David Hockney’s life in painting: stunning retrospective on the artist’s career showcases his restless talent
Exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art shows why the English painter was once such a rebel of the art world, with his most colourful, iconic works and key moments also proving his versatility over the last six decades
The David Hockney retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the delights of the season. Room after room unfolds a sense of his seemingly limitless visual talent, his mix of whimsy and keen insight, his love of the world, and his courage.
The last of these, courage, is twofold. His early work was explicitly homoerotic at a time – the early 1960s – when same-sex relations were a crime in his native England. And all of his work, then and since, is strikingly individual, often running counter to the prevailing tastes and dogma of the art world.
This engaging exhibition suggests that these two forms of daring are connected, the independence achieved as a gay man in a hostile world carrying over to a larger sense of independence from the fashion and dictates of other artists and critics.
Hockney, who emerged as an artist just as London was entering its post-war “swinging” age of music, fashion and sexual liberation, has always been a hard artist to incorporate into the standard narratives of 20th-century art.
His best-known work, made during an extended stay in Los Angeles in the 1960s, is figurative and wry, with a pop-art sheen to it. If that was all he ever produced – if he hadn’t left a legacy of magnificent drawings, or designed iconic opera stage sets, or used Polaroids to play games with multiple perspective points – then he might well be seen as a minor artist entranced by swimming pools, palm trees and other blandishments of sun-drenched suburbia.
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But this exhibition, seen earlier at the Tate Britain in London and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, explodes that misconception. Often, when one explores the work of a single artist over decades of production, you struggle to find connections between the various chapters. But Hockney is the rare artist who continually evolves without losing a powerful sense of continuity.