An intimate, witty tribute to the loss of lustrous youth
David Hockney: Drawing from Life
David Hockney: Drawing from Life begins with a painting not a drawing – a scene-setter, establishing the exhibition’s theme. It feels familiar: isn’t that the picture of his parents from the Tate? But no: this is an earlier, unfinished version, long thought destroyed, which Hockney discovered, still bearing traces of masking tape, while rootling around his LA studio for this show.
Spot the difference. The artist’s blue-eyed mother adopts the same graceful pose but wears a darker frock. Hockney’s dad, meanwhile, a restless, impatient sitter (flicking distractedly, in Tate’s canvas, through a book), stares blankly into the distance. The table mirror at the centre reflects the biggest change. In the earlier painting, we see a selfportrait of the artist on the cusp of 40, the attributes of his openly gay celebrity persona long fixed: bleached-blond hair, owlish spectacles, boldly patterned, colourful clothes. The only thing missing is a cigarette. A year later, Hockney swapped in a postcard of a favourite painting: Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ, from the National Gallery. Hockney as painting’s Saviour. He’s never been short of self-belief. Or wit.
My Parents and Myself (1976) reminds us that Hockney has rarely been a gun-for-hire, a high-society flatterer churning out simpering, flashy likenesses in exchange for cash. His best works are his most intimate, depicting the people he loves. And the new show at the National Portrait Gallery is as intimate as it gets. There are around 150 works, executed across six decades, but only five sitters – including his “muse”, Celia Birtwell, the textile designer. In Paris during the mid-seventies, Hockney immortalised his friend wearing skimpy slips and negligees, sometimes even nude, in a series of sublime drawings in Caran d’ache coloured pencils that have the purity and radiance of beaten gold.
Elsewhere, a former lover in a belted raincoat sits moodily on a crumbling column stump in Rome; nearby, we find this same beautiful youth asleep. This is Gregory Evans, the melancholic to Celia’s minx, easily recognised by his lugubrious expression and distinctive moue, with its pinched, exaggerated Cupid’s bow. As the decades pass – and this is a show about coming to terms with the loss of lustrous youth – Gregory, now the artist’s weathered confidant, looks increasingly peeved at the ravages of time. In Hockney’s telling, he goes from ephebic lover boy to bespectacled old grump.
A small gallery forms a kind of side-chapel in memory of Hockney’s
mother: usually serene, hands arranged demurely on her lap – unless she’s grappling with a crossword, when she suddenly sprouts an extra arm and spikes of hair evoking frantic, frowning thought. Laura looks inscrutable, sphinx-like, wise – and occasionally sad, as in a sepia drawing executed on the day of her husband’s funeral. Like I said: intimate.
Oh, and there are lots of pictures of the artist himself, providing the show’s principal subplot – a compelling, coming-of-age drama, as a nerdy-looking Yorkshire kid, his dark hair arranged in a pudding-bowl cut, refashions himself. It wasn’t just stylistic shape-shifting that attracted Hockney to his hero, Picasso; he admired the Spaniard’s selfpromoting savvy, too. Picasso had his strong, searing gaze and striped matelot’s jersey; Hockney, who charmingly presents himself in self-deprecating early etchings as a myopic “weakling”, had to work with what he’d got. Just look, though, at how much he could wring out of his trademark spectacles: in a playful set of Polaroid prints, he places his glasses on top of a half-finished doodle of his face so that their wire frame provides a nose.
By now, we’re thoroughly used to Hockney shows. His flawless retrospective at Tate Britain, which featured several works included here, opened three years ago. Annely Juda in Mayfair is about to show a group of new portraits, including one of Ed Sheeran. Part of the appeal of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition is that, at last, some of the hoariest Hockney myths get scotched. The popular notion that he is only an artist of swimming pools, for instance, is debunked (I counted one).
Another misconception concerns his much-vaunted obsession with modern technology. Hockney is so courageously experimental, the argument goes, that he can make pictures using a fax machine, an ipad, his smartphone, anything! His embrace of technology, though, is, in my view, almost entirely a distraction, promoted to mask the fundamentally traditional, even conservative, nature of his art. Hockney may create a drawing using a computer, but, so what? Usually, it’s still the kind of thing that Ingres would recognise. As for his photo-collages – which Hockney makes by pasting together multiple Polaroid prints of the same subject from different angles – they are, surely, a glib response to Cubism, and massively overhyped.
No, a straight-talking, wilful Yorkshireman, Hockney likes nothing more than, as he puts it, “eyeballing”, ie, observing a subject and capturing his impressions in two dimensions using hand and eye alone.
In the final gallery, he offers a few recent portraits, but it’s hard not to feel that the magic has, if not gone entirely, then mostly ebbed away. They reminded me of Martin Scorsese’s recent movie The Irishman, narrated by Robert De Niro’s character inside a nursing home: the same cast who provided Hockney with so many early hits return looking rickety and infirm. According to one self-portrait, Hockney has become a dead ringer for his dad. Celia’s personality still shines through, but, alas, these portraits, with their stuffed aspects and sausage hands, feel bathetic, not profound. Hockney is no Rembrandt, we realise, heroically grappling with old age. Unlike Lucian Freud, he can’t convey the coarse density of lived-in flesh. No, Hockney is – or, rather, was – all ethereal refinement and sunlight. And that talent is, arguably, best suited to representing youth.