Art I'm Looking at: Ruth Asawa, Paul McCartney, Kunié Sugiura, and Richard Diebenkorn

In the past six weeks or so, I've seen some of the major shows currently on view in San Francisco, mainly the Ruth Asawa show and work by Kunié Sugiura at SF MOMA, the Paul McCartney photographs at the De Young, and a small show of prints by Richard Diebenkorn at Crown Point Press. 

The Ruth Asawa show, which runs through September 2, brings together more than 300 pieces from all phases of Asawa's career. Like many people, I have been most familiar with her hanging wire sculptures. I was largely ignorant about the details of her career, however. The show, which is roughly chronological, offers an excellent opportunity to put the wire sculptures into context and to get a sense of the range of her activity. From the earliest work in the show, mainly from her time at Black Mountain College, to the last work she did, in San Francisco, where she eventually settled and raised a family of six children with her husband, architect Albert Lanier, it is evident that she had a deep interest in and understanding of natural forms, which appear to have been a constant inspiration. 

I particularly enjoyed seeing folded paper creations, early printed works, and some exquisite botanical contour drawings in the show, as well as drawings done using Screentone on matboard. Well worth a visit.  (Photos: Top – SF MOMA, installation view. Above, Mounted Paper Fold with Horizontal Stripes, ink on paper, 1952. Below, Photocopy of Ruth Asawa's Hand, not dated, photoelectric print.)

Also on at SF MOMA is a show of work by Kunié Sugiura, an artist I had never heard of, who appears to have been active mostly as a photographer. In the show are everything from small photomontages to very large photograms, but the show features what she refersto as "photopaintings." Sugiura's photopaintings are assemblages that combine photographic images with sculptural elements. Some of these put me in mind of Robert Rauschenberg's "combines." Others suggested Rothko with their simple pairings of diffuse, flat surfaces. I thought the photopaintings rather effective. The photographic elements function simultaneously as independent images and as abstract compositional elements within the whole of each piece. 

The show will be up through September 2025. If you're heading to SF MOMA to see the Ruth Asawa show, I recommend taking in the Sugiura show as well. (Photos: Above, SF MOMA installation view; below top, Introse BP3, toned silver gelatin print, 2002; below bottom Deadend Street, photographic emulsion and acrylic paint on canvas with wood, 1978.)

The Paul McCartney photographs now on view at the De Young I found interesting for their historical value; they present an intimate look at life behind the scenes with the Beatles just as Beatlemania was taking off, but I found the show a bit disappointing. With a few exceptions, the photos are not especially fine as photographs. Those on view are almost all digital prints from the negatives rather than silver gelatin prints (and where negatives have been lost, digital prints from scans of contemporary contact sheets), which would have been more authentic, and many of the shots were poorly focused (which is not to say that all photographs must be in sharp focus to be worthwhile). They mostly read as incidental snapshots – which, I suppose, is what they are; McCartney makes no claims to art here. Finally, not all of the photos on display are by McCartney. A fair number include McCartney's image, taken not by him but with his camera handed to someone else, and a couple of the best shots in the show are by other photographers entirely. Color photos in Miami reveal McCartney responding as a tourist. That said, any Beatles fan will enjoy seeing the collection presented here. I thought the photo of John Lennon in Paris and a shot of Ringo and George, both shown below, among the better images.

When Yale University Press in association with The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, published the Richard Diebenkorn Catalog Raisonné in 2016, I acquired the set, as Diebenkorn is among my favorite artists, but I was disappointed to find that none of his many prints were included. I learned that a definitive catalog of the prints was to appear in a separate edition, and that has just appeared, almost ten years later. In honor of the publication, Crown Point Press in San Francisco (on Hawthorne St., a short walk from SF MOMA) is now doing a small show of some of the prints that Diebenkorn made at Crown Point Press. The show is small, with only about 25 pieces on the walls, but each is choice and one of the finished prints is shown alongside several proof versions, which allows a glimpse into the process of its creation. Worth a visit, but, checking the Crown Point Press website, it looks like this show may have just closed. I'd recommend calling in advance, but Crown Point Press is almost always worth a visit. 

