Contrarian ShiftS PerSPeCtiveS
who’s often described as England’s most celebrated living artist, has painted those precise subjects and is well aware of the suspicions of triviality his work can arouse. On a recent morning, sitting in his studio in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, he recalled an amusing snub. He was visiting a gallery in New York when he bumped into critic Clement Greenberg, abstract art’s most vociferous defender. “He was with his 8-year-old daughter,” Hockney remembered, “and he told me that I was her favourite artist. I don’t know if that was a put-down. I suspect it was.” He laughed softly, then added in his gravelly, Yorkshire-inflected voice, “I thought I was a peripheral artist, really.”
Nowadays, in an age when the choice between abstraction and figuration is dismissed as a false dichotomy, and when younger artists imbue their work with once-taboo narrative and autobiography, Hockney is an artist of unassailable relevance. One suspects we’ll see as much when a full-dress retrospective of his work opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Nov 27. An agile, inquisitive draftsman inclined to careful observation, he has always culled his subjects from his immediate surroundings.
His art acquaints us with his parents, friends and boyfriends, the rooms he has lived in, the landscapes he knows and loves, and his dachshunds, Boodgie and Stanley. He’s probably best-known for his double portraits from the ‘60s and his scenes of American leisure, the sunbathers and swimming pools that can have a strange stillness about them, capturing the eternal sunshine of the California mind with an incisiveness that perhaps only an expatriate (or Joan Didion) could muster.
In the 1960s, Hockey was easy to recognise: a boyish figure with an appleround face, a mop of blond hair and his trademark owlish glasses. Nowadays, at 80, he has grey hair, and he wears a hearing aid in each ear. “Every time I lie down, I have to take them out because they fall out otherwise,” he noted. He’s able to carry on a conversation amid the quietude of his studio but feels it’s futile to head out with friends. “If you’re going out in the evening,” he said in a slightly rueful tone, “you’re going out to listen, and I’m not very good at listening.”
His studio sits on a hill above his house, and the grounds are slightly riotous. As in certain Hockney paintings, large-leafed plants abound and exterior walls are painted in discordant hues of hot pink, royal blue and yolky yellow. An inflatable swan floats in a kidney-shaped swimming pool that itself contains a Hockney painting: an abstract composition with curving blue lines dispersed rhythmically across the surface, like a cartoon rendition of waves.
Hockney is still a dapper, vigorous presence. His conversation is wide-ranging and larded with literary references, and his manner is so genial and confiding that at first you don’t notice how stubborn he can be. He delights in espousing contrary opinions, some of which come at you with the force of aesthetic revelation, while others seem perverse and largely indefensible.
In the latter category, you can probably include his regular denunciations of the anti-smoking movement. He smokes a pack a day and blithely discounts the hazards of cigarettes and cigars. “Churchill smoked 10 cigars a day for 70 years,” he tells me with apparent glee. “Well, nowaHockney,