DAVID HOCKNEY, THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING, NORMANDY 2020 At the ROYAL ACADEMY

 

 

DAVID HOCKNEY, THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING, NORMANDY 2020

 

At the

 

ROYAL ACADEMY

 

Hockney has sought to exploit a new material for his painting, his ipad.  Attempting to be popular, he has chosen the most conservative subject matter, landscapes of trees, hills, and farms.  Isolated trees stand against a horizon consisting of distant hills depicted in deep blue or purple.  The most jarring thing is Hockney’s colour palette provided by the ipad.  Colours are brighter and less nuanced than normal in fact they are lurid and luminous thus suggesting abstraction.  Traditional perspective is evoked, horizon lines always dwell in the middle of the painting and are never pulled up to the very top of the canvas to make abstraction.  Some of the works are reminiscent of Van Gogh or Claude Monet, particularly the lily pads depicted in 100 and 105.  The insistence of en plein air painting once again references the work of the Impressionists.



The canvases are large scale print outs of the ipad works and because of this the detail is often blurred and distorted in the transfer process but that becomes part of the aesthetic.  Just as musicians adopted the electric guitar or actors adopted the method to the accompaniment of howls of outrage from their conservative critics, Hockney has adopted new materials and mediums for a new time.  By adopting the familiar art vocabulary of Impressionism, post-Impressionism and Pontillism, Hockney is bridging the gap between popular expressions of art and the more nuanced and informed perceptions of critics as in works like 45 and 46. Like Monet, Hockney produces his studied effet, diaphanous clouds, sunsets, nocturnal scenes, and even begins to paint in series.  He takes a single landscape and undergoes a rigorous examination of its changing hues, shapes, and colours in 59, 61, 64, 75, 72, 62, 82, 92, 71 and 80.  The ipad effects can be simultaneously child-like but also rich and satisfying.  Purist probably will not see anything beyond the lurid colours and wavy lines.

The paintings were completed during the pandemic, the point being that although the pandemic stopped many things, it could not stop the Spring which is perennial and evergreen.  Hockney was isolated in rural Normandy during the pandemic but felt that the isolation helped him to focus on his work.  He has adopted the ipad because, as he gets older, the physical exertion of easels and canvas has become onerous. 

This exhibition is essentially a disappointment given the weight of expectation that David Hockney evokes in each new set of work that he exhibits.  The problem is that the works are unlikely to be very popular given their lurid colour palette and often blurred content.  Neither will they satisfy critical taste because there are simply too many art cliches on parade.  The works are bizarrely anachronistic.

 

Paul Murphy, RA, September 2020

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