Very close to Crown Point Press, walking along the sidewalk on Howard St., I noticed some pavement markings that looked very much like a Diebenkorn to me.  

Art I'm Looking At: More Diebenkorn

A show of Diebeenkorn's work just closed yesterday in Sonoma, but it looks like Stanford will soon display a group of recently acquired Diebenkorn sketchbooks, starting in September. Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed will be showing September 9 to February 8, 2016 at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University (328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way, Stanford, California).

Art I'm Looking At: Diebenkorn Around the Bay Area (July 5, 2015)

We're privileged right now to have two shows of rarely seen work by Richard Diebenkorn on view simultaneously in the Bay Area, a show of prints at the De Young in San Francisco and a show of small-scale drawings, collages, and watercolors at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in the town of Sonoma, a venue that has only recently come to my attention--and that accidentally: I happened to come across a reference to the Sonoma show in one of three books published by Kelly's Cove Press in conjunction with the exhibition, which is subtitled "The Intimate Diebenkorn."

In keeping with that subtitle, the Sonoma show presents a selection of smaller works, the largest being no more than about 24 x 36 inches (most considerably smaller) in various media. None of the images was included in the large show of Diebenkorn's work in the summer and autumn of 2013 at the De Young Museum (Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years). Some Bay Area viewers may have seen the bulk of the Sonoma show at the College of Marin (September-November 2013) or San José State University (March-May 2014), but the selection of works now at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art has been augmented by about 12 pieces not included on earlier stops. The show next travels to the University of Montana (September-December 2015).

The De Young show of Diebenkorn prints highlights the museum's "latest significant acquisition of [Diebenkorn's] prints, made possible by the Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major Accessions and the generosity of Phyllis Diebenkorn," the artist's late widow--to use the words of the introductory gallery panel. I believe the De Young Museum now has the largest collection of Diebenkorn's prints in the world aside from the collection of the Diebenkorn Foundation, from which the traveling show now in Sonoma has been assembled.

The Sonoma show provides an intimate overview of the various styles in which Diebenkorn worked. There is a good selection of representational work including still life subjects, nudes, and landscapes as well as abstract work, both in the fluid, organic style of the Berkeley and earlier periods and the more rarified, highly linear style best known from the large paintings of the later, Ocean Park period.

The works are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which allows a comparison of similar types of work from different periods, although it somewhat obscures Diebenkorn's journey from abstraction into figurative work and still life and then back to abstraction--part of what makes looking at the whole of his artistic career fascinating. Despite the diversity of subject matter, Diebenkorn was always concerned with formal compositional problems. An interior view of a posed model or a landscape was for Diebenkorn always as much about dividing up space on a flat plane as any abstraction was. The works as shown demonstrate both the breadth of his subjects and the compositional concerns that unite his work. The 1962 figure drawing in ballpoint pen shown here (above) is an excellent example--a highly economically rendered pair of nude figures but, at the same time, a composition consisting in large part of blank rectangular or squarish areas of paper separated by thin lines. The legs of the male figure at the left side of the page are particularly ambiguous. The 1958 untitled oil landscape on paper shown below likewise blurs the line between the abstract and the descriptive.

The Sonoma venue is divided into four areas: the main exhibition space, a permanent art library off to one side, a space at the front of the building where visitors are offered a place to play with paper and drawing tools if inspiration has hit them, and a darkened area behind a wall at the rear, where two videos about Diebenkorn run in a loop. One of these was made at the time of a major retrospective of the artist's work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 1977. The other shows Diebenkorn at work at Crown Point Press, in Oakland, collaborating with master printers Marcia Bartholme and Hidekatsu Takada, in 1986, photographed by Kathan Brown, the founding director of Crown Point Press. The former is short (22 minutes) and interesting mainly because it shows Diebenkorn politely, somewhat shyly interacting with an adoring public at the opening reception for the Los Angeles exhibit. The latter video (35 minutes) is of greater interest and well worth the time it takes to watch. It offers a rare look at the artist in the studio, showing him proofing prints, working on copper plates, consulting with the printers about changes, and finally coming to decisions about finished versions of a number of pieces (one of which he ultimately decides to abandon after much frustration).

