The National Gallery, that mausoleum of masterpieces where Old Masters go to die in a fug of varnish and tourist breath, has deigned to honour a living artist. David Hockney, the Yorkshire boy who turned California swimming pools into shimmering cathedrals of light, gets his retrospective. And about bloody time.
Let us be clear: Hockney is the great innovator of our age, a man who took one look at the dreary post-war palette of British art and said, "No, I shall paint the world as seen through the bottom of a gin and tonic." His colour is a force of nature, a volcanic eruption of pinks, blues, and lime greens that make Rothko look like a constipated insurance salesman. From the swimming pools of LA to the Yorkshire Wolds in spring, Hockney has insisted that art should be a joy, a visual lager in a world of overpriced prosecco.
But let us not get misty-eyed. This retrospective is also a political act, a thumb in the eye of every conceptual artist who ever filled a gallery with a pile of floor sweepings and called it postmodernist commentary. Hockney draws, paints, and photographs with the obsessive energy of a man who knows he is racing against time. He has been doing this for seven decades, and the National Gallery has finally admitted that a living artist might be worth a look, as long as he is eighty-seven and British.
The exhibition promises to be a riot of invention: the early etchings, the iconic swimming pools, the double portraits that dissect relationships with surgical precision, the Yosemite landscapes that make nature look like it has been doused in LSD, and the recent iPad drawings that prove you can teach an old master new tricks. Hockney has always embraced technology, from Polaroid collages to digital painting, with the glee of a child who has just discovered a new crayon.
But here is the rub: the National Gallery, that temple of tradition, is now celebrating the very man who once said that painting should outlive its frame. It is a bit like the Vatican canonising an atheist just for laughs. Yet Hockney deserves every inch of this pomp. He has made colour sing, he has made art accessible without dumbing it down, and he has never, ever been boring.
So go, elbowing past the tourists with their selfie sticks. Stand before "A Bigger Splash" and let the cerulean blue wash over you. Marvel at the fact that a man born in 1937 in Bradford can still make the art world tremble with a few strokes of digital paint. This is not just a retrospective: it is a victory lap for the idea that art should be exuberant, joyful, and absolutely unashamed of its own beauty. Hockney has given us a fluorescent middle finger to the grey men of criticism. Long may he splash.
