David Hockney, the most recognisable and beloved British artist of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, has died. He leaves behind an exhibition installation at the Serpentine North Gallery that is being hailed as stunning: “A Year in Normandie” – 130 iPad paintings made during the 2020 lockdown, tracing the seasons around his Normandy home. Entering the gallery, visitors are plunged into darkness; a stripe of landscape painting in bright colours runs around the wall, so luminous it looks made of neon, and on second glance, three-dimensional.
Hockney was acutely aware that his fame was double-edged. “I am very fed up with being a very public ‘art celebrity’,” he once said, “and I must be serious. I think it’s beginning to affect my own sanity.” Much of his career was spent grappling with that disconnect. His aesthetic – big glasses, vivid clothes and blond hair (adopted in 1961 from a Lady Clairol ad: “Is it true that blondes have more fun?”) – contrasted with his no-nonsense Yorkshire accent.
“David Hockney dies; his posthumous exhibition 'A Year in Normandie' at the Serpentine draws crowds with iPad paintings of Normandy.”
By 1962, the year he graduated from the Royal College of Art, he was already photographed by Antony Armstrong-Jones for the Sunday Times. He acquired John Kasmin as his dealer early. Despite his modest beginnings as the son of a Bradford accountant, his career lacked the struggle for recognition. For 64 years he worked in financial security.
His seriousness was always present. In defiance of the “painting is dead” mantra, he stuck with figurative art. “A Bigger Splash” (1967) – that dream of a blue Californian sky and swimming pool – is both realistic and theoretical; the splash took him two weeks to perfect. “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” (1971) updates Gainsborough. Another double portrait, of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968), sold last year for more than $44m.
“A Year in Normandie” was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, which Hockney visited every fortnight during his first year in Normandy. Some critics have murmured about coasting on celebrity, about “pretty inane” effects that could be achieved with app tabs. Yet the public can’t stop looking. “I’ve been here a couple of times. The first time I left happy, the second time I left very happy,” one visitor said. Another whispered: “It is not breaking any boundaries, but it is giving people what they want.”
Hockney’s defiant pleasure – his constant trolling with prettiness – has outlasted him. The final word belongs to the gallery-goers: a love that refuses to turn away.