David Hockney Portraits
Since the bookshelf of the David Hockney fan likely already contains, among other titles,David Hockney: Paintings,Hockney's PeopleandHockney's Pictures, this collection may be a bit redundant. Except for a few rarely seen paintings from Hockney's teenage years, the work presented here doesn't stray far from the familiar greatest hits seen in earlier collections. Here again is Billy Wilder lighting a cigar in a cubist-inspired photo collage and Andy Warhol in a deft little 1974 colored pencil drawing. Nor do any of the contributing curators and academics pretend that the book—which accompanies an exhibit of the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—is really breaking any fresh ground. But for those who haven't seen it all before, this is an attractive, well-organized introduction to the artist's endlessly inventive career. The selection of plates runs the full range of Hockney's adventures, and the illustrated, year-by-year chronology gives a colorful, bird's-eye view of Hockney's life. In this case, putting old wine into a new skin is not such a bad thing.(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.