Forty-two years old, hair blond enough to be almost white. Owl eye glasses. Below, the blue, lively, mocking, piercing gaze. A good trace of Yorkshire accent too. David Hockney was part of the Swinging London of the sixties and the pop movement. But he survived, him, even more than the Beatles or Mary Quant. Hockney has been said to be a “sophisticated primitive” in his art. Through his conversation he can be too: sometimes candid when he recounts his wonders as a traveler, sometimes refined when he quotes a few verses from T. S. Eliot or a stanza from George Herbert. With other English artists, such as Francis Bacon, Hockney, stepping over abstract art, restores its former chances and new vigor to figuration. He stopped for a few hours in Paris to talk to us… but quoting the English painter Walter Richard Sickert: “Never believe what an artist says, rather see what he does! »
THE NEW OBSERVER. – You are in Paris for a few hours. Tomorrow in London, and soon California. But where are you from, David Hockney?
DAVID HOCKNEY. – From China, where I stayed for three weeks with friends, including the poet Stephen Spender. A tourist trip where I took more than two thousand five hundred photos! And drawings too, but few – because the Chinese move a lot.
What did you photograph?
All. Everybody, every place I’ve seen.
What impressed you the most
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