David Hockney, that eternal chronicler of sun-drenched pools and languid bodies, has been immortalised in a new exhibition for depicting what the curators call a ‘peaceful gay paradise’ at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offence in Britain. How quaint. How utterly predictable.
We are meant to gasp at the bravery, to marvel at the audacity of a man who dared to paint two men in a domestic setting while the Wolfenden Report was still gathering dust. But let us not kid ourselves: Hockney was not a revolutionary. He was a clever, calculating artist who understood that the polite, crumbling world of post-war Britain was ripe for a scandal.
And scandal sells, darling. It sells very well indeed. The real story here is not about Hockney’s courage.
It is about the intellectual decadence of our current age, which insists on retrofitting progressive moralities onto every canvas, every novel, every dusty pamphlet from the past. We view Hockney’s idyllic scenes of male intimacy and immediately think: ‘Ah, the oppression! The triumph of the human spirit!
’ Yet we forget that Hockney fled to California precisely because he found the British art scene stifling, not because the police were banging down his door. He sought not a paradise of the oppressed but a playground of the liberated. He wanted sun, money, and fame.
And he got it. The real crime, perhaps, is how we now reduce his art to a mere political statement. Hockney’s paintings are not documents of resistance.
They are celebrations of a certain kind of privileged, sun-drenched existence that was available to those with talent and connections, even in the dark days of the 1960s. The exhibition frames his work as a ‘paradise’ precisely because it denies the gritty reality of most gay lives at the time: the blackmail, the loneliness, the shame. Hockney’s paradise is a sanitised, aestheticised version of homosexuality, one that is always on holiday, never in court.
And we, the modern audience, applaud this deceit because it makes us feel virtuous. We can admire the art and pat ourselves on the back for being so much more enlightened than our benighted ancestors. But this is a cheap moral victory.
The true lesson of Hockney’s career is not about the triumph of love over law. It is about the triumph of art over authenticity. We would do well to remember that, before we turn every painter into a martyr.
