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拍品專文
A luminous large-scale painting, David Hockney’s Between Kilham and Langtoft (2006) captures the abundance of the harvest season in the artist’s native Yorkshire. The canvas is radiant with a palette of verdant green, pale blue, rich brown and yellow ochre. A trail through long grasses in the foreground, imprinted by the ridged wheels of a tractor, leads the viewer’s eye from their high vantage point through sloping wheatfields. In the distance, a fallow field rises dramatically upwards towards a pearlescent sky. A row of trees at the horizon, their contours rendered smooth and topiary-like by distance, recall the quivering, illuminated objects in Hockney’s early still life tablescapes. This painting forms part of Hockney’s vast, celebrated study of the Yorkshire landscape, charting the ways in which its colours and contours are perpetually transformed by shifting seasons, light and weather. In early 2006 a landmark retrospective of the artist’s portrait practice opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, travelling to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and reaching the National Portrait Gallery, London, a month after the present work’s execution. While this exhibition charted some five decades of Hockney’s observation of the human form, his triumphant career as a landscape artist was also in full bloom. In 2009, Between Kilham and Langtoft was included in Hockney’s first museum presentation of Yorkshire landscapes, at the Kunsthalle Würth, Schwäbisch Hall.
Hockney was born in Bradford, in West Yorkshire, but felt a close affinity to the East Riding of Yorkshire. As a boy he had spent two summers working on farms during the harvest there, immersed in its rolling hills and valleys. Although he would return to the county at various points throughout his career, it was not until the late 1990s that he began to paint it—initially at the request of his friend Jonathan Silver, who was battling the final stages of cancer at the time. Silver’s death in 1997, closely followed by that of Hockney’s mother, would ultimately give rise to a newfound yearning for northern England. Inspired by the dramatic potential of landscape, first explored through the artist’s monumental A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), Hockney toured Norway, Iceland, Spain and Italy during the early 2000s, before realising that he was simply ‘painting views … sight-seeing’. Returning to Yorkshire in 2004, he began to depict his surroundings in earnest. Finally, he recalls, ‘I was painting the land, land that I myself had worked. I had dwelt in those fields, so that out there, seeing, for me, necessarily came steeped in memory’ (D. Hockney, quoted in L. Weschler, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney, Berkeley 2008, p. 199).
Hockney’s study of landscape places him within a lineage of British artists such as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, who found rich artistic inspiration in their native soil and whose paintings were pivotal in cultivating Britain’s modern sense of place. In the summer of 2006, an exhibition of Constable’s large-scale landscapes was staged at Tate Britain, London, closing just one week before Hockney completed the present painting. For the first time, this exhibition assembled Constable’s seminal ‘six footers,’ the artist’s celebrated views of the River Stour in his native Suffolk. Hockney was impressed by the loose brushwork of Constable’s full-scale oil sketches, which were also exhibited. Their echoes can be felt in the overgrown foliage that borders Between Kilham and Langtoft, which itself is six feet wide. These paintings marked a crucial juncture in Constable’s practice; he saw how a progression of large-scale views on a single theme might invest the landscape he had known since boyhood with a sense of drama and narrative weight. This ambitious project is mirrored across Hockney’s expansive study of his own corner of England.
With its sweeping golden fields, Between Kilham and Langtoft recalls such iconic seasonal views as Vincent Van Gogh’s The Harvest (1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)—one of Hockney’s own favourite paintings—as well as Peter Brueghel’s earlier The Harvesters (1565, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In the tradition of these harvest scenes, the work traces the ways in which human activity has shaped and reshaped landscape over time. The painting’s delineated fields and neat rows of planted wheat impart a sense of order, echoed by its diptych format. As late summer gives way to early autumn, laden wheatfields anticipate those who will harvest its golden bounty. Yet where Van Gogh and Brueghel include field workers in their depictions, Hockney’s painting is seemingly void of human presence. ‘I call these my figure paintings,’ Hockney once jested of his early East Riding landscapes: the figure, he went on to explain, is the viewer (L. Weschler, “David Hockney: Painting again in East Yorkshire,” in David Hockney: Recent Paintings, exh. cat., Pace Wildenstein, New York, 2009, p. 11). Setting up his easel en plein air, like the painters of the Barbizon school and the Impressionists before him, Hockney conceives of the painting as both a window onto the world, and a portal through which to enter it. In the present work, enveloping perspectival shifts elicit a sense of both distance and immersion: the viewer surveys the landscape and is also one with it.
