“A small-focus exhibition brings together a ‘triptych’ of works comprising Piero’s The Baptism of Christ and two paintings by Hockney, both of which depict the Piero as an integral part of their making and meaning. In My Parents, Piero’s Baptism is featured as a reproduction reflected in a mirror set between Hockney’s father and mother. It is a painting that speaks of his genealogy, both familial and artistic. In Looking at Pictures on a Screen, a poster reproduction of Piero’s Baptism is pinned to a screen, alongside three more posters of Gallery paintings by Vermeer, Van Gogh and Degas.
The exhibition sheds light on the National Gallery’s origins as a place promoting dialogues between artists and between artists and audiences. It also represents an interaction between the Gallery and a living artist. This is a narrative in which the National Gallery has played an indisputably significant and often pioneering role over its two-hundred-year history.
Hockney has a long association with the National Gallery; indeed, he is, perhaps of all living painters today, the one whose links with Trafalgar Square are the most deeply rooted. His interactions started when he came to London from Bradford in the mid-1950s and was astonished by the paintings he encountered on the walls. Over almost 70 years, he has produced numerous works and designs, including stage sets for opera, which are related to paintings in the collection.
Furthermore, Hockney has been invited to engage with the collection for particular events. In 1981, he was asked to curate the fifth of the Gallery’s pioneering The Artist’s Eye exhibitions, while in the year 2000, he was one of 25 leading artists commissioned to create a new work in response to one in the permanent collection. In both exhibitions, Hockney conveyed his appreciation for the role of the National Gallery in making great art available for all. He also promoted the value of close observation. The work he produced in 2000 was an assemblage of 12 closely observed portraits of National Gallery room stewards, whose job is to look at people looking at pictures.
Hockney told Director Michael Levey in March 1979 that ‘I love the collection of the National Gallery’, and to Susanna Avery-Quash, curator of this exhibition and author of this book, he noted in February 2024 that he had ‘never fallen out of love with Piero’. In Hockney’s writings about the Gallery, he has always stressed the life-enhancing benefits of looking at a painting for a long time and going back to look at it again and again for further inspiration and insight.
This is an encouraging birthday message for the National Gallery as it enters its third century: here people can look at art for free and then they can return and take ‘a longer look’. A favourite Chinese proverb of Hockney’s states that three things are needed to look profitably at art: an engaged eye, mind and heart. Hockney promotes this vision in the knowledge that an ever deeper, more committed engagement of people with pictures will induce curiosity, openness and connection.
Our thanks go to David Hockney for a lifetime of image-making, to curator Susanna Avery-Quash, to the Capricorn Foundation who support the H J Hyams Exhibition Programme at the National Gallery and to Riverstone who have generously supported this exhibition.”
