Hockney at the Pompidou

"I don't think there are any borders when it comes to painting," says David Hockney. As an artist, he is something of a Swiss Army knife, with interests ranging from cave painters to 21st-century digital drawing techniques.

Rereading my last post, it is obvious I have nothing original to say about the capital ("Parisians like food"), nor do I have any special insights about the most important British artist of the last 50 years ("He painted swimming pools"). But I learned a few things at the Pompidou Center's stunning David Hockney exhibition, which is in town only for a couple more weeks. Among them:

1) He designed opera sets for "Turandot" and "Woman Without a Shadow."
2) He developed a number of large photo-collage compositions he called "joiners" using images he took with a Polaroid camera and a Pentax 110 (a sub-miniature available on eBay today for less than $10).
3) He began drawing on the iPhone in 2009.
3) From 2011 to 2013 he used 18 cameras mounted to a van in the Woldgate area of Yorkshire to create the multifaceted video installation "Four Seasons," a slow-moving immersive set of 4 massive screens, each broken up into 9 discrete, slightly overlapping elements. Like most of Hockney's work, it is vivid and surprising and impossible not to like.

Another thing I learned is that the low-grade war on photography continues, fed by a combination of post-9/11ism (or locally, 11/13/15ism), a mild strain of anti-tourist sentiment and the far-fetched notion that someone might be making a commercial bonanza by taking pictures in a museum of paintings that can be seen in eye-popping high definition simply by asking Siri to deliver them to the device of your choice.

Future generations will mock us.

Centre Georges Pompidou. I remember seeing a sports-themed movie here in 1974 while the building was still under construction. It was screened in a classroom or some kind of conference room.

I wish the exhibit had included Hockney's Yorkshire watercolor sketches, but it is a greedy wish. Another thing: Hockney has gotten a lot of flak for his "Secret Knowledge" thesis ― that artists in as early as the 15th century were using optical instruments to enhance their works' visual accuracy ― but when I read and listen to his arguments, I find them persuasive. Then again I thought Ted Kaczynski's manifesto made some good points, so maybe I'm just the suggestible type. There are worse traits.

After moving to Los Angeles, he started using acrylics instead of oils. He returned to Europe briefly in 1973, living in Paris, where a major exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of Decorative Arts in '74. Like Beethoven, Hockney says that going deaf has honed his artistic sensibility.

Hockney moved to California in 1961. American freedoms made a big impression. He read Whitman and bleached his hair.

Hockney was the fourth of five children. He grew up in Yorkshire and didn't visit London until he was 18. Today he lives in Malibu.

"Four Seasons": Crappy photo does not do justice to just how vividly mesmeric this slow-moving video series is.

The artist has always been interested in new technologies. In 1986 Hockney explored ways of making art with color photocopiers.

Hockney has objected to being called a Pop artist, yet that is how the public views him. As a result, that is the classification many critics and historians use when labeling his work. He is 80 and still at work. The Paris exhibit contains at least one painting from 2017.