David Hockney’s defiant pleasure

David Hockney has died, leaving London with the most visually seductive exhibition installation of the year as his obituary. A Year in Normandie is the most stunning I’ve seen since the National Gallery’s jewel-like Siena: The Rise of Painting . Entering the Serpentine’s North Gallery, you are plunged into darkness. A stripe of landscape painting in bright colours runs around the wall — so luminous in its colours, it looks on first glance like it’s been made out of neon and, on second glance, that it’s in 3D.

A Year in Normandie (detail), 2020-2021, composite iPad painting © David Hockney

The work consists of 130 paintings of views near Hockney’s home in Normandy, executed on an iPad. They were made in 2020, amidst the pandemic lockdown. The successive scenes tell a story of the seasons, beginning with snow on the bare branches of trees in winter, through to the bright blossoms of Spring, saturated colours of Summer, glowering clouds and rain of Autumn and back to the first snow of Winter. Hockney’s iPad paintings which he has been making since 2010 have never looked so alluring. So, 10/10 for the exhibition design.

As for the art… Hmmm. It’s just the kind of stuff that the art critics like me are meant to dislike: a relentless panorama of prettiness. Pretty flowers, pretty trees, pretty paths, pretty skies, pretty half-timbered houses, runs my internal monologue. Pretty inane. It reminded me of what I used to draw when I was a teenager with my box of Caran d’Ache felt-tipped pens. I found myself wondering how many of the effects were accomplished with tabs you can just click on in the app he downloaded. Hockney said the display was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry which he visited every fortnight in the first year he lived in Normandy. But hang on, the Bayeux Tapestry will be exhibited at the British Museum from September this year. Mightn’t he have decided to show his iPad drawings in this format because the idea is topical?

The critical voice inside my head continued: “He’s coasting on his celebrity status these days, isn’t he? This is typical ‘late work’ when the artist indulges himself…” Except… except… except I can’t stop looking at them. And the more I look at them, the more I like them. Even though I am trying not to! I can’t turn my head away.

David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting, installation view, Serpentine North, 2026 © David Hockney. Photo: George Darrell

I am hardly alone in this response, as I discovered when I canvassed the opinions of some of the punters looking at the show. Of course, some people simply love Hockney’s art. “It’s the usual David Hockney because he always brings joy,” one art lover told me unambiguously. “I’ve been here a couple of times. The first time I left happy, the second time I left very happy,” another beamed. There’s a second group who don’t rate it but respect Hockney’s devotion to pleasing the average gallery-goer: “It is not breaking any boundaries, but it is giving people what they want,” whispered a visitor to me. Lastly, there’s an ambivalent and confused third group. “I can’t quite decide if I l like it or not,” murmured one. “There are bits where I think I can’t bear this, but I can’t put my finger on why.” It was a sentiment with which I could heartily concur.

And as I retraced my steps around the exhibition several times, a thought slowly dawned on me. Could this be exactly the dilemma that Hockney seeks to evoke in my mind – and the minds of any other over-educated art critics and gallery-goers who might dare to visit his show? For this work goes against the conceptual grain of contemporary art deliberately, defiantly but also skilfully. It also dovetails with long-running themes in Hockney’s art: his return to early 20th-century “ism”s; his pop art sensibility; his interest in technology; and his commitment to beauty.

And then there is the defining aspect of his personality. Hockney loved to wind up the powers-that-be. If the art establishment of the moment decided that the important art was conceptual, “explores” trauma, “references” the identity of the artist, and so on — Hockney would say, uh-uh. I will make art that simply gives pleasure.

David Hockney, “A Year in Normandie” 2020-2021 (detail). Composite iPad painting. © David Hockney

Hockney made his name with sleek and cool pop art images of people and swimming pools in LA in the sixties, but from the Eighties onwards, his art became increasingly inspired by modernist art movements. His large canvases of Californian landscapes were painted in a Cubist style, which also inspired his collages of polaroids. At the beginning of this century his work looked increasingly like Matisse’s. When he died, he was making iPad paintings outdoors in front of his subject, en plein air , to use the parlance of art history, just like the Impressionists. If it was raining, he would sit in a van with his tablet. He would use pure colours to build up and model his forms rathe…