Collector Jordan D. Schnitzer’s Hockney Holdings Come Home to Portland

“Art is the highest thing we do in society. It affects us in ways, conscious and unconscious,” collector Jordan D. Schnitzer, a real estate executive whose family has been at the forefront of Portland movers and shakers for decades, told the Observer. His collection, among the largest in North America, includes 2,000 paintings and drawings by modern and contemporary mavens such as Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Stella, Judy Chicago, Jeffrey Gibson, Alison Saar and Kara Walker, and thousands of prints, including Warlho400. “Waking up without art around me is like waking up without the sun.”

His collection includes hundreds of works by David Hockney, many of which have been touring the country, from the Honolulu Museum of Art to the Palm Springs Art Museum, then the Grand Rapids Art Museum, before finally returning to the Portland Art Museum in Schnitzer’s hometown, where it is on view in July. Collectively, the exhibition is a kaleidoscope of Hockney’s oeuvre, featuring California swimming pools, Yosemite National Park and the French countryside, as well as portraits of friends and family, book sketches and theater backdrops. Also included are Hockney’s early lithographs made with Ken Tyler, who started the LA print house Gemini GEL in the 1960s.

While still a student at the Bradford School of Art in London, Hockney relied heavily on basic printmaking techniques such as lithography and etching, which he adopted throughout his life. The first piece on display in Portland is a standalone (of at least four)—a 1954 lithograph from his student days. He’s shown here with a black bowl cut (he dyed his hair blonde when he felt blonds were more fun), a tie, vest and striped trousers, set against yellow striped wallpaper.

Eventually, he moved on to aquatinting, using a copper plate impregnated with nitric acid to achieve a watercolor-like effect. Recent techniques include soft ground, an intaglio technique that uses an oily, soft and soft ground on a copper or zinc plate to achieve soft lines and areas of tone. Examples at the Portland Art Museum include tributes to Picasso, student, which shows the artist’s head on a column next to the student with a sketchpad tucked under his arm. Hockney’s sugar-raising prints involved embedding the image with water-melting sugar/ink, covering the plate with solid ground, melts the sugar when hot water and using aquatint and acid. Using this technique, Hockney also honors Picasso with his own Blue Guitar Seriesand in the exhibition.

By the 1980s, he had started his series of Home Made Prints using a Xerox machine to create colorful still lifes such as Apples, Pears & Grapes again Fruit Bowl or monochrome Black Plant on the Table since 1986 Chairman of the Office uses six sheets of Arches paper (the best), runs through a Xerox machine to combine multi-color designs. “When he lived in LA, I was in his studio at least once a month,” says Kimberly Davis of the LA Louvre Gallery, which has represented the artist since the 1970s. “Every idea found in every photo is important in how he does things and why. He always worked with people and/or places. And he was not afraid to use new technologies. His father was an inventor, a photographer, and his long love of photography is reflected in many aspects of the work.”

The portraits are Hockney’s output, including a collection of 82 created for his 2016 exhibition “82 Portraits and 1 Still Life” at the Royal Academy of the Arts. One of the organizers is Douglas Roberts, who attended the opening in Portland. “I met David right after I graduated from UCLA, around 1982,” she recalls. “He was sitting on the kitchen floor on his hands and knees, flipping through the Polaroid photos he had just taken of people. He was taking Polaroid photos and watching them develop and make portraits of people. Then we talked for two hours about Pablo Picasso.”

Part of his Moving Focus series, Hotel Acatlan: After two weeks, a 1985 piece made while Hockney and some friends were traveling through Mexico. It is a depiction of a rural inn playing in reverse, a recurring motif found in his work from now on. “This is a clear example of standing in one place and your eye can see all around the yard,” said Roberts of the mylar print. “It’s a forced impression, since you’re in the middle of the picture and everything else is outside of it. David could wrap the mylar and take it with him to Mexico. He didn’t have to take the litho stones; he could cover the mylar and see other colors. Then the mylar was used to make the plate that was printed on.”

Distorted perspective is key to his 2014-2017 series of large-scale works composed of various elements of projected moving images, sometimes resulting in background elements overtaking those in the foreground, as in images such as The seats (2014), and more clearly in The Idea Must Be Reversed from the same year. The works of art grow in size as the years go by, culminating in 2019 In the studioanother large-scale portrait of the artist standing among many reverse pieces measuring 32 ¾” x 89 ¾”.

Before viewers get to this wonderful summary, there are iPad works—large landscapes of Yosemite and Normandy made over the past ten years, first on his phone and later on his iPad. “The app he used to draw started with the iPhone. Then the iPad, and it was a bigger space,” said Roberts, pointing to the small compositions created on the phone, such as. Lilies again Early in the morningboth from 2009. “He met this kid who built an app called Brushes, so he could paint on the iPad with his finger. This kid built a variety of tools for David.”

Large-scale iPad drawings are limited only by the size of the printer. Obtaining the largest printer he could, Hockney transcended those limits by printing part of the text on individual sheets, which, when placed in sequence, formed a mosaic of a large picture. Because 7 August 2021, Rain in the Lakeanother countryside scene made with an iPad, Hockney used watercolor on raw canvas to paint cheese, a technique he discovered while visiting Japan in the 1960s that has continued throughout his work.

Many prints, paintings, photographs and collages of many styles can be summed up in one word: greed. “I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money; I think that would be a burden,” said Hockney. “I long for an interesting life. I want it to be interesting all the time, and I get it, actually. On the other hand, I can find happiness, I admit, in the drops of rain falling on a pond, and most people will not.

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