David Hockney has died, aged 88, and the tributes have arrived with the usual solemn procession of reverence, adjectives and cultural incense. He is being described as one of the great British artists, a national treasure, a genius, an original, and all the other phrases that get brought out when a famous painter dies and everyone suddenly remembers they once stood thoughtfully in front of a swimming pool.
David Hockney was plainly a talented artist, according to many people whose opinions on art are taken seriously, sometimes even by themselves. I should probably say that early, before anyone starts clutching the pearls and accusing me of wanting to burn the Royal Academy to the ground, which I don’t, if only because the traffic round Piccadilly is bad enough already.
He could draw. He could compose. He had a recognisable eye. That much seems fair. But the jump from there to all the incense is where I start to lose patience.
Because his paintings leave me cold.
That is not quite the same as disliking them. Dislike would suggest an energy they rarely provoke in me. I can see the confidence. I can see the design. I can see the bright colours, the Californian light, the clean lines, the spectacles, and the whole carefully arranged theatre of tasteful admiration. What I can’t honestly say is that I see much cleverness. Perhaps it’s there. Plenty of serious people insist that it is. But to me the paintings often look flat in both senses: visually flat, and emotionally flat.
And that matters. Not every great painting has to make you sob gently into the exhibition guide. Some art works through wit, structure, invention or intelligence. But if the emotional temperature is permanently low, then the claim for greatness has to work rather harder. A painting can be cool. It cannot merely be chilly and expensive.
His paintings often seem two-dimensional to me. And yes, before the Hockney defence league arrives in matching spectacles, I realise that may be the point. He was often deliberately flattening space, pushing colour and pattern forward, refusing the old trick of making a canvas behave like a window.
Fair enough. Flatness can be powerful. Matisse knew that. Japanese prints knew that. Byzantine painters knew it too, although in their case the flatness was bound up with theology, iconography and the fact that mathematical perspective had not yet become the standard Western party trick. Long before anyone in a catalogue used the word “interrogate” near a chair, artists had worked out that a picture did not always have to pretend to be a window.
But deliberate flatness does not automatically make the result profound. Sometimes a painting rejects depth and gains intensity. Sometimes it rejects depth and merely becomes flat. With Hockney, too often for me, the visual flatness becomes emotional flatness. I can see the intention. I can see the confidence. I can see the market value. I just don’t feel the charge.
Hockney often seems to me like an artist of surfaces. Bright surfaces. Recognisable surfaces. Sometimes stylish surfaces. But surfaces all the same. Swimming pools, glass walls, furniture, bodies, patterned rooms, bright landscapes, and people carefully placed near one another without ever seeming quite joined.
To me, too much of it has the feel of art you’d find in an Omaze house. Expensive, cheerful, carefully chosen, not offensive to anyone, and exactly the sort of thing that tells you the kitchen has an island, the windows are enormous, and nobody has ever had a difficult emotion within planning permission.
That may be his strength. It may also be the limitation.
The problem is that fame is not the same as greatness. That is the bit the art world is always oddly reluctant to admit, possibly because too many people in expensive spectacles have spent too much money pretending otherwise.
An artist can become famous because the work is good. He can then become more famous because the fame itself becomes useful. Museums need names. Dealers need confidence. Collectors need reassurance. Critics need a position. Auction houses need drama. Before long, everyone has a shared financial and cultural interest in agreeing that the famous thing is not merely famous, but important.
That may be true. Sometimes it is. But it is not proved by the size of the room, the thickness of the catalogue, or the number of people in black polo necks nodding as if they’ve just detected a major shift in human consciousness near a blue rectangle.
Charles Saatchi more or less demonstrated the mechanism with Damien Hirst. He bought early, displayed the work, and the fact that Saatchi had bought it became part of the reason everyone else decided it mattered. That is how the machine works. Patron buys early, patron’s prestige inflates reputation, reputation inflates price, and the patron can exit profitably.
