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Grimm's Fairy Tales: ASeries of Etchings by David Hockney I came to Hong Kong to teach Western art history, and not surprisingly my earliest writing in Hong Kong remained concerned with Western art. With time I began to understand more about Hong Kong and Chinese art, and so started to write on those areas as well, but I have continued to act as an interpreter of Western art. Being based in Hong Kong has gradually changed my way oflooking at Western art history - I have become aware ofsome of its closures and parochialisms. Rather than thinking ofHong Kong as a place from which it is not possible to understand Western art properly, I would like to think of it as a place from which an alternative view of Western art, valid in its own terms, might be elaborated. This way of thinking underlies my decision to include essays on Western art in this book, and not just essays on the art of Hong Kong and China. For the most part, however, I focus my discussion on Western artworks which have been displayed locally - in this section I am still mostly talking about art in Hong Kong, even if I am not talking about Hong Kong art. This essay was published in City Enterlainment on the occasion of the Arts Centre's 1991 exhibition of Hockney's etchings. I am placing it before another, earlier, essay on Hockney's prints, since the series discussed here was executed at an earlier date. Both essays contain discussion concerning the theme of images and words, and the theme ofart about art. On show at the Hong Kong Arts Centre from March 9th till March 28th are a series of illustrations to the Grimm fairy tales by English artist David Hockney. The etchings were published in 1970, having been produced between May and November 1969. If one includes the time spent collecting reference material prior to beginning work then the project can be said to have begun in 1968, although the idea was around even longer than that. In 1961 and 1962 Hockney had made some prints based on Rumpelstiltskin, one of the most famous of the stories in the Grimm anthology. 151 Western Art in a Hong Kong Frame 152 A decision to illustrate a pre-existing text involved Hockney in accepting a limitation that modern artists have characteristically shied away from. Pre-modern Western art is to a great extent concerned with telling stories (whether from Christian dogma, classical mythology or history) but modern artists have tended to see the abandonment of 'literary' or 'illustrative' qualities as a precondition of art's autonomy, of its freedom to set its own more purely visual goals. A further limitation Hockney chose was to have images and text together on the same page. Since the stories were of different lengths this meant that the number of illustrations would have to vary from tale to tale. Another consequence of his decision to integrate word and image was his adoption of monochrome etching, and his emphasis not on tone but on line - which can be seen as the central resource of etching and the one which is most analogous to the printed word. Hockney does use aquatint to create tonal effects on occasion, but for the most part those effects are produced by cross-hatching, by an accumulation of intersecting lines. I've talked so far of the choice of medium and the illustrative nature of these works as limitations, but in a sense those same qualities were enabling to Hockney. The use of a graphic medium was not a handicap for him since it prevented the tendency towards excessive realism which was to give him problems in his paintings. 'Naturalism was never a problem in my graphic work [Hockney states], because to me graphic work is about marks, part of its beauty is the marks, whereas I'd gotten to the point where I didn't seem to care about the painted mark that much ... Somehow I've been a lot freer in the graphic work than in the painting ... there is a delight in the medium itself.' In a similar way the richly imaginative nature of the fairy tales prompted Hockney away from the naturalistic approach which can be found in his paintings of the same period, and which was to continue to trouble him for several years. Hockney did not choose, however, to slavishly re-tell the stories in his images. He shares the...

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