HOCKNEY'S NATURAL WONDER

With his largest painting ever, on display this summer at the Smithsonian, David Hockney has pitted his art against America's greatest natural panorama: the Grand Canyon

JOHN RICHARDSON

Arts

David Hockney has just completed the largest paint ing he has ever done, a triumphantly daring pano rama of the supposedly unpaintable Grand Canyon. It takes the form of an assemblage of 60 canvases set edge to edge, and is some 24 feet long and 7 feet high.

This is not Hockney's first bid to pit himself against America's most spectacular natural wonder. In 1982—20 years after it had first bowled him over—he did a couple of large photocollages. And then, in February of this year, he embarked on a far more ambitious version in paint. It took him three months to finish the work, which will be on display at the National Museum of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., from June 19 through September 7. Some studies for the project are currently to be seen at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in a show of Hockney's recent paintings.

Hockney's is a Grand Canyon for today, one that is not so much awesome as accessible and

The decision to use 60 separate canvases for the composition stems from the mosaic-like technique that Hockney devised for his photocollages. The grid formed by the edges of the photographs is what inspired the use of edge-to-edge canvases in the present work. This grid enables the artist to unify his vast surface and impose the same sense of structure that Picasso and Braque used in their Cubist paintings.

Hockney says that the 60 canvases potentially allow for at least 60 different vanishing points—a great improvement over the single vanishing point of traditional perspective, which makes everything recede. Hockney wants to do the opposite: bring everything within reach. He has no time for the old adage "Distance lends enchantment to the view." Nor does he share the 19th-century romantic reverence for the transcendental, the notion that there is something sublime about the sheer scale of the canyon, which is as much as a mile deep and 4 to 18 miles across. If Hockney has been able to demonstrate once and for all that the scene is not as impossible to paint as was thought, it is because he has set out to generate a palpable feeling of space rather than an illusion of vastness and distance.

cool, above all in the way he saturates the colors of the canyon's peaks, buttes, and ravines.

Hockney's is a Grand Canyon for today, one that is not so much awesome as accessible and cool, above all in the way he saturates the colors—the buffs, greens, violets, pinks, as well as the pervasive reds—of the canyon's strata, its peaks and buttes, its gulches and ravines, its canyons within canyons. Given his mastery of the scene, let us hope that Hockney will follow up this painting with one of those downwardplunging views at which he excels, into the beautiful bowels of the canyon.