Diebenkorn's work process was interactive, restless, and experimental--involving interaction between the artist and his materials. Each new piece was a kind of conversation with the medium: an idea proposed, considered, approved of or rejected--the artist always listening and responding to the voice of the evolving work--the cycle beginning again, repeating until an equilibrium was achieved. It's a process especially well suited to collage, so it's not surprising that collage enters into many of the smaller works on display in Sonoma. Some of the drawings are on joined pieces of paper. One small abstract work from 1992, the year before his death (shown here), consists of pieces of what appears to be a drawing cut up and arranged on a second blank sheet (coincidentally, highly reminiscent of some of the work of Basque artist Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002)). The Crown Point Press video shows Diebenkorn cutting up proofs and pasting them together to rework a composition--essentially designing a print by collage.

The De Young Exhibit focuses on Diebenkorn as a printmaker. He seems to have been interested in printmaking of various types throughout his long career, and many of the last works he made--when ill health had made it impossible to tackle the large canvases he favored as a younger man--were prints. Most were etchings and drypoints, but the De Young show includes a fair number of lithographs and you get a sense looking at the early examples that he was testing the limits of what appears to have been a new medium for him at the time. Some of these early lithographs are essentially line  drawings in crayon, others look like puddled ink drawings. Later color lithographs from the 1980s are more mature, looking very much like Diebenkorn the painter. Again, the subject matter in the De Young exhibit is diverse, including figure studies, landscapes, still life subjects, and abstraction. Nearly all the pieces exude something essentially Diebenkorn despite that diversity.

The show at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (one half block from Sonoma’s historic Town Plaza: 551 Broadway, Sonoma CA 95476, (707) 939-7862) runs through August 23, 2015. The show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco (Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr., San Francisco, CA 94118, (415) 750-3600) closes October 4, 2015.

Books I'm Reading: Richard Diebenkorn: Abstractions on Paper

For my birthday I received a copy of Richard Diebenkorn: Abstractions on Paper, a comparatively new (July 2013) book about the work of Richard Diebenkorn (a gift I had asked for). I came across it quite by accident on the Internet. I can't remember what I was searching for, but I'm glad I found this diminutive (6 x 8-inch) volume, one of three about Diebenkorn published in the same format by a small California press I'd never heard of--Kelly’s Cove Press--in association with the Richard Diebenkorn foundation. I knew I wanted the book simply because I like Diebenkorn and because in the Diebenkorn retrospective at the De Young in the summer of 2013 works on paper were some of the more interesting and rarer pieces (click here for my review of that show). Now that I have the book in hand, I'm deeply impressed--and thrilled to see this is actually a catalog for a traveling show of these and other works on paper (many never before published) that will make a stop in Sonoma County this summer, at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in the town of Sonoma, from June 6 through August 23, 2015.

The book contains 88 full-color plates and a number of black and white views of Diebenkorn’s studio spaces. It covers nearly his entire career, starting in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Sausalito, Albuquerque, Urbana, and Berkeley, moving on to the Ocean Park period (1967-1988), and then to his late period (1988-1992), in Healdsburg. I had no idea he had retired and spent his final years so close by. I was in Healdsburg today. There is little text and almost all of it is at the end of the book. There are no essays, only descriptions (titles, dates, dimensions, media, etc.) and these are presented in a block following the images rather than alongside them, so that each page of the book presents a single image with no distractions. Besides the descriptions there are only: a page of credits identifying the seven short quotes interspersed among the images on otherwise blank pages; a brief (five-paragraph) biography; and the end matter. It's a pleasure to flip slowly through the main section of the book, getting a new gem with every new page.

The quotes are wonderful. Diebenkorn appears to have been a man of few words, having given only a handful of interviews over the years, as far as I can tell, but what he says always resonates--although perhaps his words are especially meaningful to a working artist. I don't want to spoil the fun, but two quotes I liked in particular. "One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject," said Diebenkorn (this from Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, Paul Mills, ed., Oakland Art Museum, 1957). It was probably uttered in response to a question about his figurative work, which in Diebenkorn's case blossomed after an extended, highly productive period of pure abstraction, but it's a sentiment that bears repeating today in the context of an art world bamboozled by art that has become so divorced from the human hand that it barely supports the descriptor "art" any longer. Yes, indeed. One wants to see the artifice.

