Pearblossom highway, 11-18 April 1986

When David Hockney had asked about the painting or the photograph, he found it difficult to give a precise answer. The artist said: "My friends-photographers say that it is a picture, and I think that this photo". The monumental canvas "Pearblossom highway, 11-18 April 1986" really hard to call fotoraboty in the usual sense – too much of it is artistry. And this, paradoxically, is movies. Hockney told that this work was conceived as a kind of illustration for one of the episodes of the novel "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov in which Humbert Humbert goes in search of his beloved American southwest.

During the work on the collage Hockney made several thousand images, and only about 750 of them were later assembled into a coherent whole, becoming a picture. In total the whole process took nine days. The artist said that the biggest difficulty arose with the sky, which every day and at different times of day change color and texture, and it was supposed to take about a third of the space. In this case, the maximum Hockney have shown their artistic abilities, literally painting the sky is clear and bright shade of blue from images taken at different times.

For the first time, was presented to the public in 1988 at the County Museum of art Los Angeles. And since that day her started hunting the Getty Museum – or rather, curator of photographs Weston Ne. Hockney didn't want to sell "Highway Pearblossom", and Nave managed to convince an artist in 1997, telling him about the new technical possibilities of the Museum, allowed between exposures to keep the collage in a cool storage to preserve color. The amount for which the Museum purchased the painting, is never disclosed, however, the NEF said it was worth, of course, "less than the Hockney painting of the same size, but still cost dearly".

Author: Eugene Sidelnikov