Hockney’s biographer Marco Livingstone suggests that the artist’s paintings of Yorkshire from the period of the present work are ‘in purely technical terms—but also in their observational accuracy and evocation of space—the most commanding he has ever made’ (M. Livingstone, ‘Home to Bridlington: Routes to a Private Paradise’, in David Hockney: Just Nature, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Würth, Schwäbisch Hall 2009, p. 188). Like Claude Monet, who famously captured the ‘effects’ of light and weather on the monumental haystacks near his home in Giverny, Hockney returns often to the same views of Yorkshire, tracing their dramatic metamorphosis across time—bare branches becoming bejewelled, freshly seeded turf transformed into a gently swaying ocean of hay. The result is a kind of visual diary of place, and proof of an extraordinary attentiveness to the natural world. Depicting a moment of renewal and abundance, Between Kilham and Langtoft is Hockney’s joyful paean to people and the land they tend.
Hockney was born in Bradford, in West Yorkshire, but felt a close affinity to the East Riding of Yorkshire. As a boy he had spent two summers working on farms during the harvest there, immersed in its rolling hills and valleys. Although he would return to the county at various points throughout his career, it was not until the late 1990s that he began to paint it—initially at the request of his friend Jonathan Silver, who was battling the final stages of cancer at the time. Silver’s death in 1997, closely followed by that of Hockney’s mother, would ultimately give rise to a newfound yearning for northern England. Inspired by the dramatic potential of landscape, first explored through the artist’s monumental A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), Hockney toured Norway, Iceland, Spain and Italy during the early 2000s, before realising that he was simply ‘painting views … sight-seeing’. Returning to Yorkshire in 2004, he began to depict his surroundings in earnest. Finally, he recalls, ‘I was painting the land, land that I myself had worked. I had dwelt in those fields, so that out there, seeing, for me, necessarily came steeped in memory’ (D. Hockney, quoted in L. Weschler, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney, Berkeley 2008, p. 199).
Hockney’s study of landscape places him within a lineage of British artists such as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, who found rich artistic inspiration in their native soil and whose paintings were pivotal in cultivating Britain’s modern sense of place. In the summer of 2006, an exhibition of Constable’s large-scale landscapes was staged at Tate Britain, London, closing just one week before Hockney completed the present painting. For the first time, this exhibition assembled Constable’s seminal ‘six footers,’ the artist’s celebrated views of the River Stour in his native Suffolk. Hockney was impressed by the loose brushwork of Constable’s full-scale oil sketches, which were also exhibited. Their echoes can be felt in the overgrown foliage that borders Between Kilham and Langtoft, which itself is six feet wide. These paintings marked a crucial juncture in Constable’s practice; he saw how a progression of large-scale views on a single theme might invest the landscape he had known since boyhood with a sense of drama and narrative weight. This ambitious project is mirrored across Hockney’s expansive study of his own corner of England.
With its sweeping golden fields, Between Kilham and Langtoft recalls such iconic seasonal views as Vincent Van Gogh’s The Harvest (1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)—one of Hockney’s own favourite paintings—as well as Peter Brueghel’s earlier The Harvesters (1565, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In the tradition of these harvest scenes, the work traces the ways in which human activity has shaped and reshaped landscape over time. The painting’s delineated fields and neat rows of planted wheat impart a sense of order, echoed by its diptych format. As late summer gives way to early autumn, laden wheatfields anticipate those who will harvest its golden bounty. Yet where Van Gogh and Brueghel include field workers in their depictions, Hockney’s painting is seemingly void of human presence. ‘I call these my figure paintings,’ Hockney once jested of his early East Riding landscapes: the figure, he went on to explain, is the viewer (L. Weschler, “David Hockney: Painting again in East Yorkshire,” in David Hockney: Recent Paintings, exh. cat., Pace Wildenstein, New York, 2009, p. 11). Setting up his easel en plein air, like the painters of the Barbizon school and the Impressionists before him, Hockney conceives of the painting as both a window onto the world, and a portal through which to enter it. In the present work, enveloping perspectival shifts elicit a sense of both distance and immersion: the viewer surveys the landscape and is also one with it.
Hockney’s biographer Marco Livingstone suggests that the artist’s paintings of Yorkshire from the period of the present work are ‘in purely technical terms—but also in their observational accuracy and evocation of space—the most commanding he has ever made’ (M. Livingstone, ‘Home to Bridlington: Routes to a Private Paradise’, in David Hockney: Just Nature, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Würth, Schwäbisch Hall 2009, p. 188). Like Claude Monet, who famously captured the ‘effects’ of light and weather on the monumental haystacks near his home in Giverny, Hockney returns often to the same views of Yorkshire, tracing their dramatic metamorphosis across time—bare branches becoming bejewelled, freshly seeded turf transformed into a gently swaying ocean of hay. The result is a kind of visual diary of place, and proof of an extraordinary attentiveness to the natural world. Depicting a moment of renewal and abundance, Between Kilham and Langtoft is Hockney’s joyful paean to people and the land they tend.