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

“Art is the highest thing we do in society. It touches us in ways, conscious and unconscious,” collector Jordan D. Schnitzer, a real estate magnate whose family has been at the forefront of Portland’s shakers and movers for decades, tells Observer. His collection, among the largest in North America, includes 2,000 paintings and sculptures by modern and contemporary mavens like Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Stella, Judy Chicago, Jeffrey Gibson, Alison Saar and Kara Walker, and thousands more prints, including 1,400 by Warhol. “Waking up without art around me is like waking up without the sun.”

His collection also includes hundreds of works by David Hockney, many of which have been touring the country, moving from the Honolulu Museum of Art to the Palm Springs Art Museum, then the Grand Rapids Art Museum, before finally making its way back to the Portland Art Museum in Schnitzer’s hometown, on view through July. Collectively, the show is a kaleidoscope of Hockney’s oeuvre, with California swimming pools, Yosemite National Park and rural French landscapes, as well as portraits of friends and family, book illustrations and theatrical backdrops. Included are early lithographs Hockney made with Ken Tyler, who started L.A.’s legendary print house Gemini GEL in the 1960s.

While still a student at the Bradford School of Art in London, Hockney relied mainly on fundamental printmaking techniques such as lithography and etching, which he embraced throughout his lifetime. The earliest piece being shown in Portland is a self-portrait (one of at least four)—a lithograph dated 1954 from his student days. He is pictured here with a dark bowl cut (he dyed his hair blond when he heard that blonds have more fun), a tie, a vest and striped trousers, set against yellow-striped wallpaper.

Eventually, he moved on to aquatinting, which uses a copper plate etched with nitric acid to achieve a watercolor-like effect. Later techniques include soft-ground, an intaglio process using greasy, soft and tacky ground on a copper or zinc plate to achieve softer lines and tonal areas. Examples at Portland Art Museum include an homage to Picasso, The Student, which shows the artist’s head on a column alongside a student with a sketchpad tucked under his arm. Hockney’s sugar-lift prints involved etching an image with water-soluble sugar/ink, covering a plate in hard ground, dissolving the sugar in hot water and applying aquatint and acid. Using this technique, Hockney again honors Picasso with his Blue Guitar Series, also in the show.

By the 1980s, he had embarked on his Home Made Prints series using a Xerox machine to make colorful still lifes like Apples, Pears & Grapes and Bowl of Fruit or the monochrome Black Plant on Table from 1986. His Office Chair uses six sheets of Arches paper (the finest), run through a Xerox machine to assemble the multi-colored composition. “While he was living in L.A., I was in his studio at least once a month,” says Kimberly Davis of LA Louvre Gallery, which has represented the artist since the 1970s. “All the ideas behind every picture are just as important as how he developed things and why. He was always working with people and/or places. And he was never reticent to use new technology. His father was an inventor, a photographer, and his long love of photography shows up in many aspects of the work.”

Portraits are a fixture in Hockney’s output, including a collection of 82 made for his 2016 show “82 Portraits and 1 Still Life” at the Royal Academy of the Arts. One of the sitters is Douglas Roberts, who attended the opening in Portland. “I met David shortly after I graduated from UCLA, about 1982,” he recalls. “He was on the kitchen floor on his hands and knees, shuffling Polaroid pictures around that he had just taken of people. He was photographing Polaroids and watching them develop and creating mosaics of a person. And we proceeded to talk for two hours about Pablo Picasso.”

Part of his Moving Focus Series, Hotel Acatlan: Two Weeks Later, is a piece from 1985 made when Hockney and some friends were traveling through Mexico. It’s a portrait of a rural roadside inn that plays with reverse perspective, a recurring motif frequently found in his work from this point on. “This is a clear example of standing in one place and your eye sees all around the courtyard,” says Roberts of the print made from mylar. “It’s forced perspective, with you being in the middle of the picture and everything else is outside you. David could roll up the mylar and take it with him to Mexico. He didn’t have to take litho stones with him; he could layer the mylar and see through to the other colors. Then the mylar was used to make the plate from which the print was made.”

Reverse perspective is key to his 2014-2017 series of large-scale works composed of various photographic elements that jog expectations, sometimes resulting in background elements outsizing those in the foreground, as in images like The Chairs (2014), and more explicitly in Perspective Should Be Reversed from the same year. The artworks grow in size as the years progress, culminating in 2019’s In the Studio, another large-scale photographic drawing of the artist standing amid numerous reverse-perspective pieces that measures 32 ¾” x 89 ¾”.

Before viewers arrive at this grand summation, there are the iPad works—large-scale landscapes of Yosemite and Normandy made in the past ten years, first on his phone and later on his iPad. “The app he uses to be able to draw started with the iPhone. And then along comes the iPad, and it was a larger surface,” says Roberts, pointing to the narrow compositions created on the phone, like Lilies and Early Morning, both from 2009. “He met this kid who created an app called Brushes, so he could paint on the iPad with his finger. This kid developed a whole variety of tools for David.”

The large-scale iPad paintings are limited only by printer size. Finding the largest printer he could, Hockney defied those limits by printing a portion of the composition on individual sheets, which, when placed in order, created a mosaic of the larger image. For 7th August 2021, Rain on the Pond, another rural landscape made on the iPad, Hockney used watercolor on raw canvas to paint the pond, a technique he discovered while visiting Japan in the 1960s that has endured throughout his career.

So many prints, paintings, photos and collages in so 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 can be a burden,” Hockney has said. “I’m greedy for an exciting life. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I get it, actually. On the other hand, I can find excitement, I admit, in raindrops falling on a puddle, and a lot of people wouldn’t. I intend to have it exciting until the day I fall over.”

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