Outside the Royal Academy, a long, rain-drenched queue is waiting to see the latest David Hockney exhibition; inside, it is often hard to see the paintings for the throngs of mostly elderly and well-heeled folk who crowd appreciatively before them. Why has this artist exerted such a hold on the English imagination? Praise for Hockney regularly uses the sycophantic language generally reserved for the royals and other national treasures. For Grey Gowrie, Thatcher’s Minister for the Arts, Hockney is not only the conqueror of abstraction, but ‘happens also to be well-read, musical, eloquent and Britain’s snappiest dresser’.
While he remains best known for his Pop-era figure painting, the Royal Academy offers a very large exhibition of Hockney’s recent landscapes, interspersed with a few older pieces, some videos and iPad sketches. The works—like Hockney’s earlier experiments with photo-collage—are arranged in grids. Displayed without gaps between the component parts, they form single, museum-scale paintings; with gaps, they appear as series of landscapes made at a uniform size. The style fluctuates between Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, and contains their faux-naive rapidity of touch, tension between pattern and depth, and childlike distortions of perspective. All this was new a hundred years ago and, for more hidebound audiences, it still serves as a signpost of modernity. The subjects are fields, trees and roads, the treatment of which oscillates between a depiction of the eternal cycle of nature (the passing seasons) and gentle signs of industry (the fields are farmed in monocultures, trees are felled for logging, and sometimes there are old terraced houses or a traditional red phone box).