All the Colors of the Stage

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Minneapolis, the entrancing theater designs of David Hockney

Anyone who knows American museums also knows that by no means do all of their best exhibitions go to New York City. The latest omission of this kind is "Hockney Paints the Stage," a lavish and delectable survey of the theater work of the English painter David Hockney, which opened last week at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It was organized by the Walker's director, Martin Friedman, whose catalogue, with additional essays by Poet Stephen Spender and Theater Director John Dexter, is the definitive work on Hockney as stage designer. The show will travel to Mexico City, Toronto, Chicago, Fort Worth and San Francisco, but not east of the Hudson. The irony is that most of Hockney's American theater audience, meaning the people who have seen his opera designs in performance at the Met, is concentrated in New York.

No foreign painter alive today is more genuinely popular in America than Hockney. Certainly none has achieved such popularity with less compromise in the essential quality of his work. That work has its ups and downs, like any other oeuvre, but one would need a flint heart and a glass eye to resent Hockney's success. The bleached-blond thatch, the square face like that of a cubified owl, the schoolboy spectacles, the togs (blazers, cricket caps, candy-striped odd socks) that suggest the house captain of some imaginary

English public school, St. Firbank's--these are the visual package, the self-created image of the dandy from Bradford. Inside them, blinking rapidly at the world, sits one of the most astute yet lyrical talents in late modern art.

Hockney is that unusual combination, a consummate stylist who (almost) never allows his sense of style to stereotype feeling. His work has graces, but not airs. Landscapes, friends, erotic encounters, historical parody, memories of travel, all are distanced, rendered down into epitomes, laid before the eye with a sweetly honed line.

Always, in his paintings, one feels that things are happening on the other side of the frame, which is a virtual proscenium. It is exactly this removal that equipped him so well, at the outset, as a stage designer. As Friedman argues at some length in his text (and as a group of Hockney's easel paintings, included in the show, makes clear), theater has never been far from the core of his art. His shallow space quotes the conventions of the stage: flats, curtains, wings. There is a taste for exotic figures (red Indians, ancient Egyptians) and stage figures (conjurer, hypnotist, hierophant). Well before Hockney began his career as a stage designer, he was painting pictures with titles like Play Within a Play.

The first major production he designed was the 1975 Glyndebourne version of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, its libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Hockney, never embarrassed about paying homage to his aesthetic hearth gods, did the whole thing in the manner of Hogarth's engravings of that moral phantasmagoria set in 18th century England, stylizing the sets into crosshatched black-and-white etchings. Their graphic wit and punch reached a memorable climax in the final scene, where poor Tom Rakewell, insane at last, finds himself in Bedlam. The wall is covered with graffiti, each one a quotation from Hogarth, and in front of it the chorus of lunatics is housed in a stack of boxes, splayed in false perspective, a feverish metaphor of cellular confinement.

But since then, Hockney's main contribution to the stage has been as a colorist. Through the '60s and '70s, opera audiences got used to an intimidating degree of abstraction in sets and costumes--sweeping bare stages with a significant prop or two, or else labyrinths of neo-Bayreuth gloom where spotlights jabbed accusatory fingers through banks of theatrical fog. This design orthodoxy, based on texture, shadow, "sublime" cavelike space, was a necessary reaction against older conventions of the painted background: the unenchanted tempera forest with every stale leaf in place. But it left out color, and the main reason for Hockney's success onstage was that he was able, with dazzling virtuosity and conviction, to put color back.

He did this with a vengeance in 1978, with a production of Mozart's The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne. From the moment the curtain rose on Hockney's version of an early Italian Renaissance landscape, complete with a dragon quoted from Uccello, the audience was saturated in color: deep purples of the night sky, the green and pink of formal gardens in Sarastro's domain on the yellow Nilotic sands, blue cataracts and blazing gold art deco sunbursts.

In subsequent designs, Hockney used diverse sources, balancing eclecticism against hedonism: Tiepolo's punchinello figures and Picasso's own designs for Satie's Parade; the paintings of Dufy and Matisse for the imaginary seaside town of Zanzibar in Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tiresias; Matisse again for the blazing and mysterious red-and-blue moonlit garden in Ravel's L 'Enfant et les Sortileges; Chinese vase painting for Stravinsky's Le Rossignol.

Drawings for the theater are usually felt to be in a subclass of their own. They are incomplete notes. Who could deduce from Hockney's brisk studies for the mechanical bird in Le Rossignol, for instance, the surprise of its actual intrusion on the stage of the Met, a blazing vermilion-and-gilt apparition in that gauzy, lyric ambiance of K'ang-Hsi porcelain blue? The drawing just looks like a canary on a toy red cart. Yet ingenuity can bridge many gaps, and Hockney is nothing if not ingenious.

For the Walker exhibition, in order to give some sense of how his designs translated to the scale of the stage, Hockney spent several months preparing special environments. These are not set models but three-dimensional paintings, based on the sets and about a fifth their original size. What they preserve is the inherent musicality of the designs, their character as color or light, their general feel rather than the exact lineaments of the stage. Thus the blue atmosphere of Le Rossignol is re-created as a sort of collage involving more than 150 small canvases, ranked and stacked like a house of cards, each quoting a mask, a fragment of a figure, a sleeve, a distant conical mountain. The stage of L 'Enfant et les Sortileges becomes a walk-in pavilion where visitors, surrounded by bats and frogs, can stroll round the overwhelming glow of the red tree trunk under the Matissean blobs of foliage. In this way, these reconstructions manage--as two-dimensional drawings cannot--to give some real idea of Hockney's powers of spectacle.

Since the environments cannot contain actors, they are populated by tongue-in-cheek cubist animals and figures, some of which--like the cutout griffin, giraffe, manticore and other fabulous beasts in Sarastro's precinct in The Magic Flute--give the brief impression of movement when one's eye moves past them. This weak illusion, though better than crude animation, is no substitute for being in the theater. But nothing substitutes for that. What the collaboration of Hockney and Friedman has produced in this show is as delightfully impure an extension of being in a theater as one could hope to find. Bravo and bis. --By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.