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There’s an engaging story about American painter David Hockney on the cover of “Smithsonian” magazine this month (August, 2006).

The Family of the Duke of Osuna By Francisco de Goya

The article focuses on Hockney’s work as a portrait painter and makes a strong case for the elevation of portraiture over other genres of painting. Here’s a brief excerpt from the article containing one of Hockney’s favorite quotes by the poet W. H. Auden:

“Art’s subject is the human clay,” W. H. Auden wrote in his long “Letter to Lord Byron.” Hockney loves the passage and quotes it often: “To me Art’s subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cézanne’s apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.”

This is a challenging statement. Although I love Goya’s melancholy fantasies as much as the next girl I can’t say I’d choose one over a Cezanne. In my experience, all paintings evoke the human form and human experience, even if human bodies are absent from the scene. Cezanne’s paintings of fruit which depict clusters of spheres on a table might as well be family portraits. Each apple, unique but related to the others on the table (possibly from the same tree) pulsating with self-possession.

Still Life by Paul Cezanne

The most powerful art viewing experience I’ve had in the last ten years took place in front of an an abstract painting by Robert Motherwell at the Denver Art Museum. I don’t remember the name of the show, or even the details of the painting. Just its inexorable pull, its massivity, the infinite quality of its surface (inky, velvety, black). And of course, the way I felt when I encountered it… speechless.

Portraits, landscapes, abstractions – they’re all beautiful. But abstract painting has a way of invoking the unknown or the spiritual in a way that’s especially appealing to me. Although I can’t say whether I’d choose a Goya over a Cezanne I can say with confidence I’d choose an abstract painting by Mark Rothko over a portrait by David Hockney any day of the week. And I don’t mean to disparage Mr. Hockney’s interesting portraits. They’ve got depth and charm in abundance. It’s just that those pictures of individual people set against the backgrounds of their particular lives don’t evoke the universal in the same way Rothko’s epic abstractions do for me.