinese paintings, a focus on form and color, with no shadows portrayed whatsoever.  It is these shadows that Hockney intuited arose from the bright light (essentially full sunlight) needed for the proper functioning of a camera obscura.  Painters were now obsessed with light and shadow, and capturing near-perfect likenesses of people and nature.  It was not until hundreds of years later, when the chemical photograph managed to capture light and form for posterity, that the painting world retreated from pure representation, moving into wild new fields such as Fauvism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism, attempting to do with paint what could not be done with the camera.

The second part of this book deals with the textual evidence gathered by David Hockney to support his claims.  The older examples can be a bit vague, for each artist and craftsman was deeply suspicious of others and would never share the secrets of their trade with anyone for fear it would be stolen or used erroneously.  Roger Bacon, artist and scientist extraordinaire, wrote in Of Art and Nature that,

“The cause of…concealment among all wise men is the contempt and neglect of the secrets of wisdom [sic] by the vulgar sort that knoweth not how to use these things which are most excellent.” 

This is as true now as it was in the 13^th century when Bacon wrote it.

The third part prints out much of the correspondence between David Hockney and fellow artists, historians, etc., all discussing the ideas found in this book, from conception to publication.  It gives a great timeline, and allows the reader to travel along with Hockney as he gains certainty and wisdom concerning his idea.  It is a great coda to this amazing book.  Hockney also shares an extensive bibliography, perfect for people like me, seeking more reading material.

This may be the single greatest art history book I have ever read.  It reads like a mystery and the images are perfectly chosen to elucidate Hockney’s writing.  Perhaps we need to return to a time when art history was written by actual artists, instead of historians.  The insights found by David Hockney may only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  Once our preconceived ideas about how “artistic genius” functions are discarded, we can better see how these magnificently creative artists captured our world in their art.  To demean an artist for using a tool says more about the person laying judgment than it does about the creative individual.  No mechanical aid can teach how to lay down paint, or how to draw, or how to create mood and feeling in an artwork.  Those things come directly from the artist themselves, their hard work, and their imagination.  David Hockney has done all artists a great service.  This book should be required reading for anyone studying art or art history. 

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/secret-knowledge-david-hockney/1112571044 )