Hockney, Aalto, Liverpool, Brixton

Cultural notes

Nov 03, 2023

Hockney

McCartney is a hard act to follow. So the National Portrait Gallery leads its autumn programme with David Hockney, resurrecting and refreshing “Drawing from Life”, the show it was forced to close after just 20 days in March 2020.

Hockney has added a new body of work - 30 paintings, “The Normandy Portraits” - to what was an already extensive show. Each was completed in 2021 in two or three sittings and, according to the curators, with no under-drawing.

They make a vibrant bunch in a room at the end. The big draw is Harry Styles - all enormous knitwear and wild hair. He sits above Hockney’s gardener.

But the real intrigue here is still Hockney’s women: his mother, Laura, who died in 1999, and Celia Birtwell, the textile designer, his friend, confidant and one of many lifelong muses.

Laura must have been a patient - possibly indulgent - sitter. Hockney’s pen-and-ink drawings of her appear in countless sketchbooks. An entire room is dedicated to her portraits. The most unsettling is a 1982 fragmented photo-montage, “My Mother’, in which an assembled Laura sits on a tombstone in the wintery grounds of Bolton Abbey.

Her bottle-green plastic coat resembles a municipal bin bag. The tips of Hockney’s brogues are in front of her, but her gaze lies elsewhere. He has arranged the snaps in such a way that a blank space is left at the top of her skull.

Laura is fractured in the way that Picasso, Hockney’s hero, fractured his subjects. The migraine-like image of his mother was made shortly after the death of Hockney’s father.

Birtwell gets a room, too, with a sequence of portraits that, shown together, form a kind of investigation of their relationship, from the 1960s to now.

It is striking how regal and sensual Birtwell is, lolling around in black silk or sitting about wearing one of her decadent column gowns, dangling a fag. Her energy and force.

The attention Hockney pays to Birtwell’s clothes - usually 1930s-ish floor-length gowns in her seductive prints but here, in “Celia Amused” of 1979, wearing a more puckish ensemble and punkish eye-makeup - is interesting; they are vibrant and lovingly rendered. But they never upstage her.

I saw Birtwell, who is 82, at the unveiling of a blue plaque for Pauline Boty earlier this year (find it above a vet’s surgery on Addison Avenue in Holland Park). She is a luminous, joyous presence, self-possessed and, of course, faintly regal.

I tend to feel short-changed by Hockney’s iPad drawings. They feel rushed, impermanent, a little blank, and with too few mysteries. But at the National Portrait Gallery, his drawing process has been recorded and re-animated, which reveals the speed and accuracy with which he works.

Though they are no match for his pen-and-ink drawings. They can never be amended or corrected. They must be right first time.

David Hockney: Drawing from Life is at the National Portrait Gallery in London until January 21

Alvar Aalto

This is the all-seeing eye of the headmaster’s office of a primary school - a late-ish project of Alvar Aalto, the exacting Finnish modernist, whose studio designed it in the 1970s as part of the wider campus of the University of Jyväskylä. (You will certainly know Aalto’s studio’s ubiquitous Stool 60, even if you have never been to central Finland)

I visited Jyväskylä last month as a guest of the Aalto Foundation, the heritage body in charge of his legacy. What is so striking about the campus is how it is still in use exactly as Aalto planned it (or mostly).

The cafeteria is still a cafeteria; the library is still a library; the lecture halls are still lecture halls. No knocking about, no “refreshing”. It is still pristine (or mostly).

Finland has World Heritage Status ambitions for 14 untouched Aalto buildings across the country, including the vast Finlandia Hall and Aalto’s studio in Helsinki.

It anticipates more international tourism as southern Europe’s great architectural and archaeological sites become insanely and prohibitively hot in summer.

More tourism comes with environmental risks - more visitors obviously means more wear and tear. Could Helsinki, with its modernist monuments, become something like Athens or Naples? You can’t deny the ambition. They know how to look after stuff, too.

Liverpool

Does any other UK city have such a glorious sense of self-actualisation? I was there last week, partly to see Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood at the Walker Art Gallery.

Wood is a Liverpool-based photographer in the British social realism tradition of 20th century photography - more accessible than Chris Killip and Tony Ray-Jones; less slyly ironic than Martin Parr. Most of his subject matter is the people of the city. Scouse exceptionalism.

Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood is at the Walker Art Gallery until January 7

Brixton

Emerging from the Underground at Brixton is like no other London experience: nowhere else feels quite so dynamic. Art on the Underground’s specially commissioned murals above the station entrance, which change periodically, suit their hectic surroundings. Brixton is always in flux, and its public art should be, too.

Jem Perucchini unveiled his elegant, calm mural, “Rebirth of a Nation” this week. The artist was born in Ethiopia and has lived in Italy since childhood, currently in Milan. He told me how he spent a few months living in Vauxhall, walking endlessly around south London streets to try to understand this part of south London before he started the work. He found, he says, “a very surprising” version of the city.

He chose an allegorical vision, a narrative in the style of an Italian Renaissance painting, in which the past and future are embodied in a female figure.

Perucchini was interested in Ivory Bangle Lady, the name given to the North African occupant of a 4th-century grave found in York. Her jewellery, now in Yorkshire Museum, indicates that she was wealthy and of high social status. Perucchini reminds Brixtonians that black Britons have existed for millennia.