Artists historically on the cutting edge

Hockney, speaking recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, theorized that even a master draftsman like the 19th-century French artist Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres didn't create his vibrant, highly detailed portraits by eye and hand alone. It is likely, Hockney says, that Ingres also used a lens to project images of his subjects onto a plane surface, such as paper or canvas, where they could be quickly and easily traced.

This explains why an Ingres portrait such as "Louis-François Bertin" of 1832 can seem so fresh and almost photographic. (Even H. W. Janson's "History of Art," a classic college text, notes that the painting, at first glance, resembles "a kind of 'super photograph.' ") In other portraits, Ingres is able to capture the freshness of an open mouth or smiling eyes. Without the help of a lens, which allows an artist to capture a sitter's expression in minutes, the subject's face would have fallen and faded over the many hours of sitting for a portrait. The result? A dull and droopy expression like those found in so many pre-lens or no-lens paintings.

Of course, the use of lenses by artists was nothing new in Ingres' time. Optical devices, first just the simple combination of a pane of glass and an eyepiece, have helped artists capture their subjects since the 1500s. In fact, by the time Ingres had brush in hand, they were perhaps so common, Hockney surmises, that no one bothered to make a fuss about them - not the artists, nor their sitters, nor, it seems, 20th-century art historians.

18th century improvements
But earlier writers on art did make note of them. By 1763, 17 years before Ingres' birth, the Italian Count Francesco Algarotti, writing in "Essays on Painting," noted of the camera obscura, a large chamberlike improvement on the 16th-century glass-and-eyepiece combo: "The best modern painters among the Italians have availed themselves greatly of this contrivance; nor is it possible they should have otherwise represented things so much to life." By 1807, the camera lucida, a much more portable optical device - basically a glass prism on a rod - was developed by Englishman William Hyde Wollaston. The invention was said to be paving the road to drawing.

Even so, these facts haven't been passed down as common knowledge to contemporary art viewers. Now, nearly 500 years after the first lenses were in use, the notion that a great artist began a masterpiece by tracing his subject rarely springs to mind. To gaze upon a painting by say, Franz Hals or Caravaggio or even Van Gogh, and proclaim, 'Well, he certainly made good use of his lens,' would seem blasphemous.

But the British-born, Los Angeles-based Hockney is an artist whose work - whether painting a gritty green pear, piecing together a photocollage of a California highway or making huge "home made" photocopier prints - has always been about seeing.

He came upon this "lost knowledge," as his talk on the same subject a week later at Columbia University was titled, simply by using his eyes. Seeing the Ingres show, now at the Met, when it opened in January in London, Hockney was struck by the small size of many of the portraits - too small to have been so finely drawn by eye and hand alone. By comparing them to drawings by Andy Warhol, who was known to have projected his subjects onto his paper, and to his own modern-day work with a camera lucida, Hockney's thesis came to light.

Had students of art been more careful readers of history, the notion that an artist like Ingres used a lens would never have been "lost." But we humans are rarely good at heeding history, and so Hockney's talk ("Speculations on Technique in the Drawings of Ingres"), which came at the end of a daylong Ingres symposium, was not a mere refresher. Instead, it came across as something of a revelation - helped, perhaps, by artist's fresh and often humorous presentation. As one conference-goer noted, "His was the only talk that didn't put me to sleep."

Tracing history
Yet as art lovers, we have all been sleeping - and as art viewers and art students we've paid the price. Had this particular passion of Hockney's come a few decades sooner -- or better yet, had this knowledge never been "lost" at all - we toters of tracing paper would not have been made to feel we were anything less than our no-tracing-paper-needed classmates. To a child, tracing paper is a miracle tool, and why shouldn't it be? It's about as wonderful as the photocopier qualities of a piece of Silly Putty pressed against a favorite Sunday comic.

Just a few months ago, looking over an old elementary school project, I mused at the teacher's red-penned comments on each page of drawings: "Excellent!" "Excellent!" Excellent!" And I wondered: Had I pulled the wool over this teacher's eyes? After all, I had traced every single picture in this colorful report.

But now, with Hockney's thesis as my model, that teacher appears rather enlightened, and her comments take a different spin: Tracing is good, tracing is fine; it's how well you trace and what you do with what you've traced that matters. Had I known all this, I might have thought, well, my drawings are good: My lines are sure and strong - as Hockney would say, "There is no hesitation."

The larger issue is, however: Will there now be a certain hesitation toward painting's long reign of snobbery? Though "dead" for decades, painting still sits atop a centuries-old pedestal. If anyone can knock it off, it would be Hockney.

I can recall his retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which was at first to include only paintings. Hockney refused. His work, after all, was far wider ranging: He is a maker of opera sets, drawings, photocollages, etchings, lithographs and more. The crowds that jammed in to see his colorful "home made" photocopier prints left no doubt that Hockney had made the right choice.

That retrospective truly was a Hockney show, a much more interesting show than one exhibiting only his paintings. Now, given his thesis on how painters have used lenses through the centuries, the whole history of art is, to borrow Hockney's words, "actually a marvelous . . . . more interesting" show.