A rolling scene of illusionistic grandeur and dreamlike theatricality, A Picture of a Lion illuminates David Hockney’s unique, multi-perspectival approach to painting and his career-long experimentation with perspective. Painted in 2017, the present work is a magnificent return to the artist’s early and influential work in theatre set design. A key element throughout Hockney’s oeuvre is a self-reflexive artificiality and innate sense of theatricality, an effect rendered in the artist’s quintessential graphic vernacular and bold, high-key colour palette in the present work. Belonging to a series of 15 hexagonal paintings executed between 2017 and 2018 during the artist’s major retrospective at the Tate Britain, London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, A Picture of a Lion transcends the limitations of traditional representation, disrupting the rigour of conventional perspective via an expansive, fantastical panorama.

In an essay written for the exhibition catalogue of Hockney’s 2018 Pace Gallery show David Hockney: Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing], during which A Picture of a Lion was debuted, critic and writer Lawrence Weschler explains that the composition belongs to a series of “teasing capriccios, as it were, schematic experiments, larkish improvisations”, in which an enigmatically sized “picture of a lion” is propped up “between a row of curtains and a jungle backdrop, all to one side of the reversed perspective composition, while to the other side, an Astaire-like figure sashayed up from out of an urban boulevard that tapered off into the far obverse distance” (L. Weschler, ‘On Not Cutting Corners’, in David Hockney: Something New in Painting (and Photograph) [and even Printing], Pace, New York, 2018, p. 16). Presented in bold hues of turquoise, fuchsia, orange and green akin to the colourful vistas of the fauvists, A Picture of a Lion is an expansive and remarkable composition quintessential to Hockney’s inimitable oeuvre.

In the months preceding the opening of his landmark travelling retrospective in 2017, Hockney began a body of work on shaped canvases—particularly with the lower left and right corners cut on a diagonal to create an irregular hexagon. These shaped canvases revisit some of the subject matters central to his early practice – the landscapes of the Hollywood Hills, the Grand Canyon, East Yorkshire, as well as his t.mes in the 1970s and 1980s designing theatrical sets for some of the world’s most prestigious Opera Houses.These works are featured in a large-scale photo-mural now in the collects ion of the Tate, London, the culminating opus of a career-defining series that explores the nuances of perspective and colour, as well as the limitations and possibilities of photography. An exploration contained within A Picture of a Lion, a work which sees Hockney create an inverted perspective and widening of the viewer’s panoramic view via the use of a hexagonal canvas.

Across the surface of the present work a sunlit avenue unfurls into the distance behind a dancing figure dressed in a tuxedo with a sense of dynamism that makes the viewer feel that they are moving through the picture plane. With the cut corners giving the viewer a wider, panoramic view of the split scene, one’s eye is in a constant state of movement across the pictorial space. Throughout his years experimenting with painting, photography, opera and theatrical design, Hockney engaged in a sustained critical enterprise in which he strived to depict multiple lines of sight in order to most accurately recreate the actual and physical experience of looking. The paintings within the concise series to which A Picture of a Lion belongs are all united by a discovery Hockney encountered in 2017. Employing a reverse perspective in Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden, 2017, Hockney immediately ordered a set of special canvases shaped like a hexagon, leading the artist to proclaim “Just chopping off the corners has done wonders for me,” (David Hockney, quoted in Deborah Solomon, “David Hockney, Contrarian, Shifts Perspectives”, The New York t.mes s, 5 September 2017). The atypical canvases emphasised the multi-dimensionality of the painted space and lent themselves well to the viewer’s experience of ‘reverse’ perspective, or an inversion of the single vanishing point where lines diverge against the horizon. His hexagonal canvases not only open compositional space up in a way that was not previously possible, they also allow the artist to play with perspective, in fact reversing the very perspective that eighteenth and nineteenth century artists sought so ardently to achieve. As Hockney explains: “The indented sides enforced the kind of reverse perspective that earlier painting was clearly striving toward… the indentations paradoxically widen the sense of space and invite all sorts of fresh lines of sight. Still, though, as you can see, far from cutting corners, I was adding them” (David Hockney quoted in L. Weschler, ‘On Not Cutting Corners’, in David Hockney: Something New in Painting (and Photograph) [and even Printing], Pace, New York, 2018, p. 5).

