Book Review: David Hockney, by Peter Clothier, Abbeville Modern Masters Series (1995)

When the artist David Hockney died earlier this year, I realized that I needed to learn more about his work. To do so, I bought the Abbeville Modern Masters book on Hockney's work, written by Peter Clothier, and published in 1995. When I was studying art history in the early 2000's, the Abbeville Modern Masters series was a great way of getting an overview of an artist's life and career for a budget price. The books are a little over 100 pages long, and they include more than 100 images of the artists' work. Having so many images in a book was huge in the early days of the Internet, when you couldn't find everything online. I've read the Abbeville Modern Masters books on Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. And yes, I'm still annoyed that there wasn't an Abbeville Modern Masters book on Robert Rauschenberg, one of my favorite modern artists. 

The Abbeville Modern Masters book had many Hockney paintings that I had never seen before. One of the paintings I found especially intriguing was Hockney's 1964 painting Iowa. It's a landscape with a barn, a tree, and dark clouds gathering in the sky. I looked at it and wondered "Why does he have a painting called Iowa?" It turns out, Hockney taught at the University of Iowa in the summer of 1964. And the fashion designer Ossie Clark visited Hockney in Iowa, and they went on a road trip together. What? Two icons of 60's Swinging London were in Iowa City together in 1964? Groovy, baby! Also of interest to me is that Hockney's painting Iowa is in the collection of the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, DC, one of the museums I frequented when I spent a semester in DC. I wonder if I saw Iowa? I doubt it, I feel like the novelty of a famous British expat titling a painting after the state directly to the south of mine would have stuck in my mind. 

For me, Hockney's work really got interesting after he traveled to California in the mid-1960's. You can just imagine Hockney and Joan Didion sitting out by the swimming pool in Malibu, right? They're both smoking and drinking with a small circle of friends, and Hockney is chattering away a mile a minute, and Didion is sitting there, nodding, and then every once in a while she lobs in a withering bon mot that gets the whole table laughing. And then David wants to see Joan's beautiful, sexy, bright yellow Corvette. They go to look at it in the driveway. It's a gorgeous car, all long hood, concealed headlights, and barely contained power. And David says, very quietly, but insistently, "I want to go for a ride in that." And Joan grins and says, "Get in." And she revs the engine, and David can feel all 300 horsepower of that V-8 American-made engine right in his solar plexus. And Joan yells at the houseboy to open the gate, and she throws it into gear, and they go off down the drive, spinning gravel behind them as the Corvette grips the road. 

The bright California sun and the way the water moved in swimming pools brought out new qualities in Hockney's work, and he created paintings like the iconic 1967's A Bigger Splash, perhaps his single most famous canvas. Shown on the cover of this book, the viewer sees the aftermath of a dive into the swimming pool, but we don't see the person. It's beautiful, and a bit mysterious as well.  

Hockney's paintings of the 1970's are some of my favorites of his, including My Parents and Contre-jour in the French Style—Against the Day dans le style francais, stunning paintings that show his masterful handling of paint. 

In the 1980's, Hockney began a new series of photographs. He took numerous photos of one setting and then assembled them together to create a larger image, although you can still tell that the artwork is made up of many different photographs. He called these "joiners" and they are amazing to see. Probably the most famous of the series is an image of a highway intersection in the California desert, titled Pearblossom Hwy. 11th-18th April, 1986. It's such a striking image. It's hard to say what makes it so cool, but it might be the deep blue desert sky, split up into all of these little photos, each one a little bit different. 

The book also focuses on Hockney's designs for stage plays and operas, which were a focus of his work from the 1970's onward. Hockney was always fascinated by advancements in technology. The book describes how Hockney used fax machines and computers to facilitate his artwork. Later in life, Hockney loved creating little paintings on his iPhone using the Brushes app. There's a section of Hockney's official website that features 46 of his iPhone paintings, and they are a delight, tiny treats from a veteran master. 

