Has there ever been an artist quite as good at charming the public as David Hockney? Everyone knows the peroxide hair (now grey), the big glasses and the deep-voiced Yorkshire drollness. Hockney has touched the lives of millions of people who his arguably more talented contemporaries have never got near. He became the first British art star of the TV age – his easy-on-the-eye images and deadpan comments beamed into sitting rooms throughout the land – without appearing to do anything, except be himself.
An art world star when he was still a student at the Royal College of Art, he came rolling into the public consciousness on that great early Sixties wave of emancipated working-class talent that included the Beatles, Terence Stamp, David Bailey et al. And despite advancing years – he is 74 – and the fact that he has become a bit of a bore on the subject of smoking, a degree of youthful freshness and irreverence remain part of his image.
But now, having never quite shaken off his characterisation as the golden boy of British art, he appears to be the prime candidate for an even more major and potentially onerous role. With the death of Lucian Freud, Hockney is the only serious contender for the position of Britain’s greatest living artist. Eminent old stagers such as Sir Anthony Caro and Sir Howard Hodgkin feel too serious and too elitist; Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin too young and too polarising. But does he deserve it? Do the concept of greatness and the Hockney phenomenon really go together?
When Hockney, son of a Bradford accountant, came out as gay, while still a student in 1961, he was breaking through a lot more than the massive barrier of prohibition and disapproval that surrounded homosexuality. His acknowledgement of an identity that was then still illegal seems to have given him the confidence to do and say exactly what he liked, not only with family and friends, but to the media, whose attention he was adept at capturing even before he left college.
The prevailing trend in cutting-edge art was then American Abstract Expressionism, the high grandeur of Pollock and Rothko. Hockney and his Pop Art contemporaries deflated this painterly pomposity by incorporating throwaway popular imagery. But where American Pop was hard, sharp and inscrutable – think Warhol’s Marilyns – the British variant, exemplified by Hockney and Peter Blake, was more whimsical and personal.
