The three trees at Thixendale are actually four or five.

As you can see in the photos, there is another, smaller sycamore maple on the left behind the three maple giants, and on the right, up the hill, there is a whole row of trees.

David Hockney omitted both.

With him, the three trees by the country lane that meanders through the North Yorkshire countryside tower as if they had chosen that spot;

and therein lies its eye-opening magic.

Nevertheless, it is worth looking at the photographs that exist from the same spot, for they are a reminder that nature as it appears in Hockney is not mere nature.

But a dream of hers.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Hockney also did not paint the "Three Trees near Thixendale" in four large formats with a total of thirty-two individual canvases in the order in which they appear in the exhibition in the Berlin Picture Gallery.

He started in the summer of 2007, then waited until winter, continued in the spring of 2008, and completed the cycle the following fall.

In Berlin, however, the four wide-screen paintings hang in the familiar order that begins in spring and ends in winter.

The landscape, one could say, is already sorted before it gets on the canvas, and in the museum it is sorted again until it corresponds to our reading and viewing habits.

And yet the impression when you stand in the quadrangle made of partition walls in the columned hall of the picture gallery is overwhelming in an unusual way.

The exhibition itself is also a kind of art talk.

The four Hockneys belong to the collector and industrialist Reinhold Würth, with whom the State Museums have already collaborated on several projects.

She has supplemented the picture gallery with a selection of classic landscapes from her own holdings and those of the Kupferstichkabinett.

The course begins chronologically with a "Saint Jerome" by Piero della Francesca, in which the landscape still appears very schematic, but the tree trunks are just as impressive as in Hockney.

Two frames down we are in the seventeenth century and with Lorrain, who combines the virtuosic rendering of foliage with the central perspective hated by Hockney;

and if the curators had not hung French and English on one side of the room, but Italians and Dutch on the other, one could look from the arched bridge in the right half of Lorrain's "Italian Coastal Landscape" directly to Rembrandt's "Landscape with Arched Bridge", recently copied from his pupil Govert Flinck and re-attributed to the master.

In his work, too, the bridge does not play a major role; the actual subject is a group of alders that are tossed by the wind and caressed by the light in the middle of the picture.

objectivity and modernity

Concept exhibitions have the advantage that, freed from rushing through the collection, one is encouraged to immerse oneself in individual, otherwise less conspicuous images.

In Berlin, after Jacob van Ruisdael's water-and-cloud symphonies and his uncle Salomon's plundering Dutch plains, it is a landscape by Philips de Koninck from 1660. Towering high, as if lifted by a camera crane, the view hovers over the lowlands .

In the foreground, at the foot of a dune, you can see a hamlet with a little church, and behind it are a couple of windmills, but actually the presence of people in the picture no longer plays any role.

The marshland, which merges with the rainy sky in the distance, can do without traces of civilization.

The modernity of the picture lies in its limitless objectivity,

Hockney's actual lineage begins in England, with Gainsborough and Constable.

The painter from Yorkshire learned from his compatriots that landscape is a construct of reality, but he found the brushstroke that translates this idea in van Gogh.

His pen and ink sketch "Harvest in Provence", the preliminary drawing for his famous "Harvest Landscape", only hangs in the exhibition for a fortnight before it is replaced by a facsimile for reasons of conservation.

But where van Gogh celebrates human work on nature, Hockney's wheat fields are deserted.

No farmer or passer-by disturbs the devotion of blossoming and withering.

A provocation in the days of the Barbizon painters, today it is a key to Hockney's success.

Because landscapes are never innocent.

The land Constable and Gainsborough painted gave way to speculation, factories grew along the riverbanks.

The nature that David Hockney celebrates is threatened by climate collapse, and its beauty has long been in the subjunctive.

All the more fervently his brush follows the structures of the branches and his color palette follows the shimmer of the midday light.

In this way he satisfies the longing of his contemporaries for a world without change.

Tourist trails along the sites of his work have long been established in Yorkshire.

Perhaps the central perspective is also Hockney's enemy because it would force him to read the portent behind the leaves of the trees.

But why does it have to be three?

The answer is in an etching by Rembrandt from 1643, of which the Kupferstichkabinett also has a copy.

Rembrandt also shows three trees.

Hockney just found her again.

In Yorkshire and in his imagination.

David Hockney.

Landscapes in dialogue

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Picture Gallery at the Kulturforum, until July 10th.

The booklet in German and English is free.