Whether channelling Picasso, depicting Celia Birtwell or capturing Harry Styles, the artist communicates profound joy – and his most recent paintings really boom with energy and hope
shows what an achievement it really is to stick with that goal and raise it to an ideal. He has dedicated his gifts to the pursuit of pleasure since the 1960s and, in the bubbly, enthusiastic new paintings unveiled in his latest exhibition, he’s still at it. Insisting on your pleasures, from sex to cigarettes, has rarely looked as fun, nor as serious.
That passion to celebrate life and love glows afresh in this joyful tour through more than six decades of portraying people. In his, the two prophetic people he stands beside are Walt Whitman and Mahatma Gandhi: Whitman’s poetry explores the mystery of being alive, while Hockney shows Gandhi with the word “Love” emerging from his head.
What did they think of their remarkable son? Hockney’s story is one of rebellion, but not of a conventionally angry kind. Raised to be idealistic, his breakout was an embrace of absolute personal freedom. He discovered the delights of the US, an awakening recorded with wide-eyed glee in hisseries, rightly shown in full here, giving the artist’s own account of how he discovered the open and confident gay culture of early 60s America.
Hockney magically assimilates Picasso’s style. The print, with its incisive line and fleshy shading, perfectly mimics Picasso’s series of erotic etchings The Vollard Suite. Hockney would love to be Picasso’s nude, illuminated by those crisp lines. Instead, he becomes Picasso – and once you see this, you see Hockney channelling Picasso everywhere.What they share is appetite. Picasso’s line wants to touch and hold everything and everyone, to grasp the meat of existence.
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