Monday 30 January 2012
Art critic Michael Prodger examines the relentless curiosity and enduring appeal of David Hockney…
In 1960, when David Hockney was a student at the Royal College of Art, the painter Patrick Procktor, who was at the rival Slade School of Art, invited him to his college's annual drag ball. Hockney was game: he shaved his legs, put on make-up and false eyelashes, bought a pair of prosthetic breasts and a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Miss Bayswater’ and off he tottered. When he arrived, however, he was the only one there in drag.
Hockney stood out then, when he wasn't even a fully-fledged artist (he also attended his graduation ceremony in a gold lamé jacket), and has remained apart from the crowd throughout his entire life. He has lived through assorted art movements and been friends with their big names – from Warhol to Stella – but has never joined: his work has hinted at abstraction and dallied with Pop Art but never wholeheartedly. In the Sixties, already a celebrity (within 10 years of leaving art college, he appeared on Desert Island Discs), he found a style of heightened naturalism that he has often heavily adapted and played with but to which he has remained true ever since.
Another characteristic that defines him is his artistic restlessness. He could have mined any of his temporary manners – Californian swimming pools, double portraits in interiors, colour-infused stage sets – but has always felt compelled to move on. It has done his critical reputation few favours because it has often been read as showing a fundamental lack of seriousness. The opposite is true: he is driven by mark-making and the need to try out new ways of making them.
This has led him to experiment with Polaroid, iPhone and iPad, as well as film. While these may be artistic dead ends and mean that his extraordinary gifts as a draughtsman have been aired less than they should, they are also signs of his relentless curiosity. ‘You have to decide to look’, he has said, and it is this decision that lies behind the Yorkshire landscapes he has been painting for the past seven years.
The pictures, currently hanging in the Royal Academy, show Hockney at his best and worst. He depicts an undemonstrative part of England as a place of Maxfield Parrish-like colour, fecund with life and energy. The paintings are joyous and decorative. However, they also have a poster-paint lack of surface interest and rely too much on their vast scale – shrink the pictures and you shrink their effect too. They are perfect Hockneys in other words: full of talent and, simultaneously, maddening.
Michael Prodger is art critic for Standpoint magazine
Image courtesy of Stephen Simpson/Rex Features