The other I liked was "There's nothing I cannot paint over." That made me laugh out loud. Here I suspect Diebenkorn is talking about the courage and clarity of vision it requires to see that nothing is sacred, despite that feeling we artists sometimes get that a particular effect, some combination of colors, some juxtaposition of lines is perfect and inviolable--although it's almost never the case that such details can't be improved upon, set aside, painted over, left behind during the process of achieving something better. A beautiful little book.  

The book has been produced in association with a traveling exhibition entitled The Intimate Diebenkorn: Works on Paper 1949-1992. The exhibition began its tour at the College of Marin Fine Arts Gallery, in Kentfield, moved to San Jose State University and then to American University in Washington DC. It will next appear at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, as noted above. The show ends at The University of Montana, in Missoula, on view there from September 24 to December 12, 2015. In conjunction with the same show, Kelly's Cove Press has also published Richard Diebenkorn: From the Model and Richard Diebenkorn: Still Lifes and Landscapes. The books retail for $20 each.

Art I'm Looking At: David Hockney at the De Young--Bigger is Not Always Better

David Hockney is much talked about and praised in the press. With even a passing interest in art it would be hard not to know of him. I think I first became aware of Hockney in the early 1970s, when I was just a teenager, when his swimming pool paintings were gaining attention in the serious art magazines--magazines I would often see at the home of one of my high school girlfriends.

I liked the pool paintings. Later, I saw and found interesting his composite works made from multiple Polaroid photographs--a seemingly cubist approach to viewing reality, although my understanding is that he was aiming not to present multiple simultaneous views of a scene but rather to overcome the distortions of very wide angle lenses. After a long blank, I remember seeing a series of paintings of the artist's dogs that struck me as badly drawn, garishly colored, and embarrassingly self-indulgent--evoking the same feelings as those self-published novels about the exploits of a coddled pet, of interest only to the writer and the publishing company squeezing money from the obsessed owner. Subsequently, I'd not heard much about Hockney until learning the De Young Museum in San Francisco was doing a substantial show of some very recent work--a show entitled David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition. The title is curious, but now that I've seen the show, it makes some sense (more on that subject below).

Having last thought about Hockney in the context of the dog paintings, it was with some skepticism that I visited the De Young this past weekend. Nevertheless, I determined to go with an open mind. I wanted to see what Mr. Hockney had been up to lately. I was hopeful the show would be of interest.

It was interesting and I'm glad I went, but I found it interesting mostly on an academic level. Say what you will about him, he is nothing if not prolific and you have to admire his energy and willingness to experiment and use new media. Still, I have to say the show left me cold, and I find it difficult to understand why Hockney continues to get the attention he does. Seeing David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition left me disappointed. The contrast with my emotional state after seeing the recent Richard Diebenkorn show at the De Young couldn't have been greater. That show left me energized, inspired, joyful, and greedily wanting to see more. The Hockney show left me mostly puzzled.

In the charcoal portraits that open the show, I saw awkward foreshortening, figures constructed using a vocabulary of crude marks on the paper themselves not especially interesting as details, and clumsy smudging that looked impatiently done. The work had an air of self-indulgence again. The drawings seemed to declare themselves worthy of scrutiny solely by virtue of their being by David Hockney and because of their presentation in a place like the De Young Museum, rather than because of deeply felt commitment, because of passion behind their creation. The introductory blurb describes David Hockney as a superb draughtsman. If by "superb draughtsman" we mean someone to an extraordinary degree capable of translating a view of the world or ideas into images using a precise, economical, and confident line; having a deep understanding of foreshortening and perspective; and capable of convincing modeling through use of light and shadow, then much of Hockney's work suggests rather that he is a crude draughtsman. And why pretend otherwise? We no longer require great artists to be great draughtsman. Fine draughtsmanship is not the only wellspring of worthwhile art. Art can and often does happily emerge from a far less disciplined place. Hockney's strengths lie elsewhere, but he seems to have forgotten himself. The pool paintings of the 1970s were so successful because the subject matter was well-suited to a brash approach to color, bold composition, and minimal use of line--traits that virtually define Hockney's artistic instincts. Hockney has a distinctive set of artistic tools, but all tools have strengths and weaknesses. It's for good reason that we don't hammer nails with screwdrivers.

