Up close, the ploughed field of Autumn dissolves into dots, some of them in a very un-Yorkshire shocking pink. And his talents as a colourist, as a painter of coded forms, come to the fore in this quartet. The trees themselves have the Englishness of Constable or Rudolph Ackermann, a love of place made urgent by Hockney's having once misplaced it. More than this, the gridded surface of the Three Trees pictures places a distance between us and the landscape, so that seeing becomes remembering, an act tinged with loss. The joins between them impose a grid on the work's surface, suggestive of Modernism but also allowing us to take in a vista that would otherwise be too large to see. If England's greatest living painter wants to put 200 works in his Royal Academy retrospective, rather than, say, 50, who will tell him not to? This is especially problematic because Hockney's fame rests on his fecundity.Įach picture is roughly two metres high by five wide and is made up of eight canvases, two deep and four long. As artists get older and more established – Hockney is 75 this year – so their position becomes less assailable. Given that our designers might struggle to devise a figure throwing streamers with her left hand while putting a gun to her head with her right, I am going to award this schizophrenic show two armchair ladies, one standing and clapping, the other slumped in despair the first time I've done so in 13 years as a critic for this paper. No armchair lady exists who could encompass the horror of some works in David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture, and the wonder of others. Most weeks, choosing the armchair lady to put at the top of this column is easy enough, exhibitions being consistently good, bad or so-so.
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