Hockney's optical delusions - Letters

To the Editors:

David L. Sweet rightly points out the incoherence of David Hockney's theory. I don't want to diminish Andy Warhol's accomplishment as an artist, but comparing him to Ingres is absurd. There is a fine but crucial difference in the quality of these artists' lines. Ingres's confident lines have their origin in his knowing awareness of the subjects' three-dimensionality; they produce a different esthetic effect than traced lines. Hockney's failure to recognize this difference speaks poorly of his qualifications as a draftsman.

If optical devices really had a large impact on the creation of premodern paintings, why haven't the advanced technical tools now available enabled today's artists to paint like the old masters at will?

Ruprecht von Kaufmann
Brooklyn

David Sweet replies:

Ruprecht von Kaufmann is clearly provoked by Hockney's comparison of Ingres's and Warhol's lines, but the point of the comparison is to reveal precisely those instances where Ingres's line seems to forget, as it were, the three dimensions of the objects they depict. Clearly, such instances are atypical, to be found at the margins of certain portrait drawings. Also, although I appreciate Kaufmann's acknowledgment that my review reveals inconsistencies in Hockney's argument, it doesn't follow that his entire thesis is incoherent.

David G. Stork, on the other hand, seems unaware of the shortcomings of some of his own alternative explanations. Simply because artists might look at objects from different distances cannot explain why some objects are painted in perspective and others not--particularly when they are all arrayed on the same table top, as they are in Holbein's portrait Georg Gisze. Stork writes as if painting at different angles were an anomaly of the painting process from which anamorphs causally ensue. But in fact painters almost always work at angles to their canvases without always producing anamorphs. Something else must intervene. If Hockney's solution seems a poor one, Stork offers none at all. Hockney also makes it fairly clear that optical devices would have been used at the preliminary stages of the process: for drawing or underpainting, not for finished surfaces or subtleties of color. The idea of actually completing such a surface under an optical projection is Stork's invention.

I don't know exactly when long-focal-length mirrors became available to painters, but they are not, as Stork maintains, "demanded" by Hockney's theory. Hockney's best early examples are the smaller portraits and still lifes that could have been painted using smaller concave mirrors and could have been traced upside down. Where he applies the theory to larger works, Hockney adheres to the notion that elements had to be projected in piecemeal fashion, in consistency with the fact that only small mirrors were available before the 17th century.

I do agree with Stork that the argument for Caravaggio's use of lenses in certain paintings requires a sustained suspension of disbelief. And while fear of the Inquisition seems an overdramatic explanation for keeping such knowledge a secret, the argument that lenses and mirrors were a trade secret is more plausible--certainly not requiring thousands of co-conspirators as Stork contends. Even today, with mass-produced shaving mirrors in bathrooms across America, most people still have no idea that projections can be made with a concave mirror.

Laurence Gretton does not seem to have noticed that although Hockney is over-ambitious with his theory, he never applies it to Michelangelo. Gretton also seems to confuse the camera obscura with the camera lucida, a fairly inconspicuous portable device an artist such as Ingres could have made use of in less than a minute before going on to finish his portrait drawings--a longer process, no doubt.

Not one of the correspondents mentions my discussion of Philip Steadman's book Vermeer's Camera, which makes the case that Jan Vermeer may have used a camera obscura. Here, a scholarly consensus about the use of such an optical device already exists. But to acknowledge that at least one old master may have used optics would be to admit that any great painter could make use of such aids and remain a great painter, which is exactly Hockney's point.

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