Hockney portrait exhibit explores the intensely personal

BOSTON --While David Hockney doesn't scoff at painting portraits of relative strangers, it was his likenesses of loved ones that are the British artist's most striking examples of portraiture.

In one painting, titled "Mum," the British artist's elderly mother gazes with piercing blue eyes directly at the viewer. Another painting, "My Parents," shows Hockney's mother and father sitting in a room, neither one paying attention to the other, suggesting emotional distance.

Other works portray Hockney's male lovers -- some of them nude -- and friends, such as one of his most famous paintings, "Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy," a 1970 work depicting two friends and a cat lounging at home.

Hockney wasn't shy about opening up his private life to public scrutiny, and the intimacy between the artist and his portrait sitters is vividly captured in "David Hockney Portraits," the first exhibition devoted solely to these works.

The 159 pieces in the exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts span five decades, including early self-portraits of a shy-looking artist and close-up likenesses of loved ones. The collection also features candid depictions of celebrity friends, from pop artist Andy Warhol to the gender-bending actor Divine, a favorite of cult filmmaker John Waters. Many of the portrait sitters were depicted at Hockney's homes in London and Los Angeles.

"What he is allowing us to do is enter into the intimacy of his life," said Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The exhibition of paintings, drawings, photographs and other media runs Sunday through May 14 at the MFA's Gund Gallery. The collection will then be displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from June 11 to Sept. 4, before moving to London's National Portrait Gallery for a showing from Oct. 12 through Jan. 21 of next year.

Hockney, who appeared at a pre-exhibition press briefing at the MFA last week, said he "never thought of myself totally as a portraitist."

Most of the exhibition's works are rendered in the naturalistic style that Hockney embraced over many of his contemporaries' abstract expressionism.

Several works are double-portraits exploring closeness and distance in couples' relationships through the physical space that separates them, as well as the subtlety of their facial expressions.

"Space itself is an incredibly interesting thing," Hockney said.

Hockney said he has only so much control over the people he depicts and the mood that emerges from how they position themselves in portrait sittings.

"I did position people, but they also positioned themselves," he said. "I'm not totally telling people what to do. ... Just the way someone crosses their legs can tell you how they connect with one another."

Some of the portraits reflect Hockney's life in the late 1960s, when he immersed himself in Southern California culture and completed a series of well-known paintings featuring swimming pools. One such work, "Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool," depicts Peter Schlesinger, one of Hockney's lovers and a favorite model.

The exhibition includes a section called "Studio Visitors" -- depictions of an eclectic stream of people who stopped by Hockney's studios in Los Angeles and his native England. One collection, "112 L.A. Visitors," features color laser print portraits of visitors to Hockney's Hollywood Hills home during a yearlong period beginning in 1990.

Other parts of the exhibit focus on Hockney paintings done in the style of Picasso, and Cubist-inspired collages of Polaroid photos, such as 1983's "The Scrabble Game."

The exhibit concludes with some of the most recent works of the 68-year-old artist, including a series of full-length standing figures and a work from last year, "Self-portrait with Charlie."

Nairne, of London's National Portrait Gallery, said Hockney's body of work is noteworthy because it reflects the artist's "constant and continuing investigations of the world and those around him."

For Hockney, the exhibition is cause for self-reflection, and memories of those closest to him.

"I've never seen 50 years of my work put together," he said.