David Hockney - Art on Stage

David Hockney emerged from the British 'Pop’ movement at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. Most iconic of his work is A Bigger Splash (1967), which was done using fast-drying acrylic paint, and was influenced by his fascination with photography and the ubiquitousness of the modern Southern California swimming pool.

He was reportedly in a creative funk 10 years later when a new artistic outlet appeared. He was invited to design for Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute in 1978 for the Glyndebourne Festival in East Sussex, England. Hockney studied early 19th century designs by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and toured Egypt in preparation. He created 35 backdrops for the opera. 

One of his designs, below, was first seen on an American stage at the San Francisco Opera in 1987.

In his photographic collages Hockney experimented with perspective, something which excited him about the opportunities of stage design and the use of lines converging toward the audience, rather than away, sometimes called “reverse perspective”.  

Another of Hockney’s opera sets was first seen in San Francisco in 1982, for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (below). Hockney found the subject of Stravinsky’s work compelling.

Composed between 1948 and 1951, the opera is based on a series of eight engravings by the painter William Hogarth, entitled “A Rake’s Progress” (1732-1733). They depict the decline into drunken debauchery of a young man who throws away his fortune on gambling and harlots. Hockney had made a modernized version of the Hogarth work in the early 1960s. His stage settings reflect the pictorial techniques of Hogarth's prints.

A Los Angeles resident since the mid-sixties, the San Francisco Opera continued to be home for Hockney’s stage designs. His creations for Turandot debuted in San Francisco in 1993, and were restaged in 1998, 2002, and 2011 (below).

The company also produced his staging of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in 2006 (below).

In December of 2017, David Hockney received a San Francisco Opera Medal in recognition of his work for the company. General Director Matthew Shilvock said upon the occasion,”His productions are bold expressions of archetypal emotions, deeply rooted in a strong sense of spatial resonance and scale. His productions take us — audiences and artists alike — on journeys that allow us to see our world more clearly. He finds rhythm in color and design, and creates portals that we enter with thrilling excitement.”

Images courtesy of the David Hockney Foundation and the San Francisco Opera.