Giving Success a Good Name

By ROBERT HUGHES

No other English artist has ever been as popular in his own time, with as many people, in as many places, as David Hockney. At 50, an age at which J.M.W. Turner was hardly known in France and Henry Moore was only just beginning to enter collections outside Britain, Hockney has the kind of celebrity usually reserved for film stars but rarely visited on serious artists -- Picasso and Warhol being the big exceptions. Merely to see his blond hair and round glasses across a crowded room, let alone hear his Yorkshire voice droning unstoppably on about Picasso, cubism and his own photography, turns the knees of collectors to jelly. When Actor Steve Martin pays $330,000 at auction for a medium-good, medium-size drawing of Andy Warhol by Hockney, as he did last month, one knows that some overriding program in the fame machinery has kicked in and will not soon be turned off.

No one has ever begrudged the artist his success. Hockney is that rarity, a painter of strong talent and indefatigable industry who has never struck the wearisome pose of il maestro and has been grounded, throughout his career, in the bedrock of Yorkshire common sense. Self-mockery may not be his long suit, but Hockney is the least arrogant of men, and his achievement, uneven though it looks, is a distinguished one. It can be assayed in the retrospective of some 200 works -- paintings, prints, drawings, photocollages, stage designs -- that, having originally been put together by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opens this week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To think of Hockney is to think of pictorial skill and a total indifference (in the work, at least) to the dark side of human experience. Does the latter make him a less serious painter? Of course not, any more than it trivialized the work of that still underrated artist Raoul Dufy. At root, Hockney is popular because his work offers a window through which one's eye moves without strain or fuss into a wholly consistent world. That world has its cast of recurrent characters -- friends, lovers and family. Hockney's portraits of his parents, in particular, are full of unabashed filial devotion, and through repeated drawings and paintings he has given the portly form of his friend and promoter Henry Geldzahler an abiding recognizability: one knows that stomach like the knob of Mont Ste.-Victoire. And then, inseparable from Hockney's skill and lack of pretension, there is his candor about sexual matters, which is no more titillating today than it was shocking in the early '60s. It is simply there, part of the work, like Bonnard's liking for peaches.

Hockney was by no means the first English artist to make his homosexuality a theme of his art, but he was the first to do it in a garrulous, social way, treating his appetites as the most natural thing in the world and not, like Francis Bacon, as a pretext for reflection on Eros' power to maim and dominate. His code for the subject in the early '60s was graffiti. Flattened scrawly figures with sticks for limbs and blobs for heads, much influenced by Jean Dubuffet, populate a whole set of images from 1960 to 1963 -- Doll Boy, The Fourth Love Painting, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (a valentine to the pop singer Cliff Richard, on whom the artist had an unrequited crush), We Two Boys Together Clinging (a line from Walt Whitman, who, like Gandhi, was one of the heroes of Hockney's youth).

Often loosely called a pop artist, Hockney was only tangentially so. He did not care deeply about mass imagery. What did delight him was the modalities of fine art as they brushed against print and, later, photography. He loved formal impurity as long as it was clearly underwritten by formal skill. With his wiry line that defined shape while subliminally conveying its depth and weight, with his unfailing instinct for placement, he knew just where the metallic fronds of a palm should pop up in empty space, just how much of a figure in a shower could be elided by white lines of water. His hero of virtuosity was Picasso, whose work, he said, showed that "style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want. The idea of the rigid style seemed to me then something you needn't concern yourself with; it would trap you."

These early Hockneys, flat, offhand and laden with tropes, hold up very well after 25 years. Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices, 1965, is a witty protest against Cezanne's peculiar remark, elevated into a tedious orthodoxy by art teachers, that in nature one should look for geometry -- the sphere, the cone, the cylinder. So Hockney paints his father behind a pile of cubes and cylinders, with more such patches ranged on a shelf above his head. These "devices" are merely a pedantic clutter of spare parts without meaning; feeling, the portrait argues, matters more than formulas.

Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he still lives, in 1964. Before long it became apparent that his paintings of El Lay were inventing the city, giving it a promptly recognizable, iconic form that no other painter had cottoned to. Just as, once you have seen their work, you cannot look at New York brownstones without Edward Hopper or at certain Paris locales without Edouard Manet, so Hockney's Los Angeles is quite indelible.

He did not always get the light right, but he fixed other things -- those pastel planes, insouciant scraggy palms, blank panes of glass, and blue pools full of wreathing reflections and brown bodies. A Bigger Splash, 1967, remains the quintessential L.A. painting, taut but inviting, like a friendly, dehistorified De Chirico in which the melancholy drag of Then has turned into a radiant acceptance of Now -- an eye blink, picture-perfect. The splash itself, in its strands, hatchings and squiggles of white, is Hockney's masterpiece of stylization. Anything could have gone wrong in it, but nothing did.

Although Hockney doted on L.A., he sometimes allowed himself a prod with the needle. American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968, takes its relationships of figures and architecture from the Italian quattrocento, the ideal proportional world of Piero della Francesca. But then one notices that Marcia Weisman's lopsided smile echoes the toothy grimace of the Northwest Indian totem and that a dribble of paint has run down from her spouse's fist, as though he were crushing something small and warm to pulp.

Hockney's deepest interests as a painter lay with reaching an unforced calm beyond rhetoric, and in the late '60s and early '70s (as in the finely modulated Still Life on a Glass Table, 1971-72) he succeeded in doing so without a trace of pretension. Not all his later paintings have been as successful. His images of travel in Japan (flower arrangement in front of Mount Fuji; rain on canvas) seem facile and touristy by comparison, and a coarse, overdone glow began to seep into his portraiture. On the evidence of this show, Hockney was faltering somewhat by the late '70s.

He retrieved his momentum through photography and the theater. In photography, he took to reassembling a scene or a motif by taking hundreds of photographs of it, and then constructing a cubist patchwork out of these shifting, overlapping views. This, he believed, replicated for the viewer the actual process of scanning -- and so it did, in a fairly schematic way. Cubism linked up, in Hockney's mind, with the study of Chinese scrolls. He enjoyed the sense of traversing an image, rolling through it, taking the eye on a journey. His most ambitious effort to mimic that feeling, the big buckling panorama of his painting Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, 1980, is by no means the masterpiece it has been taken for, but he did produce in Nichols Canyon, 1980, a soaring Dufyesque landscape of the Los Angeles hills (all fauve orange and blue, viridian, chrome yellow and black) that wrought his color to a new freshness and intensity.

That, in turn, was useful in the theater. Hockney was a natural stage designer. The distanced attitude of his work, the sense of the image as a proscenium of quotation with flat figures moving within the frame like puppets, guaranteed that. Since 1966, when he designed a London production of Alfred Jarry's farce Ubu Roi, he has done a stream of designs for opera and ballet, most recently Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, whose romantic sets with their plunging perspectives, sweeping sails and bombastically thickened architectural decor are lavishly represented by models at the Met.

Indeed, one may prefer Hockney's stage work to the present phase of his painting, which consists mainly of devotional pastiches of '30s Picasso in licorice-Allsorts color, some of them very slack indeed. The wall space occupied by some of these should have been sacrificed for a better look at his prints and graphics, which are one of the great strengths of Hockney's work and, except for the suite of etchings based on Hogarth's Rake's Progress, are not covered in the depth they deserve. But though parts of the show and its presentation disappoint, the whole does not: perhaps it is only because Hockney delights you so regularly that you feel vaguely cheated when, here and there, he fails to.