The many landscapes in the show struck me similarly--as having the look of work done by an earnest, untutored amateur. There is a very large room in the show devoted entirely (and tiresomely) to charcoal landscapes depicting a road through Woldgate Woods, in Yorkshire, at different times of the year, excerpts from a chronicling of the seasonal transformation of the place. Recording seasonal effects is an interesting enough idea, but is it sufficient if the drawings themselves are not especially compelling? Hockney captures in these drawings something of the light and mood of the place, but I was struck by the ugliness of the marks he has made on his paper. At close range, the drawings decompose into fields of dark squiggles, hash marks, and areas of smudging. The drawings quickly become incoherent. They are much more effective if you turn 180 degrees to view the examples hanging on the opposite wall, from a distance of about 30 feet. It's not uncommon for a drawing or a painting to look markedly different when seen from different distances, but a truly fine drawing or painting is very often as interesting viewed from a few inches away as it is from many feet away. The image may disintegrate and become increasingly abstract as we move closer and we're forced to focus on details, but the details themselves are virtually always as compelling in their own way as is the whole, and this, I feel, is where Hockney's work is so disappointing. The individual marks on the surfaces seem to have no life. Thinking just of the Western artistic tradition, the feathered wingtip of an angel by Fra Angelico, a single flower at the foot of one of Botticelli's diaphanously draped women, one square inch of a Van Gogh pen and ink drawing, a single bright highlight in the dress of one of Sargeant's sitters, a feverish brushstroke by a De Kooning or a Karel Appel--any of these can hold our attention for a remarkably long time. At a normal viewing distance, I found the charcoal drawings of Woldgate Woods soulless.

Bigger is not always better.  David Hockney, A Bigger Exhibition is somewhat absurd in its fetishizing of scale and number. A section of the show highlights works Hockney has made by mounting four, six, or as many as 20 or more panels in arrays to create bigger pictures, some paintings, some digital images printed out on large inkjet printers and mounted. I found it hard to see anything much gained by this approach except scale. The titles carefully record the number of panels in each piece as if the number itself is an accomplishment. What is the point here? In other instances, one-sheet drawings created on an iPhone or an iPad have been blown up to a very large scale, notably a number of landscapes done at Yosemite National Park, and here the large scale and the use of the electronic device serve mostly to accentuate the lack of inherent interest in Hockney's "brushstrokes" again. Some of these images are so big that you can't step far enough away to allow distance to fudge things. One wall of the show is covered with video screens presenting slide shows of some of the artist's many other iPhone and iPad drawings. Being more in their native habitat--on computer monitors--these have more punch, more luminescence, and they seemed more successful for it. I'm not a luddite. I use the iPhone in my own artistic work. I'm all for experimentation and exploring new avenues of expression. Still, with art--unless it's conceptual art--it's the destination that counts, not so much how you get there. To assume that the work is inherently worthwhile because it was made using new technology is just another type of fetishism.

Somewhat ironically, a set of six large portraits made using a tablet, stylus, and Adobe Photoshop  in 2008 and 2009 were the most interesting pieces in the show, in my view. Each is a matter-of-fact observation of the sitter in a mostly empty space against a plain, brightly colored background. They owe much to Van Gogh.  The backgrounds are often split in two, a favorite Van Gogh device. In looking at A Bigger Matelot Kevin Druez 2 (2009), for example, I was immediately reminded of the Van Gogh portraits of Dr. Gachet or the postman Joseph Roulin. I'm not sure why these pictures seem so much more interesting than many of the others, but a major factor seems to be that they have been rendered in more detail and with more care than many of the landscapes and other portraits in the show. Here the individual strokes on the paper, although created digitally and printed, are of some interest. The compositions, though simple, seem more considered. The use of color seems more effective.

