David Hockney is a conjuror who likes to explain his tricks, or, as one commentator put it, conducts ‘his education in public with a charming and endearing innocence’. This chunky picture-book brings the story right up to date with watercolours and portrait drawings made only a few months ago. It contains work from throughout Hockney’s career, but is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, according to the themes and subjects that have occupied him for almost five decades. Of the four sections, Problems of Depiction, Life Stilled, Portaits, and Space and Light, the first is the most complex, with sub-divisions into Looking at Pictures; A Marriage of Styles (demonstrating his deliberate and diverse stylistic borrowings); Stages (dealing with his work for the theatre and the ‘interior landscapes’ that grew out of it); Water, Movement, and Moving Viewpoint (including his experiments with photography and in the use of printing technology as a medium in itself). Apart from anonymous half-page introductions to each of the main sections and short quotes from Hockney himself, there is no text. He is a great communicator in words as well as pictures and these concise comments, with their combination of intelligence, candour and unpretentiousness are characteristically engaging and illuminating.
Anyone who is tired of hearing that painting is no longer ‘relevant’, or who feels that contemporary art has somehow outflanked them and turned them (once, surely, so open-minded?) into furtively indignant philistines, is likely to find at least temporary consolation in the phenomenon of David Hockney. He is sometimes patronised as, in Simon Schama’s phrase, ‘a user-friedly modernist’, his very versatility held against him. But he believes in the inexhaustible posssibilities of figurative art and unfashionably thinks that ‘art is about sharing: you wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience’.
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