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David Hockney changed the world just by looking at it. His art was a feast of unabashed visual pleasure, one long orgy of the gaze, the delighted lifelong epiphany of someone who cherished flowers in a vase and freeways in the sun and thought endlessly about new ways of making pictures of such passing treasures. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the way he saw was revolutionary – all he cared about was truth. But no one had ever captured the look and feel of the contemporary world with such acceptance before. He has the same simple perfection as the Beatles – just as they caught the sound of the modern world, he caught its look.
The most revealing fact about Hockney is that he loved LA. Where some might see a moronic inferno, he saw freedom and possibility under an unjudging blue sky. Low-lying houses with patio doors glinting vacantly, tall thin palm trees with tiny heads, the white spume of a diver’s splash – Hockney’s California is a vision of paradise. He is the Matisse of pop art, A Bigger Splash the 1960s answer to Matisse’s 1904 manifesto for hedonism, Luxe, Calme et Volupté.
Pop art had a miserable streak a Chevrolet wide. Most of its great exponents – Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter – were not fans but cold critics of the new western consumer society that was taking shape by 1960. Then along came Hockney. A childhood in the smoke-blackened industrial landscape of Bradford produced a young artist as free from nostalgia as he was from snobbery. His early pictures, made when he was a student at the Royal College of Art in London, accept modern life not ironically or ideologically but because it was his life: from desk lamps to dancing to taking a shower, why shouldn’t he show the way his generation lived?
Being gay was just part of the truth he lived and painted. It wasn’t a big deal and he’d be upset if we remembered him as “Britain’s first openly gay artist”. It’s exactly his relaxed and untroubled depiction of a sexuality that was illegal in early 1960s Britain that makes his art so insouciantly subversive. From his splashy 1960-1 painting Doll Boy that confesses to his passion for Cliff Richard (“very attractive, very sexy”) to a composed 1968 portrait of a mature and confident couple, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, the development of Hockney’s art in that decade of revolution is very much about finding the right style to show gay life as it is.
Yet Hockney is never simply a participant in the new, free, fulfilled world he sought in swinging London – and found in California. He is an observer, too, and a highly self-conscious one. When he visited the US for the first time in 1961, he made a comic record of the trip in a series of prints modelled on William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. The bespectacled, weedy Rake is Hockney, at once entranced and mystified by America as he discovers there’s a gay scene and ends up surrounded by jeans-wearing clones listening to pop music on earphones (this was nearly 60 years ago: Hockney was already picturing the way we live now, even back then).
By the end of the 1960s, an eerie stillness dominated his paintings as he became more openly the observer, the looker-on. The loneliness of looking is the theme of what may be his greatest painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). It’s certainly his most expensive, selling in 2018 for $90.3m. In this huge 1972 canvas, an almost mystically radiant work, a young man in a pink jacket stands by an open air swimming pool watching a swimmer whose pale flesh flickers under translucent turquoise water. To give the kind of gossipy detail Hockney came to loathe, the man by the pool is Peter Schlesinger and the painting captures the end of their affair, a trauma that gives it painful authority.
Yet if looking can be solitary, it is also a delight. It’s almost embarrassing to admit that, for all the psychological tension of this painting, the glowing, molten landscape of the multi-coloured sun-blessed hills beyond the pool is just as captivating. Such sights ravished Hockney and his art shares his wonder. Some of his most memorable works of art are simple still lifes: his 1972 painting Mount Fuji and Flowers, or his gorgeous study of a fragile porcelain teapot against a roiling and heaving blue sea, Breakfast at Malibu, Sunday 1989.
In both these pictures, fragile still life scenes are juxtaposed with immense and sublime images of nature. It’s the kind of art historical game – in this case playing Chardin against Turner or Hokusai – that Hockney could carry off deftly because he was so curious about art’s changing styles and how they shape our perception of the world. There was nothing naive about his realism. One of his biggest heroes was Picasso. He not only portrayed an imaginary meeting between the two of them in a brilliant assimilation of Picasso’s own graphic style but, in an experiment that took him far from his easel, tried to apply the shifting perspectives of Picasso’s cubism to photography. His layered arrays of photographs that seek to capture the many glances and fractured glimpses in which we really see the world are among his most instantly recognisable works.
Hockney once took me around a Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery to demonstrate why he believed the painter must have used some kind of early camera. Then at his London residence, he produced a Japanese scroll to show how eastern landscape art uses shifting, unfurling viewpoints that are much more embracing of the world’s scale than the single-point perspective that has obsessed western art. His argument was fascinating and so was the scroll, which wasn’t an original but a facsimile. In other words, he valued it not for its rareness but its use.
Hockney’s house in Bridlington too was beautifully but unpretentiously decorated. He didn’t use his wealth to live luxuriously but to work and research. There was a modesty and directness about him that was hugely affecting. He became famous for his last stand refusal to give up smoking but, as a non-smoker, I can testify that when he once drove me across Yorkshire he used a hi-tech ashtray that kept his smoke to himself. He was a courteous libertarian.
That character came through in public and made Hockney a celebrity. He attained a kind of popularity that has eluded younger British artists and has more in common with that of David Attenborough or the queen. David Hockney was the real thing – a great artist and a great human.
