David Hockney has died aged 88, leaving London with the most visually seductive exhibition installation of the year as his obituary. Entering the Serpentine’s North Gallery, you are plunged into darkness; a stripe of landscape painting in bright colours runs around the wall — so luminous it looks on first glance like it’s been made out of neon, and on second, that it’s in 3D. The work, A Year in Normandie, consists of 130 iPad paintings made in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown, depicting views near Hockney’s home in Normandy. The successive scenes tell a story of the seasons, beginning with snow on bare branches, through to bright blossoms of spring, saturated colours of summer, glowering clouds of autumn, and back to the first snow of winter. Hockney said the display was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, which he visited every fortnight in his first year in Normandy.
“Love life,” Hockney once said, and he brought a brightness to life like no other Briton of his age. Born in Yorkshire, he became an out gay artist who depicted same-sex desire long before male homosexuality was partly decriminalised in England and Wales. In 1961, as a student at the Royal College of Art, he painted We Two Boys Together Clinging, one of the earliest expressions of queer identity in British art — a childlike painting of two figures embracing, its title drawn from a Walt Whitman poem obscure enough to avoid censorship. His winking way continued with Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10pm) W11 (1962), featuring two figures brushing their teeth, with suggestive red Colgate toothpaste tubes shooting toothpaste into each other’s mouths. “Highly controversial at the time,” the work left little to the imagination of those “in the know” while maintaining innocence for the masses.
“David Hockney has died aged 88, leaving a final exhibition of iPad landscapes at the Serpentine.”
After moving to Los Angeles in 1964, Hockney found greater freedom. His most famous painting, A Bigger Splash, captures the moment after a person jumps off a diving board into a still cyan swimming pool; reproductions have become a visual motif in gay domestic life. “It’s fitting that A Bigger Splash is now emblematic of this pioneer,” wrote one commentator. Behind the insouciant façade of brightly coloured spectacles and Rupert Bear tweed checks, Hockney was one of the hardest-working people you would ever meet. “He never stopped,” recalled a friend who visited his studio last year, where surrounded by medical apparatus and attended by a nurse, he was still hard at work, talking about art theory. Hockney would say you needed three things for art — “the eye, the hand and the heart. Two were not enough.”
The critical response to his final show has been typically divided. Some visitors love it: “It’s the usual David Hockney because he always brings joy,” one art lover said. Another beamed: “I’ve been here a couple of times. The first time I left happy, the second time I left very happy.” Others whispered: “It is not breaking any boundaries, but it is giving people what they want.” Even a reluctant critic admitted: “I can’t stop looking at them. And the more I look at them, the more I like them. Even though I am trying not to!” Hockney’s art, rooted in simple delight in the world and a vast ability to convey it, changed our perceptions — just as we can’t see French landscapes without being affected by Monet and Cézanne, so California and the Yorkshire wolds are changed by Hockney. As he put it: “Drawing and painting are designed to bring people closer to the world that surrounds them.”