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DAVID HOCKNEY:SECRET KNOWLEDGE

I guess the secret’s out. In this 2001 BBC Omnibus special directed by Randall Wright, David Hockney posits the idea that Western art made use of first concave mirrors (beginning around 1420) and then lenses (about a century later) to create images that could be more or less traced. The evidence has to do with the 30-centimeter size of many paintings, with out-of-focus effects characteristic of mirrors (but not the eye), with the vivid reality of sunlight on faces and the small pupils depicted therein, with the way exquisite drapery molds itself to bodies, with the way armor glints (in real life, the shine moves when you do, but not in a mirror). Hockney travels to Florence and Bruges and Ghent; he re-creates Brunelleschi’s 1412 drawing of the Florentine Baptistery (pointing out that if anyone was using a mirror at that point, the builder of the cathedral dome would have known about it) and Van Eyck’s painting of the chandelier in his Arnolfini Wedding. He observes that lenses reverse and draws your attention to the improbable number of left-handed drinkers in later European painting, a phenomenon not found in Giotto. He even shows how the need to do one figure at a time is responsible for the flattened picture space in Caravaggio’s The Cardsharp.

Critics have apparently charged that Hockney is trying to denigrate the achievement of Western civilization’s great artists; Hockney responds by wearing an "Optics Don’t Make Marks" T-shirt. But he’s trying to make a more important point. From 1420 on, artists were anticipating the 1839 invention of the camera, with its single-point perspective. Post-photography, artists began to rebel, which is why Van Gogh’s portrait of Saint-Rémy orderly Charles-Elzéard Trabuc looks more like a Byzantine Christ than anything in between. Photography and film won out over Cubism and multiple perspective in the 20th century, but now the computer promises to put art back in the hand of the artist, to Hockney’s evident delight. In any case, this 72-minute film will make you rethink the way you look at painting.

BY JEFFREY GANTZ

Issue Date: June 13 - 20, 2002
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