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Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Gayford, Martin
Birthdate: 1952
Gender: male
Nationality: UK
Places of residence: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Education: University of Cambridge
Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
Occupations: art critic
Senior Research Fellow
Organizations: University of Buckingham
Spectator
Sunday Telegraph

Members

Reviews

Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy by Martin Gayford

What a lovely object this book is: a satisfyingly solid hardback bound in cool bright colours, with thick, cream-coloured pages that allow for good quality printing of the many illustrations. The hardback is a nice readable size, not unwieldy like a coffee table book, but nonetheless an art book with nearly as many pages of images as of text. These illustrations are not just of Hockey's work; his inspirations and influences are also included. Gayford essentially collates conversations with and artworks by Hockney into a narrative, centring around the period of 2020 when Hockney was in lockdown in his beautiful Normandy farmhouse.

Hockney (via Gayford's quotations) is critical of photography as a means of capturing nature's beauty.

There, in that chance visit to an exhibition, lay the germ for decades of thought and work: how the stroke of a brush, pen, or stick of charcoal could produce a picture that was better and in a way truer than any camera. What he saw in Marquet's work was what he also finds in Monet: beautiful marks that reveal the beauty of the world, so that when you've seen their pictures you see more in the world around you. Of course, that's what he's doing himself.

Hockney's strikingly colourful lockdown works are nearly all pictures of his gardens, done via an iPad app or more traditional media. Without the distraction of visitors, he completed one or more of these pictures every day.

Just as the camera does not see space or sunsets as the human eye and brain perceive them, neither does it register the colours of flowers in the way that we experience them. That is why photographing a spring meadow, for example, is a frustrating business. Where you see a mass of wild blooms - red, yellow, blue, and white - the lens minimises these hues and records mainly grass and leaves. Monet's painter's-palette flower beds might not appeal to a serious aficionado of the herbaceous border. But then what a painter finds interesting will not delight every eye ('willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork' were on Constable's list of his favourite things). So arranging a garden for an artist to paint is different from making one for a horticulturist, a tree-fancier, or a lawn-lover. Conversely, what makes for a good painting or drawing is not necessarily the sort of prime specimen that would please a landscape architect or arboriculturist.

Via these works, the book considers the power of getting to know your surroundings and looking at them with an artist's eye. I think lockdowns forced us all to do more of this.

What is special about these landscapes is precisely that they are his own: long studied and internalised. He knows them deeply, thoroughly, intimately, and gets to see and understand more and more with each hour of attention. Bit by bit, these familiar spots turn out to be microcosms containing all the ingredients a painter could require.

The moral is this: it is not the place that is intrinsically interesting; it is the person looking at it. Wherever it is, it will part of the world; the laws of time and space will still apply. Then sun will rise and set, and so will the moon.

Gayford also includes Hockney's broader philosophies of life and art.

The message, though positive, is a tough one: 'The cause of death is birth'. But the pictures transmit the idea that idea through visual enjoyment or, to use an old-fashioned term, beauty.

DH: I think that there's a pleasure principle in art. Without it, art wouldn't be there. You can almost drain it away, but it still needs to be there. It's like in the theatre. Entertainment is a minimum requirement, not a maximum. Everything should be entertaining. You might go to higher levels, but you always need to accomplish that at least. The pleasure principle in art can't be denied; but that doesn't mean all art is easy and joyful.

This beautifully arranged book is primarily a visual (and generally sensual) pleasure, but the text is thought-provoking too and compliments the images well without descending into hagiography.… (more)

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annarchism | 3 other reviews | Aug 4, 2024 |

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine… by Martin Gayford

Fiction - Van Gogh, Gauguin relationship

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Docent-MFAStPete | 4 other reviews | May 27, 2024 |

The Grove Book of Art Writing by Martin Gayford

Discussing the visual arts successfully in words is often held to be an impossible task. In fact it is merely difficult. And since the days of the ancient Greeks, many writers of all kinds have taken up the challenge -- not only art critics but novelists, poets, gossips, artists, and essayists. In The Grove Book of Art Writing, Martin Gayford and Karen Wright have collected the best and most lively attempts to pin it down, in a single-volume cornucopia of writing on art. From Vasari and Freud on why Mona Lisa smiles, to Adolf Hitler on the degeneracy of modernism, to Picasso on how to measure the depiction of the female body, art historians, art critics, artists, as well as the aforementioned weigh in on what makes art so wonderful, frustrating, what makes it art. From the deadly serious to the deeply witty, from the sublime to the ridiculous, The Grove Book of Art Writing is an eloquent compendium of insight into the diverse ways the visual arts can be seen and thought about.… (more)

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petervanbeveren | 1 other review | Mar 18, 2024 |

A history of pictures from the cave to the computer… by David Hockney

This is one of those books where you have to look quite closely at the title: It's not a history of visual art, it's a history of pictures. In other words, Hockney and Gayford are discussing the history of human depictions of the real world on flat surfaces. They look at the interaction between imaginative reproduction — artists putting lines and colours on paper — and technical reproduction where we use optical devices to project images of the real world either temporarily onto a wall or a screen or more permanently onto a photographic film or a digital sensor.

Hockney, of course, has a long-standing bee in his bonnet about the way artists have used optical devices to assist them in composing pictures. So there's a lot about how every important artist from the renaissance onwards has been using a camera obscura to trace forms or at least to establish the composition of their work. It's perhaps controversial if you're an art historian, but if you don’t have a vested interest, it does seem to make perfect sense. Why wouldn't you use a tool if it's available and makes your work easier?

Of course, they emphasise that there's still always an important creative element in choosing the composition and lighting of what you want in your picture and then choosing how you want to transfer it from the projection to the permanent record.

Hockney points out that trained artists have often also turned out to be very good at taking photographs, whilst people who have no sense of visual art are unlikely to be good at taking photographs, except in a technical sense.

The book also covers moving images and digital creation of pictures — Hockney is the great advocate of iPad art, of course — but it’s just a bit too old to cover the rapidly developing topic of AI-created images. I’m sure there will be a chapter on that if they ever update the book. It would be interesting to know what Hockney thinks about computers producing images of penguins on surfboards or inadequately-clothed Asian girls in post-apocalyptic cityscapes.

It's interesting how this book is set up very explicitly as a dialogue with alternate passages written by Hockney and Gayford. Hockney writes, of course, from the practical viewpoint of a practising artist and also from his own aesthetic insight, whilst Gayford sticks more to filling us in on the history of art, explaining the background and context of the things that were going on around the artists at the time. It's a very good collaboration and it works surprisingly smoothly. I didn't find it at all distracting really.

The book is very richly illustrated. It includes practically every picture mentioned in the text, even the very over-familiar ones. In the paperback it's not always the most beautiful, glossy reproduction, but they're all perfectly adequate. The book is quite pretty to look at, although a bit chunky to be a coffee table book.

If you're going to read just one book on the history of visual images, this is probably a bit too random and discursive: you would probably want to start with someone like Gombrich. But this is also a very nice one, and a lively, entertaining read.… (more)

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thorold | 2 other reviews | Feb 23, 2024 |

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