"I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century"
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Calling Picasso “the greatest portraitist” is a deliberately loaded compliment from a working painter who knows how dangerous that word “greatest” is. Hockney isn’t just ranking artists like it’s a chart; he’s staking out a lineage. He’s saying portraiture isn’t a polite side genre for capturing likeness and status. In Picasso’s hands it becomes a high-speed laboratory for seeing: identity pulled apart, reassembled, and made newly legible.
The genius of the line is its swaggering scale - “of the 20th century, if not any other century” - which mirrors Picasso’s own appetite for domination. Hockney’s exaggeration is part of the point: you can’t talk about Picasso in modest terms because Picasso didn’t work in modest terms. That hyperbole also smuggles in an argument about what counts as portraiture. If a portrait is supposed to reassure you that a face is stable, Picasso’s portraits are practically anti-portraits: multiple angles at once, mood and desire becoming anatomy, the sitter’s social mask treated like something you can peel back with paint.
Context matters here because Hockney is not an awestruck spectator; he’s an heir and a rival. His own portraits - intimate, prolonged, attentive to the slow accumulation of presence - take a different route to the same problem: how to represent a person in time. Praising Picasso is also a way of defending painting’s ongoing relevance against photography and screens. Picasso didn’t just depict people; he updated the very technology of looking. That’s the standard Hockney is endorsing, and quietly challenging himself to meet.
The genius of the line is its swaggering scale - “of the 20th century, if not any other century” - which mirrors Picasso’s own appetite for domination. Hockney’s exaggeration is part of the point: you can’t talk about Picasso in modest terms because Picasso didn’t work in modest terms. That hyperbole also smuggles in an argument about what counts as portraiture. If a portrait is supposed to reassure you that a face is stable, Picasso’s portraits are practically anti-portraits: multiple angles at once, mood and desire becoming anatomy, the sitter’s social mask treated like something you can peel back with paint.
Context matters here because Hockney is not an awestruck spectator; he’s an heir and a rival. His own portraits - intimate, prolonged, attentive to the slow accumulation of presence - take a different route to the same problem: how to represent a person in time. Praising Picasso is also a way of defending painting’s ongoing relevance against photography and screens. Picasso didn’t just depict people; he updated the very technology of looking. That’s the standard Hockney is endorsing, and quietly challenging himself to meet.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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