It was a crush. A vision. Those freshly cut and still alive trunks, the dripping sap, those tilled fields, the jade green of the grass… German construction magnate Reinhold Würth was the first collector to capture the beauty and originality of the landscape paintings that David Hockney had begun. to work hard in their native Yorkshire around 2005. They were brilliant, in every way. It was unseen with added blinding effect. And that the Bradford artist no longer had anything to prove at that time.
The Pop Art pope disjointed the idea of plein-air painting and brought revered English landscape painting into the 21st century with fluorescent tones, fresh perspectives, and razor-sharp lines. Würth was struck by the paintings painted at first in oils and à plein air and then without textures, or impastos, only the cleaning of the digital image that came from the palette of his iPhone and later from the brushes of the iPad.
Würth, who inherited a small hardware company with 3 workers after World War II, has a collection of 19,500 works and more than a dozen museums and galleries, including one near Logroño, always next to his factories. Art together with work and giving names to places that just because of their factories, would not appear on the map.
The Würth Museum's Only Nature exhibition on Hockney in 2009 at the main museum in Künzelsau caused a sensation and paved the way for many others like it. Since then, the collector-visionary and the artist with visions, already well into the eighties, have been very close friends and have followed in the footsteps until now meeting again in an exhibition curated by the great expert Sylvia Weber, which once again exceeds all expectations. .
The artist presents the works that he has been painting in Normandy, where he lives, but he presents them in a rarely seen format: pieces that are friezes, reminiscent of Monet's Water Lilies in the L'Orangerie museum in Paris and medieval tapestries. and oriental. They are panoramic that reach and even exceed 90 meters.
Few spaces can accommodate pieces of that length, but the original Künselzau museum and an extension, the Würth 2, with long corridors and spacious rooms reminiscent of the new EM∑T in Athens, can. In a territory where industrial hustle and bustle rules outside, inside nature overflows, flourishes, falls asleep, bears fruit, cools down, lives, dies and is resurrected. But if the industrial barrier is crossed, there are also fields where the flowering of the fruit trees is prolonged.
“I have very clear memories of my exhibition at the Kunsthalle Würth in 2009, where I showed what were then my last Yorkshire landscapes. Years later, my assistant Jonathan Wilkinson, present at the Frieze iPad installation A Year in Normandy, Tribute to Spring, explains how it fits with the arrival of spring in the Hohenlohe region and with the walls of the new Würth space.” explains the artist.
“If I have to choose only three artists, I prefer Anselm Kiefer, Pablo Picasso and David Hockney”, Reinhold Würth himself (88 years old) told Magazine exclusively a few years ago in one of his few interviews with the press.
A Year in Normandy is Hockney's response to the pandemic and confinement by drawing an idyllic world (and which some critics describe as too idealized), and his research and interest in two centuries-old artistic phenomena. One is that of the Chinese panorama scrolls, dating from the 14th century and describing landscapes and everyday or heroic scenes.
The other is the famous Bayeux Tapestry, an embroidered linen scroll nearly 70 meters long that represents the struggle for power on the English throne and was settled in the momentous battle of Hastings in 1066 and has been interpreted by artists and photographers, like the fashion portraitist Tim Walker who recently exhibited in Rotterdam.
“I painted my closest surroundings in Normandy with the iPad for more than a year, the composition of these grouped images form the frieze of more than 90 meters in length, which is the ideal size to hang in the Wurth Museum 2. I am very curious to see the reaction of the public when seeing the frieze”, exposes the English artist who many years advanced to that need created by the pandemic to return to nature, to which we have turned our backs too many times.
Hockney highlights the need for flowers in art and in his art: "If I moved to Normandy it was because the trees bloom more, the apple trees, the pear trees, the cherry trees... this is where I really experienced the arrival of spring" , confess. The variety of colors is added to the changes in light, the seasons, the same dressed and bare trees, the dry or flooded fields. And all possible skies, always in motion, but frozen in the works.
"In the museum there is a three-voice dialogue," explains Sylvia Weber, the curator of the show, on the other end of the phone. The first you on you is the one that brings together today's Hockney with whom he began to experiment with great enthusiasm with the phone and tablet (and also in video format) fifteen years ago. The curious thing about such a long frieze is that you have to go through it, it is not painting in movement but rather the one who moves is the viewer", she adds.
Indeed, the Norman pandemic pieces embrace their English sisters from Yorkshire and talk about technological improvements in the color palette of electronic devices and formats, more square at first, more in cinemascope now. "But you have to remember that the first paintings in this series in Yorkshire were in oil (like the image below, one of the most famous), and he still paints, but over time it has become more comfortable for him to work on the tablet," he says. the police station.
Indeed, there are oil paintings from that period. Brush and digital paintings coexist on the common walls of the museum and thus the evolution of the work of the Bradford artist, very prolific in recent years, is verified. The second tête à tête, recalls Weber, "is between Hockney and the bottom of the collection where nature, flowers and plants have a preponderant role" by artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Emil Nolde, Alex Katz or Gabriele Münter .
The works are in a nearby museum, also from the Würth collection. Sunsets, trunks, dead and green leaves. Flowers cut and rooted. An orchard, a garden, a forest of artistic immortality. The four seasons in fireworks mode. Hockney is on his way to immortality with his usual round glasses, his impeccable tweed and sipping a good cigar. The colors of the glasses and the vitola of the cigar are exactly the same. Wow crack.
