‘His last kiss to the world’: David Hockney’s return to Yorkshire sparks a glorious awakening | David Hockney

IIt was spring in Paris, and I was floating among little green leaves and white flowers, but I was not in a garden. I was on the top floor of the Fondation Louis Vuitton beaming, immersed in several David Hockney paintings on an iPad of his garden in Normandy. In one room, this green oasis appeared in the silver light of the moon: the dark room was alive with bright white lunar discs, blue clouds and the fingers of mysterious tree branches.

It was early April last year, and it was the opening of David Hockney’s 25th exhibition, a huge show, curated with his close involvement, covering his entire career – but with a focus on his works in this century. What a daring and bloody spectacle, he insisted, Hockney’s later pictures of hay bales and ponds are just as good, if not better, than his famous swimming pools and his early erotic pictures. What a victory! With an unusual amount of self-confidence, Hockney made his point. I went from gazing in awe at some of his greatest early paintings, enjoying the swinging California lights of London, to suddenly standing in Yorkshire fields in the early 2000s, taking in views of emerald hedges and purple trees. And everything suddenly made sense.

One of my fondest memories was of having a quiet dinner at a house in west London after a trip to the National Gallery. This was not a vintage trip to NG, but an after-hours trip in which my host Hockney used his special privilege as a modern landmark to go there when he pleased: the only other visitors that evening were the painter Leon Kossoff and his family. Now I sat down to dinner with a man who has been one of my heroes since I first saw the picture of A Bigger Splash in my childhood encyclopedia. We had refreshing fresh lychees for dessert – a first for me – accompanied by Hockney’s passionate views on art. He spoke in detail about his book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Ancient Masters,” which was published at the beginning of this century. We went to see a Caravaggio exhibition in which we saw evidence that this 17th century realist artist used a type of camera obscura.

I wasn’t convinced. I wasn’t even sure why it was important. Instead, I was trying to understand this astonishing man and searching for traces of Hockney whose frightening social world of his hauntingly glamorous era is evoked in Jack Hazan’s quasi-dramatic documentary A Bigger Splash. When I recognized one of the people in the film moving through the house, I was thrilled.

The 21st century Hockney has done his best to be different from his famous 20th century figure. He seemed more interested in art history and theories of perspective than in male beauty or Hollywood hedonism. Well, maybe not quite. The first time I spoke to him, he made a startling statement about the power of human beauty: “When you see someone really beautiful, it’s like a door opens…”

He also preferred the countryside to the city, and straw bales to swimming pools. The next time I met him was in Bridlington, Yorkshire, where he lived in an old-fashioned house whose interiors were painted in strong Californian colors with a sunny conservatory. The small upstairs bedroom served as his studio – or more like a shop for his latest paintings, as he would actually rehearse in the actual Yorkshire landscape, with his easel. outdoor Like the French Impressionist.

It was difficult to adapt to this unglamorous Hockney. The first time I saw him physically, he still had peroxide-blonde hair: he was bowing out in a revival of his opera set to Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress at Sadler’s Wells. I was on top of the gods, clapping furiously. He soon stopped choreographing ballets and operas due to his severe deafness, and allowed his hair to naturally grey. One hockey player seems to have died, to be replaced by another.

However, if I had thought about it more deeply, this production of Stravinsky might have shown me that Hockney was still the same artist, always conscious of art history, fascinated by style and fascinated by how perspective creates an imaginary space. For this opera, based on William Hogarth’s 18th-century visual narrative, Hockney’s group surrounded the stage in criss-crossing, deeply fractured recreations of Hogarth’s prints in vanishing perspectives. Smart stuff. When he began to paint the woods and crops of Yorkshire, he was also clever.

However, it took a global catastrophe for the gentle private sentiments of Hockney’s late career to become urgent, public, even saving. When the pandemic began, he was living in Normandy, where he found an old country house nestled among abundant nature. He had always been interested in new technologies – he even had a period of fax art – and was now adept at using an iPad. When lockdown began, he drew iPad paintings of his garden and emailed them in a simple attempt to spread some lockdown cheer. I somehow ended up on his list of titles, and would wake up to find a new Hockney device, or several, in my inbox every morning. From his iPad to mine. He was photographing spring in Normandy – trees stirred by the breeze, rain splashing on a pond – and offering these spontaneous observations of nature as evidence of hope and happiness in a world that had closed its doors.

At first, at least to me, Hockney’s decision to go back to basics by painting directly observed nature seemed like his retirement. It was pleasant enough, but wasn’t painting the pastoral beauty of Yorkshire the painter’s equivalent of spending a quiet afternoon gardening? Now his insistence on seeing and demonstrating the infinite diversity of the seasons and the resilience of the natural world suddenly became profound. What do we have but life in all its forms? What matters but waking up and seeing the light and feeling the breeze?

Bing: Another email from Normandy, another bright yellow sunrise over deep green, as I drink my morning coffee.

In one of the closing emails, he referred to “JP who I love.” It was a surprise because he was very careful about his private life. I could never get him to talk about the emotional content of his art. He preferred to discuss the issues of photogrammetry. JP is Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, who was Hockney’s assistant before becoming his mistress. I still have a vivid memory of them smoking outside the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Hockney in a wheelchair as they laughed contemptuously at the university’s strict anti-smoking policy. I think JP helped Hockney by making him happy. His late art seemed to flourish as their relationship grew. Hockney found love and put it into his Norman art, a kiss to the world.

However, you can’t really put Hockney into any simple box or make him what you want him to be. On that visit to the Fitzwilliam Gallery, where I was introduced to the scientific ideas in his art, I stood next to him in front of a haunting painting from the 1970s trying to get him to say something about its depiction of his former lover, Peter Schlesinger, but he only spoke of its deceptive perspective. My nostalgia for early Hockney was greatly heightened that day by the arrival of his muse, Celia Burtwell, still as glamorous as in his Mr and Mrs Clarke and Percy.

Let’s be honest. Hockney’s paintings of the 1960s and early 1970s will be ones that live through the ages. His way of framing a scene makes him a great narrative painter, and his observations of the social world are utterly haunting. But he made his point about simply looking at nature in his later works. When art seemed to have lost its faith in painting, and the death of painting was rumored, he returned to his Yorkshire roots to assert a quite modest idea of ​​art as pure perception.

As he grew older, and the precision of his hand and eye declined, he also showed how democratic and universal art could be. We should all notice our surroundings, draw and paint. The iPad is fine, you don’t need a stand. It’s the eye’s journey that matters.

In this solemn Paris exhibition, this great late vision triumphed, and Hockney was vindicated. What a stubborn, strong-minded Yorkshireman. His most recent win even included a show this year at the distinguished Serpentine Gallery in London. An artist who began the 21st century far from fashion, ended his life as the toast of the art world. It was a glorious and finally triumphant spring.