The hexagonal shape of this series recalls the historic form of the amphitheatre, a metaphor that is no surprise given Hockney’s early work in theatre set design. The vestiges of the theatre are a recognisable motif throughout Hockney’s work, with curtains appearing again and again in his California compositions. In 1963, Hockney made a number of works which used the device of a curtain, either as a backdrop, as if in a theatre, or as a framing device, as can be seen in the present work, apparently pulled back to reveal the scene beyond. The double portrait Shirley Goldfarb + Gregory Masurovsky from 1974, with its stage-like rooms pushed forward close to the perceived surface of the picture in contrast to the deep receding space on the right hand side, instantly recalls the split scene of A Picture of a Lion. The lion and the male figure occupy separate spaces, with Hockney announcing the artificiality of the scene in an especially evident way: we get a view of the interior space behind the screen of the lion through to the jungle scene beyond by virtue of the opening up of the side wall, like a theatre set. It is an image that plays with the viewer’s perception of the object in front of them, in this case a lion, and with the conventions of illusionism in painting. The falsity of the image is similarly signalled by the peculiar perspective of the floorboards on the corresponding side of the composition which converge into one another, as if the room were disappearing into itself, recalling the modalities of optical illusion.

It was in 1974 that Hockney was commissioned to design a production of Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress, which turned out to be the first in a series of opera designs that would consume much of the artist's t.mes during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Working on space that would be illusionistic while including real people, and which contained events spread out across t.mes , would have a lasting impact on Hockney, as evidenced in the present work. Through his sketches for these performances, Hockney makes use of dramatic perspective foreshortening, and, improbably, turned even cross-hatching into a theatrical device, with the result proving to be so original and effective that these designs were shown in the exhibition, Hockney Paints the Stage, at the Hayward Gallery in 1985. The tension between a pitched foreground plane and a deeper space beyond would go on to inform a wider compositional framework in Hockney’s paintings, appearing in some of the artist’s most acclaimed landscapes of Colorado and Yorkshire in the 1990s.

Another critical reference point in unpacking Hockney’s late experiments with perspective is Chinese scroll painting, the influence of which is palpable on the surface of the present work. In 1984, Hockney made numerous visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he saw Chinese scroll paintings for the first t.mes . As Hockney himself describes, “I’d been pushing the notion of the observer’s head swivelling about in a world which was moving in t.mes , but I’d really only just begun to try and deal with how to portray movement of the observer’s whole body across space. And that’s precisely what the Chinese landscape artists had mastered’ (David Hockney, quoted in C. Simon Sykes, Hockney: The Biography, vol. 2, Century, London, 2014, p. 206). Upon viewing Hockney’s late series of paintings during a visit to the artist’s studio in 2017, Weschler describes this affect as “not so much reverse perspective as moving focus (albeit spread across an airy and well-ventilated reverse perspectival expanse), the sort of thing he grew to appreciate during his immersion in Chinese scrolls, where the latter of locally specific schemes (blended across the wider expanse) enforced in the viewer an experience of slower t.mes and sequentially parcelled attention” (L. Weschler, ibid. p. 17). Indeed, the aesthetics of Chinese scroll painting presented Hockney with radical possibilities in rendering t.mes , space and movement across the two-dimensional surface of a canvas, possibilities which are spectacularly embodied in the present work. Space flows in a series of perspectives that fold into each other in one compressed plane across A Picture of a Lion, with Hockney intending his canvas to be read ‘in t.mes ,’ the way a viewer unrolls a Chinese scroll, physically moving through its narrative. By destabilising conventional perspective and painting a scene that offers numerous points of view from differing vantage points, the viewer is placed within the picture itself, an effect akin to watching a performance on stage.

A whimsical piece brimming with Hockney’s instantly recognisable use of joyful colour, A Picture of a Lion blurs the line between reality and fantasy, landscape and interiority, presenting a fantastical stage of Hockney’s vivid inner world. Brilliantly paying homage to his career-long experimentation with perspective and theatricality, the present work expertly rejects the laws of perspective, instead catching space, light and t.mes in breathtaking movement. The result is a thrilling and immersive scene captured in the kaleidoscopic hues integral to one of the world’s most celebrated living painters.

