MY BRUSH WITH A (VERY BRITISH) GENIUS

The new Hockney show is a huge hit. And as his friend ANDREW MARR reveals, it’s his joyous simplicity that puts pompous rivals in the shade

There has been a lot of David hockney about, goodness knows — big shows in Britain, the U.S. and all across europe. They have focused on everything from landscapes to portraits. There has been a torrent of books and a sea of media coverage about his views on everything from smoking to pornography.

Now hockers has still, let’s hope, many years of good work ahead of him. But this gargantuan retrospective at Tate Britain feels like some kind of closure. In room after room, painted in delicate pinks and greys, here is the British art world’s favourite son home at last, the bottleblond emigre enfolded in our arms.

Advance ticket sales show, says the Tate, that this is the fastest-selling major art exhibition London has seen. In a strictly feet-on-the-floor, cash-on-demand way, he is outstripping Picasso, Monet and Matisse.

It seems only yesterday that the royal Academy, a mile or so farther north, was devoted to hockney’s landscapes, room after room, from LA to Bridlington. Yet this is one — maybe the only — modern painter we just can’t get enough of.

It isn’t hard to see why. Like his hero Picasso, hockney was born with an almost unnatural facility for drawing, an ability to sum up a face or a city street or the movement of water in just a few strokes.

Allied to this, he has a gloriously un-British lust for bright colour, bringing the aquamarines, the hot yellows and reds of California into the icy-cold, gunmetal greyness of a London February.

In room after room we get showcase works that grab you by the lapels. When I was there, everyone seemed to be grinning.

So what’s not to like? Critics — and he has plenty — argue that too much of the work is simply too easy on the eye, that it fails to challenge the social or political issues of the day and that the think- ing isn’t deep enough. They say, in short, that this is a higher form of holiday art, as sunny and instantly appealing as an ice lolly, but not significant.

And it’s true that not everything is of the same quality. The recent show of portraits at the royal Academy, made of his rich American friends in sticky acrylic paint, was exuberant, ambitious but unconvincing — the drawing simply didn’t seem up to his usual high standard.

But the idea that hockney is shallow — standard punishment for his popularity, I guess — is something this new Tate show demonstrates to be utter nonsense.

Not challenging enough? his earlier paintings here, made when he was a student at London’s royal College of Art in the Sixties, are passionate, angry and sometimes despairing accounts of gay sex.

They shocked at the time, and in their loose handling of paint, use of graffiti and blunt phallic symbols remain raw and powerful half a century on. Not intellectual enough? The truth is that hockney’s life has been dedicated to thinking about, examining and working around some of the toughest problems of perception.

Again and again, in huge canvases, small drawings, photographs and film, he makes us think again about perspective, illusion and the things a flat surface, cleverly decorated, can do.

he emerged when the big American abstract painters dominated everything and pop art was just beginning.

Look closely and you see how he has absorbed lessons from both — in the way he lays out his paint, leaves parts of his canvas bare and incorporates all sorts of different elements — and yet carves out a course that is his and his alone.

he has thought as deeply about the meaning of art as any of his rivals. These might seem immediately appealing images, but many are based on a profound knowledge of Western and Chinese art.

Poussin (the French baroque painter), Chardin (an 18thcentury master of still life), Gainsborough and Van Gogh stalk these rooms alongside David hockney.

I’ve known hockney off and on since the Nineties, when I started to interview him. We’ve sat and talked about artists we love for many hours.

he painted a watercolour of me (far left), though it was too expensive to buy, and I visited him in Bridlington to make a film about him. he has always been generous with his time and thoughts.

And while he might not make drearily obvious points

in his art, the fact he is such a great looker or observer tells us a lot about the way we live. The huge double portraits, mainly of men, crackle with electricity, disappointment and the difficulties of sustaining long-term relationships.

His depiction of rich art collectors makes them seem almost inhuman, melting until they resemble the objects they lust after.

Then there are the scenes of his native Yorkshire rendered in dazzling Technicolor — yet the winding roads and neatly furrowed fields are instantly familiar.

But you must — absolutely must, no excuses — actually go and see the works. Don’t rely on reproductions or on critics.

Unless you have seen the 25 ravishing charcoal drawings entitled The Arrival Of Spring In 2013 for yourself, face up and close, you really have no idea of what this man can do. Again, no description will prepare you properly for the utterly exhilarating experience of watching the synchronised digital videos that he used to record moving through the Woldgate woods in Yorkshire through the four seasons of 2010-11.

For the thing about Hockney is his gusto — his lust for life. He is interested in everything. He paints and draws about ageing relationships, the simple joys of a glass of wine, a cup of tea or a cigarette, an amble along a quiet country road.

He portrays women beautifully, from his great muse Celia (Birtwell, the textile designer who was married to his friend Ossie Clark), subject of some of his best coloured pencil drawings and the well-known painting above, to the haunting pictures of his elderly mother.

Showering, friendship, city life and travels from Egypt to China, games of Scrabble and the shape of an Apple iPhone charger — almost nothing is outside the range of his eye and his avid interest. A tiny cactus in a pot? A pair of shoes? The colours of a puddle on Tarmac on a winter day? Hockney loves it all.

And I suspect it is this ordinariness, rather than his celebrity and partying years in New York and LA, that draw in so many admirers.

Here is a man who hobnobbed with Princess Diana and Warhol, is courted by the rich and powerful, yet only really wants to settle down quietly with his brush or pencil and look, ever more intently, at the beautiful world around him.

Again, perhaps, I’m making it all sound too easy. There is something immediately appealing about Hockney’s drawing, and love of strong primary colours, that can seduce the eye so you smile, nod and go ‘yes, yes’ as you bounce along the surface of the paintings and never stop for long enough.

It isn’t that he has stopped being angry — hear him on Britain’s culture of bossiness or the smoking ban — or that he stopped thinking hard about problems of perception.

It’s more that he has been fighting, and losing, a battle with his lavish talent. Like Picasso he finds it so easy to draw so very well, that silky smooth facility, glibness, is a perpetual threat. He has had to wrestle himself away from it.

Sometimes he does this by changing medium. Acrylic paint, so smooth and forgiving, he eventually rejects for oil, with its richer, stickier colour, and watercolour, which produces a series of different technical problems.

For me, the standout moments of this new show are more often in the smaller scale work, such as an almost ridiculously dexterous picture of his father made in ink in 1972 or a simple seeming crayon study of water done in Arizona in 1976. The more I looked at them, the more I asked myself: ‘How did he possibly do that?’

There is also more humour than you might expect — a bit of smut, affectionate mockery and a teasing playfulness.

Character matters. Lucian Freud, his great friend and rival, was an unkinder and more selfish man: there is a pitilessness in his work that will always limit his popularity.

I was talking to an art dealer recently who has rather fallen out of love with Hockney’s work, but who said: ‘The thing about David is that he is such a lovely man, he has such charisma and enthusiasm that he gets away with everything.’

Well, long may he continue to do so. Seeing this show, I fell right back in love with the work. Few artists find their way into the hearts of the public in the way Hockney has.

This cheeky, angry, rebel painter who vehemently shook the dust of London’s streets from his feet and rushed off to embrace a brighter life in the U.S. has returned as a deeply loved national icon. I hope he’s enjoying every moment of it.