Hockney's work transcended art movements or simple labels. He started out being categorized as part of British Pop Art, along with artists like Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake. But Hockney's work soon went in a different direction, and it's hard to imagine anyone calling his 1970's paintings "Pop Art." Like many great artists, Hockney simply defied easy categorization. 

Hockney's personal style was also a large part of his image: the dyed blonde hair, the round glasses, colorful sartorial style, and mismatched socks were all a part of his charm. 

I've never seen a large museum exhibit of Hockney's work, and I'm kicking myself that I didn't have the time to see the Hockney retrospective at the Palm Springs Art Museum when I was there in 2025. My wife and I were at the museum for an event, to see retro enthusiast Charles Phoenix speak, and so I looked around the first room of the Hockney exhibit, and I took a couple of photos of some beautiful works, but I wish I would have seen the whole exhibit. 

David Hockney's career spanned many decades and numerous artistic styles, and Hockney will long be remembered as one of the major artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 

Book Review: Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World is a dystopian classic of science fiction. I first read Brave New World when I was 14 years old, at the end of 8th grade or the beginning of 9th grade, shortly after I had read George Orwell's 1984. I recently re-read Brave New World. The edition I read from 2004 combined Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited and also featured a Foreword by Christopher Hitchens. 

I was curious what it would be like reading Brave New World again, more than thirty years after I had first read it. I really enjoyed it, and I had forgotten how funny the novel is. Brave New World is set in the year 632 AF, which means 632 years after Henry Ford invented the Model T. In other words, the year in the novel is 2540, AD—or CE if you like. People use Ford's name in place of "Lord," a funny joke that Huxley might hit a little too often in the book. But he gets his point across—we have replaced the worship of religion with the worship of commerce. 

In Brave New World, sex is no longer needed for reproduction, as there are giant "Hatcheries" that take care of growing embryos, who are then conditioned into various classes of workers: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. The classes are also conditioned into being happy they are of the class they were born into, so as to remove that pesky idea of improving one's lot in life. This is B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism taken to its extreme.

Bernard Marx is one of the main characters in the novel. He is an Alpha, but he is quite unhappy with this supposedly utopian society. Bernard is noticeably smaller than other Alphas, and this might be the source of some of his dissatisfaction. Bernard is quite a drip, and it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for him. 

Lenina Crowne is a Beta. She is quite happy with her status, although she is a bit unorthodox in her dating life, choosing to exclusively date Henry Foster, rather than have a multitude of different sexual partners, as the government encourages people to do. I don't remember what I thought of Lenina the first time I read the novel, but I quite liked her in this reading. She's a sympathetic character who has to deal with some ridiculous men. 

The other main character in the novel is John, often referred to as "The Savage." Raised on the "Savage Reservation" for Native Americans, John is the son of the Director of the Hatcheries and Linda. Linda had been presumed dead and left behind on a trip to the reservation. John has never been accepted by the Native Americans. His education consisted of reading the complete works of William Shakespeare, and his speech is peppered with allusions to Shakespeare. I can happily say that I caught way more of the Shakespeare allusions now than I did when I read it 30 years ago. The title of the novel itself comes from The Tempest: "O brave new world, that has such people in 't." 

Bernard takes John and Linda back to London, and this of course creates quite a disruption. I won't say anything more about the plot of the novel, since the plot is really less interesting than the setting of the novel, and the world that Huxley has created. Brave New World is a fascinating book. Yet there is something detached about it. I can't say that I felt much sympathy or empathy for Bernard—certainly not like I felt for Winston Smith and Julia in 1984. 

Huxley was boldly predicting the scientific future in Brave New World. We're not quite at hatcheries yet, but in vitro fertilization has moved out of the realm of science fiction and into reality. And government interference in family planning? Well, just look at China's "one child" policy, and the various policies India has tried over the years. 

