Science Over Hockney
Our friend Dr. David Stork has delivered a knockout punch to David Hockney's theories in this month's Scientific American. If you had any doubts at all about the validity of the truth in this case you should make sure to read it!
3 Comments:
I first became aware of Hockney's ideas through a TV documentary. At that point I did not know much about the subject. I found some of his arguments reasonably convincing; others not (e.g. the idea that one cannot possibly draw realistically without optical aid).
The more I thought about it, the more I doubted his theory, and the articles about it at www.artrenewal.org convinced me that his views are likely mostly mistaken (though I think it is possible that the artists of the past might have played around with camera obscuras (or should that be cameras obscura?) to help them analyse perspective and perhaps to place the forms in a still life.
When 'Scientific American' published that article I was greatly interested, but did not have the time then to read it, so I never got around to it.
Even so, we hardly need a very complex mathematical analysis; I think the folks at artrenewal already do a good job of it.
Hockney's notions are certainly provocative (and from what I hear, some of it is already preached as gospel in some textbooks!), but it is not entirely convincing.
I am curious to see how this issue will develop in future. It's one of those stories that is a bit like an urban legend: it is so juicy it just HAS to be repeated and elaborated on. How delightful an idea it is for hopeless draftsmen such as myself, that the great masters of the past might actually have been 'cheating.' Just the kind of thing many would WANT to believe. It also seems to have had some cultural influence, for example, in the film "Girl with a pearl earring" the artist Vermeer is shown as possessing a camera obscura (though the film never comes out and says that he was dependent on it.)
In the long run, I don't think Hockney's ideas will survive, although, like many a conspiracy theory, there will from now on always be true believers.
By Brian van der Spuy, at 12:41 PM
Never understood why people would using any device which produces great art would be regarded as 'cheating': it shows the great masters were clever in using everything available to them to create great art!!! If Hockney's theory is correct, it does not diminish the works of art in ANY way...
By Anonymous, at 7:19 AM
It's not so much that they would hyave been "cheating" that bothers me (after all, great results are still great no matter how they were made). The really insulting thing about Hockney's theory is that it insists that the Old Masters weren't as competent as contemporary painters who clearly are "eyeballing it" (to use Hockney's term) because they can do live demonstrations showing that they don't use optical aids and tracing.
More concerning in a different way however is the way that Hockney can make these absurd claims with so little justification and that a great many people swallow it. The worst thing about Hockney's theory is of course not that it is insulting of real artists (after all, if they really were somehow incompetent they would deserve to be called incompetent), but that's it's factually false.
--Brian
By Brian Yoder, at 3:53 PM
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