大 衛・霍克尼在藝術生涯中對透視法的反覆錘煉，以別樹一幟的多角度透視法繪畫，透過《獅子的圖像》中如夢似幻的宏偉劇場感充分體現其多年實踐成果。本作畫於2017 年，是一幅回溯了霍克尼早期極具影響力的舞台設計元素，回歸本源的輝煌之作。霍克尼對人為性的自我反思與那渾天而成的戲劇感貫穿其畢生創作，並在本作透過經典的圖像語言及鮮活大膽的用色呈現於人眼前。霍克尼在2017至2018年，分别於倫敦泰特不列顛美術館（Tate Britain）、巴黎龐畢度藝術中心（Centre Pompidou），以及紐約大都會藝術博物館（Metropolitan Museum of Art）舉辦個人回顧展。期間他一共創作了15幅六邊形畫作，而《獅子的圖像》為該系列的其中之一，透過廣闊而奇幻的環景，超越了傳統具象手法限制，打破了傳統視角的嚴格規範。

《獅子的圖像》於霍克尼在2018年在佩斯畫廊舉辦的「David Hockney: Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing] 」展覽中首度登場。評論家塈作家勞倫斯·韋斯勒（Lawrence Weschler）在其展覽圖錄中一篇文章解說，此作是「一連串帶有玩味的狂想、對圖示的實驗，以及逍遙自在的即興創作」――一幅尺寸大小不明的「獅子畫像」被懸掛在「一排帷幕和森林佈景版之間，兩者落在這逆向透視構圖的一側。而另一側畫有像亞斯坦（Astaire）般的人物，在一條漸漸消失在遠處城市的大道上，搖搖晃晃地行走。」（L. Weschler, 摘自〈On Not Cutting Corners〉，《David Hockney: Something New in Painting (and Photograph) [and even Printing]》，佩斯畫廊， 紐約， 2018，頁16)。《獅子的圖像》尺幅宏闊，構圖獨特，並以大膽鮮活的綠松色、紫紅、艷橘和翠綠等媲美野獸派藝術作品的斑斕色彩繪製，是大衛・霍克尼的一幅經典鉅作，令人留下深刻印象。

2017年，霍克尼舉辦了一場盛大的巡迴回顧展。開幕前數月，他開始著手在左右下角被斜切成不規則六邊形的塑形畫布上創作。這些創作的藝術語彙回顧了其早期作品各式各樣的主題，包括荷里活山、科羅拉多大峽谷、約克郡東區等地景色，以及他在 1970 至 1980 年代為數家享譽國際的頂級劇團所創作的舞台設計。這系列壁畫式作品尺寸宏大，探索了視覺和色彩的複雜性，以及攝影的限制和潛能，堪稱為霍克尼藝術生涯的巔峰之作，現被收納為倫敦泰德不列顛美術館的館藏。霍克尼在《獅子的圖像》中運用了逆向透視，透過六邊形畫布所締造的全景視角，擴闊了觀者的視野。

在此作中，一條陽光充足的大道橫跨畫布，穿過一名身穿燕尾服翩翩起舞的人物身後延伸至景深遠處，觀者彷彿在畫作平面上移動。畫布的切角為這分成兩半的畫面締造更廣闊的全景視角，使觀者的眼睛得以肆意流動於構圖空間上。在多年的繪畫、攝影、歌劇及戲劇設計實驗中，霍克尼一直毋忘審視批判。他致力描繪多重視線，旨在準確重現視覺的真實體驗。《獅子的圖像》的所屬系列，全源於霍尼克在 2017 年的一次意外發現。其時，霍克尼正在繪畫《藍色陽台和花園的室内畫》（Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden），在使用了逆向透視後，隨即訂購了一系列六邊形畫布。他聲稱：「只要把邊角切掉，我就能創造奇蹟。」（大衛・霍克尼，摘自Deborah Solomon 撰寫的〈David Hockney, Contrarian, Shifts Perspectives〉，《紐約時報》，2017 年 9 月 5 日）

這些破格的畫布強調了繪畫空間的多維性，讓觀者體驗何爲「逆向」透視，亦即是反轉了線條與地平線交錯時的單一消失點。他的六邊形畫布打開了構圖空間，是藝術家探索透視法的實驗舞台，顛覆了十八和十九世紀藝術家所熱切追求的傳統透視手法，確實前所未見。霍克尼解釋說：「切掉畫布兩邊，增強了我的早期畫作中，所明顯在追求的那種逆向透視…將畫布的角落切掉，反而擴闊了空間感，並引進了各種鮮活的視線。如你所見，我是在增加『角度』，而非減去。」（L. Weschler, 摘自〈On Not Cutting Corners〉，《David Hockney: Something New in Painting (and Photograph) [and even Printing]》，佩斯畫廊， 紐約， 2018，頁5)。