This is the bit the art world never likes to discuss. The market does not merely discover value. It can manufacture value, certify the value it has manufactured, then sell the certificate. In Hirst’s case, it sometimes looked less like art history and more like a confidence trick with formaldehyde, a glass tank and a small army of people pretending the smell was intellectual difficulty.
Now, Hockney is not Hirst. That should be said as well, before someone tries to report me to the Yorkshire Tourist Board. Hockney was a real painter with a long career, a recognisable eye and actual skill. But the same machinery still matters. Once an artist becomes an institution, the institution begins defending itself. The galleries, museums, collectors, critics and auction houses are no longer simply responding to the work. They are responding to the reputation, and to their own investment in having been right about it.
In the modern art world, the brand matters enormously, and Hockney’s art was certainly recognisable as a brand. The pools, the colours, the flatness, the spectacles, the Yorkshire landscapes, the brisk little iPad trees - you knew what you were looking at before anyone told you. That is a real achievement. But recognisability is not the same as greatness. It may just mean the product has excellent packaging.
The history of art is littered with artists who were celebrated in their own day and then faded into the respectable cupboard of period taste. It is also full of artists who were ignored, mocked or barely known, only to become central later. Van Gogh did not need a Sotheby’s dinner to become Van Gogh. Vermeer had to be rediscovered. Blake spent much of his life regarded as a crank. Posterity can be slow, but it has a useful habit of not caring who was fashionable at lunch.
That is the bit the art world prefers not to dwell on. History and time decide whether an artist is important, not current adulation. Not private views. Not auction records. Not critics performing reverence in public. Not collectors reassuring one another that the thing they bought for the price of a small hospital is not merely expensive, but significant.
Had Hockney been alive in Vasari’s time, would he have earned one of the grand central chapters of The Lives of the Artists? I doubt it. He might have got a polite mention in a footnote about decorative brightness and a successful line in swimming pools, but I cannot see Vasari clearing space between Leonardo and Michelangelo for a man whose greatest gift may have been making flatness expensive.
Current fame tells us that an artist mattered to the present. It does not prove they will matter to the future. The future, annoyingly for dealers, cannot be invited to dinner and softened up with champagne.
That is what makes Hockney interesting. Not the question of whether he had ability. He did. The question is how much of the enormous Hockney industry will still look necessary when the personality, the interviews, the prices, the national-treasure glow and the institutional scaffolding have fallen away.
My suspicion is that some of it will last, because posterity usually keeps a few samples from each large reputation, if only to justify the storage costs. The best portraits, perhaps. Some of the California work. The sharp, clean, emotionally chilly paintings where sun, water, glass and money somehow make loneliness look very well designed.
But a lot of the rest may shrink. The late iPad works may come to look less like profound reinventions of seeing and more like evidence that an old artist was still curious and astonishingly productive, which is admirable, but not automatically immortal. The Yorkshire landscapes may remain loved, but love is not the same as importance. Plenty of things are loved. So are Labradors and crumble.
The art world hates this sort of doubt because doubt is bad for valuation. Once a painting is worth tens of millions, scepticism becomes socially awkward. Nobody wants to be the chap at the private view saying, “Yes, but is it actually that good?” That’s how you stop being invited to rooms where the wine is free but somehow still morally expensive.
Brian Sewell, for all his faults, was useful because he understood the racket. He could be unfair, snobbish and gloriously overcooked, but he did not confuse applause with judgement. He knew that the art world is not a pure temple of beauty. It is also a market, a club, a status machine, a language factory and, occasionally, a very efficient laundry for rich people’s certainty.
So perhaps the sensible position on Hockney is neither worship nor dismissal. He was famous. He mattered, at least to his time. Some of the work may last. But the full halo should be treated with caution. Fame is not proof. Price is not proof. Public affection is not proof. They are evidence that a culture has decided to gather round an artist and keep warm.
Whether future generations still see fire there is another question. What do I know?
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