Hockney at the Royal Academy

David Hockney is still an artist who genuinely matters
Hockney's show poses hard questions, on how and why we decide how much things matter

Martin Kettle
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 18 January 2012

David Hockney's trumpeted and garlanded landscape show at the Royal Academy is more than just the must-see art exhibition of the new year, though it is certainly that too. It is also a bold assertion about the place of skill, craftsmanship and beauty in the making of art, which sets Hockney gloriously at odds with much of art's recent past.

Hockney's show offers his own way of seeing the East Yorkshire landscape in which he now lives. There's not a swimming pool in sight. It's a show about the Yorkshire countryside, about changing skies and seasons, about trees and blossom, hedgerows and puddles. But you can tell from the very first room, in which Hockney has painted big pictures of the same three trees at four different times of the year, with the same low hills and the same bend in the road, that there are wider ruminations here too.

For this is also a show about a man, his craft and the land. It is a statement about the primacy of skilled drawing and painting in the visual arts and about the challenge of doing them with originality in the 21st century. A conversation with art history runs through the exhibition too, a dialogue with Caravaggio, Claude, Constable, Monet and Picasso among others. And though one of the show's most distinctive themes is Hockney's famous fascination with his iPad and new technologies, another is its potent respect for and celebration of tradition.

This makes the exhibition, to use a phrase Hockney is fond of, a vindication of his own eye, own hand and own heart. (And what an eye, hand and heart they are. Such energy too, thrilling in someone of 74, almost Verdian in its old man's creative fervour.) But that makes it also a set of propositions about art and ourselves, about the meaning and content of art in the Britain of 2012, and about that hardest of all questions in both art and life – how and why we decide that one thing matters more than another.

That's why the opening of the Hockney show has been taking place to a not particularly subtle descant of propaganda and provocation from the great man himself. It's as if all those interviews he's been giving, including the needling of Damien Hirst and the conceptual artists (since retracted, but we know better, I think), are intended to make us do more than look at his pictures. Hockney seems to want us to think about what the different approaches mean, as well as what they show. To use the title of the wonderful recent book of Hockney conversations with Martin Gayford, he has a bigger message.

That message is principally about the craftsmanship that, in his very different way, Grayson Perry's terrific British Museum show (catch it too, it runs for another month) also glorifies. Hockney celebrates drawing because, as he says to Gayford, drawing is an instinctive human act from an early age, and because teaching someone to draw better is to teach them to see better. He does not add that to see better is to understand better, and thus to communicate better, but it is implicit and central to everything else.

It has always been hard to tell if Hockney is interested in politics – but he is a child of his time and a product of the hard-working northern culture in which he grew up, and of the British postwar settlement. He is manifestly, as Benjamin Britten once put it, an artist who thinks it is important to be useful. Britten comes to mind a lot when thinking about Hockney, not least because they are two of those rare artists of my lifetime whose new works genuinely mattered to a large audience outside the academy.

At the risk of pushing this argument too crudely and too far, and conscious also of my own Yorkshire pride, it seems to me that Hockney and his art express and address the kind of people and country that he and we wish we were. There is something religious in his work. And when Hockney takes a pop at Hirst, I, for one, will cheer, because he is taking a pop at the kind of country we have become, in which attitude is more important than morality, price trumps value, and in which to shock and make a name is privileged over doing something lovely or true.

The new Hockney show is not wall-to-wall pleasure. The room devoted to hawthorn blossom is strident. Hockney's colours don't always convince. Time and again, though, something draws you in and won't let go. The light, the draftsmanship and the composition are all there, but so too is the sensibility and the feeling, even the moral feeling, which is missing from so much that is merely fashionable.

For a few days more, on the floor above the Hockney show at the Royal Academy, you can still see a much smaller exhibition about the modernist values of Soviet art and architecture. It's a poignant show, about the failure of the revolutionary idea. The modernists, like the conceptualists today, believed that the past had nothing to teach them and that the rules all had to change. They were utterly wrong. They offered 20th‑century answers to 19th‑century questions. Hockney seems to know it is time to move on. This show offers one artist's own 21st‑century answer to a quest for something beyond ourselves that is truly timeless.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/18/david-hockney-artist-matters?intcmp=239

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/