DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
The Gate, 2000
Oil on canvas
60×76 inches (152.4 x 193 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘David Hockney 2000 The Gate’ (on the reverse)

Provenance
Galerie Lelong, Paris
L.A. Louver, Los Angeles
Private collection, Italy
Private collection, New York
Anon. sale; Phillips, New York, 16 November 2016, lot 12
Acquired at the above sale by the late owner

Auction History

Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection
Christie’s New-York: 11 May 2023
Estimated: USD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
USD 14,670,000

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937) (christies.com)

REPEAT SALE

Phillips New-York: 16 November 2016
Estimated: USD 6,000,000 – 8,000,000
USD 6,970,000

David Hockney – 20th Century & Cont… Lot 12 November 2016 | Phillips

 

Positively bursting with vibrant color and expressive brushwork, The Gate departs from Hockney’s earlier spatial studies in favor of an all-encompassing scene that seems to close in around and envelop the viewer. Depicted from a singular perspective at eye level, a short path runs downhill toward the titular gate, its blue metalwork appearing wispy and delicate against the sprawl of nature beyond. To the right, a glimpse of green picket fencing is visible before giving way to a grand arcing tree trunk that explodes upward into the canopy. Its branches intermingle with those of another nearby, their sinuous tendrils vacillating between representational depictions and the gestural marks of Hockney’s Abstract Expressionist precursors. On the left, a short, red stone wall eases down toward a yellow railing, these architectural elements set the stage for a squat pink house with a roof constructed of primary tones. All of these elements are set against a preponderance of leaves, vines, branches, and stalks. The verdant backdrop filters the sun’s light and casts a tranquil shade upon the scene that suggests peaceful calm and comfortable cool. Hockney’s ability to construct a scene so charged with an all-encompassing feeling is a nod to both his studied respect for the Impressionists and their ilk as well as his careful consideration of minute details that add depth and richness to seemingly innocuous compositions.

Painted in 2000, The Gate is part of a pivotal series that the artist began after a summer sojourn back to his native England. Focusing on the area in and around the garden of his guest house in the Hollywood Hills, these canvases are harbingers of a seismic shift in Hockney’s practice at the turn of the millennium. Eschewing the presence of figures, the painter instead casts his eye toward the dappled light of his California locale while also alluding to the changing weather of his homeland. The meditative depictions of his domicile draw an immediate connection to the work of Claude Monet. The Impressionist’s myriad studies of his own garden at Giverny act as conceptual precursors to Hockney’s work. This association was first reestablished after the latter saw Monet’s retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995.

“I came out of that exhibition and it made me look everywhere intensely. That little shadow on Michigan Avenue, the light hitting the leaf. I thought: ‘My God, now I’ve seen that. He’s made me see it’. I came out absolutely thrilled.”

This creative fire was further stoked by his visit to the blockbuster exhibition Monet in the 20th Century at the Royal Academy in 1999. Focusing on the artist’s plein air painting and light studies that gave rise to new ideas of what painting could be, the emphasis on Monet’s later output and its undeniable influence on Modernist movements like Abstract Expressionism highlighted a creative bridge that Hockney eagerly crossed into new territories.

Hockney’s art is not “realistic” in the sense that it purports to portray chromatically accurate images in perspective. Rather, it has a perception of a place that is a direct reflection of his sense of that place. Like Henri Matisse’s Fauvist Road at Biskra, 1906, Hockney uses colors that may at first seem unnatural to the viewer; to Hockney, though, it is veritably there in the original scene. Matisse’s color was derived from the immediacy of the glance, the intensity of the sun within the scene, whereas Hockney’s is drawn out of intense looking and reflection. And yet the end result is the same – a conflation of figuration and abstraction resulting in a more expressive reality. There is a humanism in these pictures that is pure Hockney.

“I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one”

The artist painted The Gate when he was visiting the British countryside of his youth. But the influence of his many years in Los Angeles is clearly reflected in the work, much as it is in pictures like his Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio of 1980. We see many of the same technical achievements in The Gate—a deeply personal setting (whether an intimate garden gate or the approach to his studio) and a multi-tiered perspective arranged to create a visual narrative. The eye is drawn in just as the viewer might move in the physical world. The Gate is a masterwork of Hockney’s later oeuvre, looking both backwards and forwards to his next seminal series of paintings executed in the Wolds of Great Britain, which were met with similar acclaim.