本作的所屬系列沿用的六邊形畫布讓人聯想起古羅馬的競技場，與霍克尼早期的劇場設計無疑在相互呼應。這類劇場元素常見於藝術家的作品中，以其加州時期的構圖作例，帷幕圖像則重複出現。好比1963 年，霍克尼便在一連串創作中引進帷幕圖像，當中例子有如本作般，將帷幕用作揭露背後場景的外框裝置，亦作品以之用作佈景，讓觀者猶如身處於劇院裡。霍克尼繪於 1974 年的雙人肖像畫《Shirley Goldfarb + Gregory Masurovsky》中，如舞台般的房間向左推進，緊貼畫框的牆邊，與右邊較空曠、逐漸遠去的空間形成對比，令人立即聯想起《獅子的圖像》中的分割畫面。

而在本作中，霍克尼以顯而易見的方式，突出這場景的人為性：獅子與男人佔據着不同空間；如同劇場的佈景一樣，觀者能透過側邊牆的開口，看到獅子佈景板後方的室內，亦即是森林的場景。觀者對眼前之物（在本例中則為獅子）的感知，與日常在畫作中看到的圖像，兩者所形成的奇妙關係，在此作得到充分體現。畫面兩則的結合處亦將圖像的虛假性表露無遺，房間呈現錯視手法所體現的自我消融感。

霍克尼於 1974 年受史特拉汶斯基委託，為其歌劇《浪子的歷程》進行舞台設計。該次創作開展了他後來一系列歌劇舞台設計，在 70 年代末至 80 年代初佔據了他大部分時間。舞台設計創這種作本質虛幻，卻牽涉到真人參與，並要處理隨故事推進而有所不同的場景，對霍克尼的創作帶來深遠的影響和啟發。他為歌劇舞台所繪畫的草稿利用了戲劇性的前縮透視法，更巧妙地把交叉排線繪法活用至戲劇化手段。這些設計最終展出於1985 年在海沃美術館舉辦的「Hockney Paints the Stage」展覽，力證它們的效用及原創性。這種以傾斜的前景平面以及更深邃的空間所形成的張力，為霍克尼日後的畫作帶來更廣闊的構圖框架。此手法可見於他某些畫於 90 年代的科羅拉多及約克郡風景畫，那些亦是藝術家最備受讚譽的作品。

霍克尼的晚期作品在透視上進行了實驗，中國的捲軸畫可謂為藝術家的一大參考，其影響在本作品顯而易見。1984年，霍克尼多次參觀位於紐約的大都會藝術博物館，從而初度接觸中國捲軸畫。據霍克尼本人描述：「多年來我一直竭力創作出能讓觀者的目光流動於一個隨時間移動的空間裡的作品。但最近我才開始明白，要如何描繪出讓觀者整個身體在畫布空間中移動的動感。那正是中國山水畫家早已掌握的技巧。」（大衛・霍克尼，摘自 C. Simon Sykes 撰寫的〈Hockney: The Biography〉第二冊，《Century》，倫敦，2014年，頁206）

2017 年，韋斯勒在參觀霍克尼工作室時，觀看了他晚期系列的畫作，並如此形容：「與其說那是逆向透視，不如說是焦點移動（在寬敞明亮，空氣流通又廣闊的逆向透視空間內），他是從欣賞中國捲軸畫學到的。中國捲軸畫利用局部位置（融入於更廣闊的空間），使畫中的時間變慢，從而延長觀者的注意力。」（L. Weschler, 如上，頁 17）。

事實上，中國捲軸畫的美學為霍克尼的二維畫布平面上，提供了呈現時間、空間和動態的其他可能性，並在本作得到完美體現。在《獅子的圖像》的壓縮平面裡，空間在一連串透視關係中互相流動。霍克尼希望其畫作能被「按時」觀賞，就像觀者打開中國捲軸時，會順著畫作的敘事而置身畫中移動一樣。藝術家打破傳統透視手法，繪畫出能提供多種觀點及不同視覺的場景，讓觀者彷彿置身於畫作之中，猶如在觀看一場舞台表演。

《獅子的圖像》洋溢著霍克尼標誌性的歡樂色彩，在模糊了現實與幻想、景觀與內觀之間的界線同時，呈現了藝術家異想天開的內心世界。這幅作品摒棄了傳統的透視法，以令人屏息的動感捕捉空間、光線和時間的流動，並運用繽紛的色彩營造出身臨其境的場景。這些元素結合成了霍克尼獨特的創作風格，向藝術家在自成一家的視角體現和擬造劇場感等的歷年錘煉致敬，展現了他在藝術創作上的精湛技巧之餘，也力證其為在世備受尊崇藝術家之一美譽。