Secret Knowledge
Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters
by David Hockney
Viking, 296 pp., $60
WHEN David Hockney shared his hunches about optics and art history with the New Yorker nearly two years ago --which reported them with some (but not enough) skepticism--did he imagine the uproar or the opportunities he would provoke?
In the wake of that New Yorker story announcing Hockney's thesis that the Old Masters painted with help from secret technology, there came a flood of offers to help develop his conspiracy theories. The BBC let him expound in a seventy-five-minute documentary. Hockney and his assistants prepared a coffee-table book tie-in, entitled "Secret Knowledge" (rights for which were shopped to American publishers at an asking price of $600,000), a package that Hockney has been promoting in recent months with interviews on radio, television, and in newspapers around the world.
Only cicerones of the order of Sir Kenneth Clarke, Robert Hughes, and Sister Wendy have commanded media exposure on this scale. Finally, this December--in a kind of apotheosis normally reserved for such monuments of art scholarship as Panofsky or Gombrich--a two-day symposium was organized in Hockney's honor at New York University's Institute of the Humanities. Convened to discuss his self-proclaimed discoveries were some of the most illustrious art historians: Svetlana Alpers, Rosalind Krauss, and Michael Fried. Joining them were Susan Sontag, painters Chuck Close and Philip Pearlstein, and the former director of the Getty Museum, John Walsh, among others.
Serious people, serious money, serious respect. But maybe Hockney isn't surprised at what's happened. As an Englishman residing since the 1960s in Los Angeles, he must have observed that celebrities are often granted improbable liberties to advance pet causes, however outrageous; and that the media, with an insatiable hunger for controversy, are megaphones for all kinds of glamorous amateurs and nuts, provided they're sufficiently well-connected.
Hockney is not a nut. One of the few high-profile contemporary artists to describe for a general public how he looks at the work of other artists, he has an alert and curious mind. He enjoys thinking through the technical problems of making and seeing art. A 1990 documentary in which he analyzed a seventeenth-century Chinese scroll is marked by acute observations about a tradition far removed from his own.
Still, after looking at his book and the BBC film, and especially after attending the NYU conference where his slipshod arguments and naivet were held up to the bright light of history and logic, I find it hard not to picture Hockney alongside those literary sleuths who periodically since the mid-nineteenth century have uncovered "proof" that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays and poems.
Of course, it's not foolish to wonder about the anomalies that are sometimes visible in Western paintings. But Hockney shows all the signs of being a coddled celebrity whose every apercu is treated reverently by those flattered to earn his attention. He seems to have no one strong or trusted enough who could sift his intriguing insights from his banalities, the thoughtful guesses from the harebrained. Proud to be a working artist rather than an art historian shuttered in a library, he suffers from an overwhelming belief in his own eye. As in his earlier books on photography, he seems oblivious to earlier scholarship. It would be thrilling to report that the plucky sixty-four-year-old autodidact has uncovered what the Ph.D'd professionals have for decades overlooked. But, about the Old Masters, it turns out Hockney is largely wrong.
AS HE WRITES in "Secret Knowledge," Hockney began his journey at a London show of Ingres's drawings that left him "awestruck." The lines seemed so tiny and "uncannily 'accurate'" that he was sure, from his own experience, they could not have been "eyeballed," by which he means drawn freehand. (Sontag characterized this logic as: "Because I can't do it, they couldn't have done it.") More, the confidence of Ingres's hand reminded Hockney of an Andy Warhol drawing made from a projected photograph.
From this he decided Ingres must have used an early projection technique called camera lucida to draw portraits. Suddenly Hockney began to notice correspondences everywhere. A host of classic painters came under his suspicion for using lenses and mirrors to achieve their effects. His assistants photocopied works from the canon of art history textbooks and hung them on the wall of his studio, where Hockney eyeballed them to identify paintings with an "optical look."
