David Hockney: Radical Traditionalist

Ahead of a Landmark Retrospective of His Work at Tate Britain, Art Critic Martin Gayford Looks at David Hockney’s Extraordinary Influence on Contemporary Painting.

"I'm just as advanced as anybody else in painting”, David Hockney remarked in 2013, before adding the qualification: “If there is such a thing as advanced art; I’m a bit doubtful about that”. In combination, those two sentences suggest some of the rich complexities of Hockney’s position as an artist and a thinker. He is a radical traditionalist.

On the one hand, few have experimented so restlessly and constantly with new media and means of making pictures. Since the 1970's Hockney has adopted one new technique after another: polaroid photography, colour photocopying, fax, computer drawing, digital editing, high-definition multi-screen moving imagery and the list goes on and on, and is still growing. No sooner than a new form of technology appears, it seems, Hockney begins to look for novel ways of making pictures with it.

On the other hand, there is Hockney’s fundamental grappling with what he calls “the problems of depiction”. All makers of pictures – whether the final product is a still life in oils, a strip cartoon or a computer game – encounter these problems. In essence, the difficulty is that the world is not flat or still: its fundamental dimensions are space and time. There is no perfectly satisfactory manner of representing this three-dimensional flux on a two dimensional plane, such as a canvas or a screen, any more than there is a geometrically ideal way of displaying the round globe on a flat map.