“Everybody does look. It’s just a question of how hard,” David Hockney told Susanna Avery-Quash, curator of this exquisite exhibition-in-miniature, in which the pleasures and rewards of looking at pictures are heaped like garlands around the National Gallery. This year the art museum marks its 200th year as the guardian of one of the world’s great art collections , and as a vital conduit between artists living and dead.
Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look includes just three paintings, among them one of the National Gallery’s best-loved pictures, Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ (probably about 1437-45), flanked on either side by Hockney’s Looking at Pictures on a Screen and My Parents (both 1977). By urging audiences to look longer, harder, and better, the exhibition opens up the treasure house of echoes and resonances that link these three paintings. In doing so, a grander vista is revealed, in which some six centuries on, Piero della Francesca, a foundational figure of the Renaissance and of the National Gallery lives on, not just in the mind’s eye, or as a postcard revisited at leisure, but in the work of Hockney, Degas, Seurat, Bridget Riley , Winifred Knights, David Bomberg , and so many more.
It’s remarkable that until now, these three paintings have never been seen together: Each of the Hockney paintings contains direct reference to Piero’s Baptism , and the almost identical dimensions of his paintings, their shared colour palette and oth.
