The banal creep Neil Entwistle wasn't the only Englishman drawing camera crews in the Boston area on Thursday. At least a couple of dozen journos and four or five TV crews turned up at the Museum of Fine Arts this morning for scones, a walkthrough of the new "David Hockney Portraits" exhibit opening Feb. 26, and an audience with the artist himself. I've got a short on the show in the next Improper Bostonian, but I don't think I'm spoiling anything to tell you there are more than 150 works in this terrific exhibit, spanning just over 50 years and every medium Hockney has worked in. Many seem quite intimate examinations of character, and some are just fun. This is an event.
The first oil painting Hockney ever sold is included - a 1955 portrait of his father - along with big, colorful oils done just last year. The subjects include everyone from the younger Hockney's handsome boyfriends to the wrinkly W.H. Auden. A couple of wealthy art collectors pose for his brush on their sunwashed California patio. Hockney's elderly mother sits hunched outside a ruined abbey in a scarily bleak photocollage. There are numerous self-portraits as well (below, right). "I do occasionally think it's time to have a look at myself again," he told the assembly, adding the laugh line that it's usually when he's depressed. He seemed quite upbeat, though, despite the walking 
stick and hearing aids. He cheerily dissed digital photography and spoke of exploring the space between people - seen here in perhaps a dozen large dual portraits, most clearly in the distance between "Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy," which also serves as the exhibit's logo (above left).
Nearly all of the sitters are friends, family, lovers. One of the strangest and coolest parts of the MFA event was that perhaps a dozen of them turned up, a cast of characters that might have stepped out of an updated production of an Agatha Christie mystery, or more likely an episode of "The Avengers." Oh look, there's the art publisher with the big floppy hat and the scarf, attended by the younger woman, a print dealer, who dotes on him. There's the jaded-looking photographer and his pretty daughter, who's got that teen-model look. And there's the striking, if rather strange looking, Gregory Evans in a blazer and blue-striped shirt, sitting just below a picture of his much-younger self in a blue-striped jersey. Just around the corner was another Hockney drawing in which Evans stands nude against a wall, looking like a pouty teenager. Some sitters posed happily for photos or consented to TV interviews in front of their Hockney portraits, but, this being Boston, by the time I left neither Mary Richardson nor Emily Rooney nor Joyce Kulhawik had asked him to pose with that one.
("Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy" is presented by the friends of the Tate gallery 1971, "Self Portrait with Charlie" is from the collection of David Hockney. Both are copyright David Hockney, courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)
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