There's a 1972 etching by David Hockney of a striped jacket thrown over the back of a chair with a panama hat resting on the seat. No sitter. Just the suggestion of one. It's a small, understated piece, easy to walk past in a gallery full of pools and portraits but this week it feels like exactly the right place to start. Hockney knew that an empty chair, carefully observed, has a way of saying everything.
That tenderness for furniture runs through almost everything he made. He filled his interiors with chairs and sofas the way other people fill a room with the company they keep. Take the double portrait of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, where an Art Deco pink sofa (one Henry had originally bought for The Met) does as much character work as either sitter. It's flamboyant, generous, slightly absurd, much like Henry himself by most accounts. Behind them, the New York skyline is lifted from a Polaroid Hockney shot from the apartment window, the whole scene built on the kind of Renaissance perspective Piero della Francesca would recognise.
But Hockney spent much of his career taking that perspective apart.
From Aldo Jacober's modest folding wooden chair to Marcel Breuer's tubular steel icon, chairs turn up across his work with the same regularity and the same affection as his closest friends. They're sketched, photographed, collaged, painted. In his late series 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life, a chair gets equal billing alongside the people. Look closely at any interior of his and you'll find the same attention given to a chair leg as to a face, nothing in the room was ever just background.
His homages to Van Gogh's chair and Gauguin's chair push this further, painted in his trademark reverse perspective, multiple vantage points collapsed into one image, so the eye keeps moving rather than settling. He described it himself: you see one side, then another side, so you're moving. It's a deliberate refusal of the fixed viewpoint and it owes something to Cubism and to Picasso's lifelong fascination with how we actually see.
He found unexpected backup for this in Pavel Florensky, a Russian mathematician and art historian whose 1920 essay defended the "incorrect" perspective of 15th-century Russian icons, arguing that the lack of single-point perspective in Russian, Egyptian and Chinese art wasn't a failure of skill, but a different, equally valid way of representing the world. Hockney took that idea and ran with it, bending the rules most painters had spent centuries trying to master.
Looking at his interiors now, what comes through is a lifetime spent paying close attention. To rooms, to light, to the people who sat in them and to the furniture left behind when they got up. Tonight, the rooms get a little quieter.