Outlines : David Hockney

Based on a candid conversation with the artist, Peter Adam's "Outline" leads us through David Hockney's endlessly inventive artistic development. From the perspective of his enduring fascination with the male nude, it also charts his relationships with the friends and lovers who fired his imagination and whom he portrayed, both intimately and formally, in his work - including those in London, such as W.H. Auden, Ossie Clark and Patrick Procktor, and later those in the United States, notably Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, Peter Schlesinger and Gregory Evans. It tells the story of a wonderfully engaging artistic personality, from his swinging sixties' peroxided hair and gold lame jacket, through his impatience with English prudery and censoriousness, to the present day when so many of those he has painted or drawn are no longer alive.

The British-born, longtime Los Angeles resident, gay painter Hockney suffers from overexposure in a plethora of books about his mixed achievements in painting, drawing, stage design and photography. However, a memoir by Adam, a BBC documentary filmmaker, author of Art of the Third Reich and a friend of the artist, adds a personal tone that is different from the usual Hockney-olatry. Adam, who attracted much attention in England with his refreshingly candid autobiography about his experiences as a gay German Jew, Not Drowning but Waving, is frank in his approach to Hockney's sex life, money matters and other details. Particular attention is given to gay erotica drawn by the artist, which was suppressed in a controversial 1980's Los Angeles retrospective, but is a special interest of Adam, who also authored a study, forthcoming from Thames & Hudson, The Love of Man: Homoerotic Art from Antiquity to the Present Time. The British edition was titled David Hockney and His Friends, which was really more apt as the focus is on the importance of friends--which includes lovers, even some ultimately very unfriendly ones, and ex's who have walked out on him only to return as vague employee-assistants. Part of Outlines, a new series of brief biographies of important gay and lesbian creators, this book is one of the most substantial.

Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

These two titles are the first offering in the new "Outlines" series, which promises to bring out small, affordably priced biographies of gay artists, writers, actors, and composers. Probably the publisher's location in Britain led the editors to choose Benjamin Britten as one of the first entries, a choice unlikely to make the book as successful on this side of the Atlantic. To make matters worse, in this slim volume TV and screenwriter Wilcox (Gay Plays Five, Heinemann, 1995) finds most of the operas wanting in many ways, and 18 exceedingly brief essays do little but catalog hidden gay subtext within each piece?allusions that would have been created by the librettist in most cases. Art historian and filmmaker Adam's work on the English painter David Hockney is by far the more successful of the two. The sensual, the libidinal, the homosexual have always infused Hockney's art, and the author clearly, almost lovingly, opens up the artist's personal life to explain how it came to inhabit his professional body of work. Hockney chose friends, lovers, and family members for his pastel-colored portraits and poolside paintings that forever transformed Western art's previous idealized and allegorical image of the male nude to a more honest and natural one, from the heroic to the erotic. Not meant to provide in-depth biography or academic analysis, "Outlines" is a promising new series whose second offering, on Hockney, is recommended for most collections.?Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.