The citizens in Brave New World are kept docile and happy thanks to many diversions like "Obstacle Golf," and movies. There's also soma, a delightful pill that keeps people sedate and tranquil, and offers no nasty hangover or side effects. Huxley took the name soma from the drink that the ancient Vedic religion placed great importance on. 

Something that struck me about Brave New World is that the world government really relies on keeping the populace docile and happy, and they are largely using soft power to do so. As opposed to the governments in George Orwell's 1984, which embrace brutal power and sadistic methods to keep people in check. This struck me as a key difference between these two dystopian novels. 

I don't know if we've seen a dictatorship embrace Huxley's ideas of soft power to keep people in line, rather than Orwell's ideas of brute strength. Perhaps the progression would be that a dictatorship has to use brute strength and hard power to gain power and control, and then at some point could transition to only using soft power. But of course, once brute strength is set in place as a key part of a government's apparatus, it's hard to let it go. 

Here in 2026 in the capitalist Western democracies, people aren't kept docile with soma, but rather with a mixture of smart phones, Netflix, marijuana, and alcohol. Soft power indeed seems to have triumphed. Although the surveillance that is a feature of 1984 has now become the norm as well. 

What struck me as remarkable about Brave New World was that Huxley was writing this novel in 1931, and it was published in February of 1932. This was before Hitler came to power. This was before Stalin's show trials and the Great Purge of the late 1930's. In short, before the modern concept of a dictatorship had really come to pass.

This time difference accounts for some of the differences between Brave New World and 1984. Huxley was writing before World War II, whereas Orwell was writing in 1948, after World War II, and after the world had seen the destructive horrors that dictatorships brought about. 

There are many great quotes from Brave New World. Some of my favorites are:

"Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation." (p.49)

About soma: "Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology." (p.60)

About Bernard's friend Helmholtz Watson: "It was said that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four years." (p.71) 

The Director says, "Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself." (p.137)

"Television was left on, a running tap, from morning till night." (p.180) How prophetic! 

Mustapha Mond, the controller of Western Europe, tells John about the "Cyprus experiment," a society of only Alphas, and why different classes are needed. "The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and recolonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas...they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories...Within six years they were having a first-class civil war...nineteen of the twenty-two thousand had been killed...And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen." (p.201) 

Brave New World Revisited was published in 1958, twenty-six years after the publication of Brave New World. It's a non-fiction look at what Huxley had prophesied. In the chapter on "Over-Population," Huxley wrote: "The shipping of a few surplus humans to Mars (at a cost, for transportation and development, of several million dollars a head) will do nothing to solve the problem of mounting population pressures on our own planet." (p.243) Yes, tell it to Elon! 

Huxley was critical of the mass media, and how much of what they produced fed into "man's almost infinite capacity for distractions." (p.267) I wonder what Huxley would say today about our capacity for distractions? 

Huxley wrote about politics and mass media: "The personality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter." (p.286) Huxley is predicting John F. Kennedy two years before Kennedy won the Presidency. Of course, Kennedy was more than just a personality, but he understood television in a way like no American President had before. Richard Nixon learned from his 1960 loss to Kennedy, and used his hard-won knowledge of the importance of television to help propel him to victory in 1968.  

Huxley came to this conclusion about war: "For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics." (p.288) Huxley is anticipating the premise of Joseph Heller's classic 1961 anti-war satire Catch-22. If you're crazy, you don't have to fly any more missions. But if you ask to be classified as crazy, this proves that you're sane because you don't want to fly any more missions. So it goes. 

Christopher Hitchens' Foreword is entertaining, as always, and I learned this incredible fact: "that Aldous Huxley should have taught George Orwell at Eton...seems to strain the natural serendipity of coincidence." (p.viii) That's just astonishing. Each man offered praise for the other's dystopian novel but naturally preferred his own vision of the future. Isn't this the way of much of the conversations between great writers? "You're very good, but if you wanted to be truly great, you'd be a little more like me." 

Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited are essential reading, and it's quite remarkable how fresh and relevant this novel feels, some 96 years after it was first published.