![](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" height="2537px" width="2557px"></svg>)
C reated in 1996, 30 Sunflowers is a singularly extraordinary masterpiece within Hockney’s inimitable oeuvre. Marking Hockney’s return to painting after a decade primarily immersed in photography, the exuberantly radiant painting represents the artist’s momentous undertaking of traditional subject matter – the venerated still life – at the height of his artistic powers. At the brink of his sixtieth year, at a cogent peak of his career, he must have finally deemed himself ready and worthy to encounter his heroes and predecessors, including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Johannes Vermeer.
Prior to painting 30 Sunflowers, Hockney attended two exhibitions that proved to be tectonic: Claude Monet, 1840-1926 at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Johannes Vermeer retrospective at the Mauritshuis in the Hague. Emerging thrilled and revitalized, he picked up his brush again with renewed vigor and urgency, applying unprecedented attention to painterly texture and modulated tonalities. Hockney recalls: “When I came out [of the Monet exhibition] I started looking at the bushes on Michigan Avenue with a little more care. He made you see more. Van Gogh does that for you too. He makes you see the world around just a little more intensely” (the artist cited in Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, 2011, p. 85).
Returning to California, Hockney readjusted the location of his easel in his studio to allow the north light to illuminate his still life studies. The flower paintings from 1996 stand out from the rest of Hockney’s oeuvre: they commence an astonishing dialogue with Monet, Van Gogh, Gaugin as well as earlier painters like Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age masters. With a heightened naturalism coupled with saturated, emotive colors, Hockney devoted his energies into scrupulously meticulous application of color and rendering of light. In particular, he closely studied Vermeer’s method of layering yellow and blue beneath outer layers of color to achieve mesmerizing radiance – here rendered to consummate effect in 30 Sunflowers.
30 Sunflowers is not only one of the two largest paintings of the Flower series; it is without doubt the most superlatively exceptional in terms of its richly resplendent color palette, complex, charged compositional structure, and intimately significant subject matter that characterize the artist’s most iconic masterpieces. The definitive picture was featured on the cover of the catalogue for Hockney’s “Flowers, Faces and Spaces” exhibition in 1997, which was his largest exhibition in London since his 1988 Tate retrospective.
30 Sunflowers dazzles with the sublime bravura that only comes with artistic maturity, as well as the quiet yet palpable elation of a master once again intoxicated by the very craft of painting. In the artist’s words:
“Painting still lifes can be as exciting as anything can be in painting. I remember once saying to Francis Bacon in Paris, that I knew a painting in California of tulips in a vase that was as profound as any painting he’d made. I think at first he almost thought I was referring to my own, but I was referring to the Cézanne in the Norton Simon Museum. It’s the most beautiful painting, and it is as profound as anything he did. Just some tulips in a vase. The profundity is not in the subject, it is the way it’s dealt with.”
The artist cited in 'David Hockney: Paintings and Photographs of Paintings', 1996, p. 44
Viewing 30 Sunflowers, the eye is compelled to rove the canvas, from the upright stalks to the dipping, searching blooms, and finally to the single fallen stem. Drawing absorbing parallels to the human condition, the painting led artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye to comment:
“David Hockney’s 30 Sunflowers (1996) depicts flowers at various stages of life, drawing parallels with the human life cycle, and was one of the first works I was drawn to. The colors, the composition – there’s something so satisfying, as a painter, to look at it. It comes back to this idea of the senses and the sensual. There’s something about the handling of color, about the richness, in this work that is so appealing to me.”
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye on curating Works from the V-A-C Collection: Natures, Natural and Unnatural, at the White Chapel Gallery in London, 2015
In keeping with the tradition of the greatest still lifes in history, 30 Sunflowers prompts contemplations on mortality and transience. At the time 30 Sunflowers was created, Hockney was emerging from a period of prolonged mourning over several significant losses, including the passing of his closest confidant and champion, the critic and curator Henry Geldzahler. Elegiac in tone yet imbued with hope, optimism, and the pure exuberance of life, 30 Sunflowers encapsulates a cherished worldview that is weathered yet untainted by sorrow and loss.
“The world is colorful. It is beautiful, I think. Nature is great. Van Gogh worshipped nature. He might have been miserable, but that doesn’t show in his work. There are always things that will try to pull you down. But we should be joyful in looking at the world.”
The artist cited in Exh. Cat. Hockney – Van Gogh. The Joy of Nature, 2019
Encapsulating both splendor and brutality, celebrating ravishing beauty as well as delicate ephemerality, 30 Sunflowers is a glowing exaltation of light, space, and color refracted through the lens of art history while suffused with personal meaning and transformation – manifesting the supreme quintessence of Hockney’s artistic output that powerfully establishes him as one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century.