Other work draws heavily on Picasso--in particular, The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction (2003), essentially a re-working of Picasso's Massacre in Korea (1951), which takes as its subject a massacre of Korean civilians by US forces at No Gun Ri, in July, 1950, although many people in the galleries seemed to think it was derived from Picasso's Guernica (1937). Hockney has appended to the image a second, smaller image below, a crudely rendered photographer behind a tripod with his head under a darkcloth. What are we to make of this? Another group of works in the show was inspired by Claude Lorrain's Sermon on the Mount (c. 1656), culminating in a wall-sized rendering of that painting on multiple panels, which seemed most impressive as further evidence of Hockney's apparent obsession with size for its own sake. Hockney's version is called A Bigger Message (2010).

Two spaces in the show are devoted to Hockney's recent video explorations, which he calls "cubist movies." These I rather liked. Here the use of an array of screens makes sense. Hockney presents simultaneous views of a scene but from slightly different viewpoints. In these cubist movies (as well as the multiple Polaroid pictures of the past) the question of draughtsmanship is no longer an issue. The individual images that combine to create the whole are each created by a camera, whether still or moving. It becomes possible to focus on the concept behind the work without the distraction of questions about the quality of the rendering.

The last sections of the show suddenly veer back to portraits--some paintings, some drawings--and then to Hockney's interest in optical aids to drawing. The portraits generally are in much the same vein as the earlier portraits, but a series entitled 12 Portraits After Ingres in a Uniform Style (2000) is different and perplexing. According to the text in the galleries, Hockney was inspired to create these after seeing a show of the work of Ingres that led to an epiphany: Ingres must have used some kind of optical device to achieve the high quality of the work he's known for. However, it's not clear how these particular Hockney watercolors (in pairs, of guards at the National Gallery in London, all in uniform--an upper panel showing a closely cropped face set above a panel showing a hand in close-up) demonstrate anything much about Ingres. The lack of guidance here was especially frustrating.

These are followed by a wall of about 40 small portraits made using the camera lucida. Across from the camera lucida drawings and the Ingres series is a re-creation of Hockney's "The Great Wall," a large arrangement of reproductions of European art from around the 13th century to the 20th century, ordered chronologically on the horizontal axis and from north to south geographically on the vertical axis, originally assembled in Hockney's studio. The Great Wall, the story goes, was a response to Hockney's Ingres epiphany, the result of an early 1999 visit to the National Gallery in London. He became convinced suddenly by the increasing use of precise realism from around 1430 that artists at that time began to rely on devices such as the camera obscura, the camera lucida, and curved mirrors to achieve a high degree of realism. Hockney used the wall as a tool to investigate the trend and also to illustrate it. He presented his thesis in a 2001 book entitled Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Techniques of the Old Masters, co-authored by a physicist, Charles M. Falco. The book was controversial and generally got skeptical reviews. While artists certainly did use a variety of optical tools (Philip Steadman's Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford University Press, 2002) is especially interesting in that regard), that was not news in 2001, and Hockney seems to have let enthusiasm far outrun the evidence.


Looking at the camera lucida drawings is instructive, however. Hockney's draughtsmanship greatly improves here. Still, he is no Ingres, even with the aid of the camera lucida. Essentially, the camera lucida is a prism mounted on a stand that allows the user to look simultaneously at a sheet of paper and a reflected image of a scene on that paper, making it possible to trace the exact contours of the projected image onto the paper. The camera lucida is a finicky device, however, that takes quite a lot of practice to use effectively. The artist's hand always obscures part of the projected image. Contrast is often low, making contours difficult to see. If the camera lucida could suddenly make a master of anyone that used it, most of us would have used it by now. Most of us would still be using it. I suspect that Hockney's draughtsmanship improves in the camera lucida drawings more because it forces concentration than because of any true advantage the device gives. A tool is a tool. An artist is an artist. Hockney's thesis is ultimately unconvincing. It's much easier and more persuasive to think that even if Ingres and others did sometimes use drawing aids, they were masters because of their mastery, not because of miraculous and secret devices.

In Summary, I wonder if it's really necessary to take Hockney's recent work as seriously as some seem to be doing. While the show was worth seeing, I'm glad I saw it free, as the guest of a member. Had I paid the $25 entry fee, I suspect I would have felt cheated. The show closed on January 20, 2014.

[Update--December 2, 2014. I recently found this review of Hockney's book Secret Knowledge on line. Well worth a read.]