David Hockney & Martin Gayford: A History of Pictures : from the Cave to the Computer Screen. New Edition. With 315 illustrations. © 2016 and 2020 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London / David Hockney / Martin Gayford. - New York: Abrams, 2020. ISBN: 9781419750281. 368 pp.
Abrams: "A compact edition of David Hockney and Martin Gayford’s brilliant book, A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen features updated material and pieces of art original to this volume."
"Informed and energized by a lifetime of painting, drawing, and making images with cameras, David Hockney, in collaboration with art critic Martin Gayford, explores how and why pictures have been made across the millennia. Juxtaposing a rich variety of images—a still from a Disney cartoon with a Japanese woodblock print by Hiroshige, a scene from an Eisenstein film with a Velázquez painting—the authors cross the normal boundaries between high culture and popular entertainment, and argue that film, photography, painting, and drawing are deeply interconnected."
"Featuring a revised final chapter with additional works by Hockney, this compact edition of A History of Pictures remains a significant contribution to the discussion of how artists represent reality."
AA: I have just finished reading the dialogue book A History of Pictures by David Hockney and Martin Gayford. I bought it at the Fondation Louis Vuitton bookstore at the David Hockney 25 exhibition and have been savouring it slowly. It is well written but so dense with ideas that it cannot be read more than a few pages at a time. It is also a worthy entry to the Platon / Socrates tradition of dialogue literature.
It is a unique art history. The authors state that there are many books on the history of paintings, drawings, sculptures, tapestries, photographs, films, television, videos and CGI but as far as they know this is the first history of pictures in general. It is an audacious enterprise, and the result is a joyous adventure through the history of human culture from the chosen perspective.
The generalist, encyclopaedist and universalist approach yields new and surprising insights on every page. The authors have devoted their lives to art, and their knowledge is formidable, but they are never snobbish, nor snobbishly anti-snobbish.
It is one of the great works on the philosophy of art history. And a work of art history as philosophy. And of the art of seeing, in all senses of that word, including understanding profoundly. It is also a contribution to the critique of judgement.
Among other things, A History of Pictures is an essential study on the camera, the history of which is at least hundreds of years longer than that of photography. I was not aware that artists had used the camera (camera obscura, camera lucida) since the days of Galileo, Caravaggio and Vermeer. New optical instruments then changed the way we see the world, also in art.
Hockney had already discussed that in his television programme and book, Secret Knowledge : rediscovering the lost techniques of the old Masters (2001, 2006, Thames & Hudson). I am looking forward to getting my copy and reading it as soon as possible
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